There is a crunch of bamboo stalks underfoot and the first of four bodyguards appears, wearing a black judo guerrilla uniform and a black headscarf. He scans the clearing. Then the 12-year-old commander of God's Army of the Holy Mountain arrives.

Luther Htoo is dressed in a short-sleeved khaki shirt with an Airforce One badge on his right arm. On his forearm is the tattoo of a fish pierced with a spear. He nods to one of the bodyguards, who passes him a lit cheroot, then he spits and climbs on to his bodyguard's knee.

His special protector is called Rambo, a 28-year-old fighter who has been with him for three years. He likes playing with Rambo's long, thick, black hair.

Luther, the leader of the youngest and most desperate guerrilla army in the world, accepts a chocolate biscuit. He says his younger twin, Johnny, second in command of Burma's God's Army of the Holy Mountain, might be along later. Or he might not.

The meeting with the twins has taken two months to organise. The final part of the journey began in the middle of the night with a nervous, greedy taxi driver who could be bribed to drive to the jungle, but who played the Best Gospel Album in the World over and over to comfort himself.

As he raced against the dawn to pass the last military checkpoint while its guards were still sleeping, a young Vera Lynn-like voice belted through Soul of My Saviour again and again.

Then, mosquitoes and steamy jungle heat along a path that went up and up. A mountain jungle blocked by fallen trees, sprinkled with giant anthills and odd, empty cartons of UHT milk chucked into the bushes by passing guerrillas.

God's Army of the Holy Mountain was born three years ago when the Burmese army moved in to swamp the route of a multi-million pound gas pipeline and clear thousands of people before them.

For 50 years the Burmese army and the Karen, one of Burma's three main ethnic groups, had skirmished, but in the early 1990s the Burmese army launched operation Spirit King. Its aim was to wipe out the Karen people and secure the route of the pipeline. Some 100,000 Karen fled to refugee camps across the Thai border.

The British consortium Premier Oil began pumping gas through Karen land in April. The British energy consultant Wood McKenzie estimates the pipeline will earn Premier Oil - which includes Japanese and Thai oil companies and the brutal Burmese regime - almost $750 million over the next 25 years.

The roof of the jungle is webbed in a fine green net from the ferns of the bamboo trees. Today, there is a wind rattling the stalks of bamboo. When the wind stops there is silence. There are no birds: the people have eaten them, as they have eaten most of the jungle cats and wild monkeys.

Luther and Johnny were discovered three years ago by a television crew looking for the Burmese students who had fled after taking over the Burmese embassy in Bangkok. The cameras found the students in the camp of the twins, who were nine years old at the time, and the myth of the guerrilla children who smoked cheroots and were scarcely big enough to hold an M16 rifle was born.

In Canada, prompted by the television pictures, a retired Playboy bunny offered to adopt them. A website, johnnyandluther.com, was registered.

Then the twins disappeared in the jungle. Now, they keep disappearing in the middle of a question to slide down the river banks with the other boys in their group on the back of a cardboard box with the words "Instant Noodles in Sour Shrimp Paste" written on it in black ink.

Their army is an army of orphans, their camp a mobile foster home for the remnants of the Karen people's 50-year fight for independence against the Burmese.

Two years ago, at the end of 1998, God's Army had 500 soldiers and Johnny and Luther were reported to be working miracles: landmines were jumping up in front of them and soldiers who fought with them were able to brush off bullets like a jungle shower.

The Baptist preachers who had brought Christianity to the Burmese jungle from Salem, Massachusetts, 100 years ago had also brought the cult of deliverance to a destroyed people. The Karen needed saviours. In March 1997, in the Htaw Maimaw district of eastern Burma, a local pastor brought two illiterate nine-year-olds to the military chief and said the Lord had spoken to them and they would save the Karen people. News of the visitation passed through an area where the Burmese army was cracking down hard after the Karen had killed eight workers on the pipeline.

The military chief gave the children a "pistol complete with bullets and everything", says the pastor, Thah Hpay, who went with the twins into their first battle.

"That morning there were 20 enthusiastic men there and our commander Luther shouted `God's Army!' and everyone in the cart shouted back `God's Army!' At 6.20 p.m. at the Manderlay church where the enemy was we selected eight from among us to serve as commandos and we named them `Jesus Commandos'.

"We attacked the enemy at Manderlay and shot dead 24 of them. For the next battle, at Aimlat, we started to fight at 3 p.m. and the battle lasted for two hours. Those that attacked were 16 but the enemy were hundreds."

SO THE beautiful myth of divine salvation for a desperate people was born and the cult of the twins began to grow. The old Karen military had become corrupt and the twins represented purity. Hovering in the background, dressed in a loud Hawaiian shirt, is the twins' dwarf uncle, a man called Mr David, who reminds them of the rules: "No duck, no pork, no eggs, no swearing, no womanising."

Johnny doesn't smile much. He is dressed in a black judo suit and his long chestnut hair just covers his shoulders, where a badge reads: "Number One Military Commander". Luther does the talking from his bodyguard's knee, swatting at a yellow butterfly that comes again and again to settle on his head.

"I shoot the Burmese army because of what they do to our people," he says. "They beat and rape Karen women, they steal from us and burn down our houses. Some holy thing touched my heart and I became a soldier."

"How did the holy thing touch you? Did it come in the night?" "No, in the day." "How did it touch you?" "I don't remember." "Would you like to go in an airplane and see the world outside the jungle?" "No, I want to stay here with my people. In my homeland, in my own area."

"What do you do all day?" "I play - at fake battles, shooting birds. We use real guns." "When was your last real battle?" "A month ago. We were gathering chillies in the field and we saw a Burmese army patrol and we killed two of them." "Do you miss your mother?" "Yes." She is in a refugee camp on the Thai border. "But I love my people more."