MAYA COSMIC NUMBER PUZZLES, VOL. 106 MAYA COSMIC NUMBER PUZZLES, VOL. 106 | Page 7

back in the year 1945.
An American, Thomas David Abrams, had been a soldier in the Second World War. He had enlisted as a naive, young seventeen-year-old boy. He had been given the rank of private. But through
his own actions, and the battlefield deaths of many older and wiser men he quickly achieved the
rank of first lieutenant. He fought on the snake-infested, jungle islands in the remote South Pacific, such as Guadalcanal, island hopping slowly towards Imperial Japan. At the end of the Second
Great War, tired of the fighting and the killing of other men, Thomas resigned his commission. He
declined the promise of a peacetime military career, when he returned to the United States.
He began searching for another life, and soon found himself in a smoky little bar, by a beach in
San Diego, when fortune smiled on him. He couldn’t help but overhear two middle-aged Mexican
men talking at a table next to his. They were discussing an adventure where they knew a hidden
treasure was buried, one that could make them very wealthy Patrons. They desperately needed a
large quantity of supplies, extra workers, and strong burros to travel into the uninhabited, mountainous terrain of the Guatemalan border with Mexico. The two men, Juan Vega and Jorge Ortega,
were turning increasingly sad and bitter at their bad luck. They had just come from a cockfight
where they had lost all their seed money in a quick game of chance, where they both had bet their
last year’s meager savings on th