D909: The Unspoken Game

Prologue

"Down!" George Sanders yelled at me two seconds before the barrage of bullets zinged above my helmet.

"Two seconds? Two seconds, George? You've got to be kidding me." We were hunched down behind a bank of thick metal storage cabinets—the only thing between us and about twenty pretty irritated HLA militants.

I rolled to my side and checked the skull as it sat on top of the grey foam bedding inside the black Pelican case. It wasn't exactly an ideal way to transport a two thousand year old pre-Columbian mummy, but it was the only way it was getting out of the Gold Museum of Costa Rica in tact, so it was what it was.

"Is it okay?" George asked as he popped off two rounds and ducked back behind the column.

I rolled my eyes since he couldn't see me. "Of course it's okay. It's me."

This was what I did for a living. My job was to rescue ancient artifacts before warlords, dictators, and terrorists used them to bankroll ammunition and bombs, or before they used their destruction as a power play or, you know, to demoralize an entire nation. Hey, this really important church that means everything to the people in this country? Boom. Gone. Have a nice day. By the way, we own you.

But that's where I come in.

I lead the D909. A top-secret task force that may, or may not, work under the United Nations flag. When things get down and dirty between warring factions, we're called in to rescue national treasures before they're destroyed, looted, or sold off on the black market. We're usually invited by the leaders of the country in question, but occasionally we stretch our ethical boundaries and go in uninvited.

Personally, I leave the higher moral discussions to the councils and boardrooms. I just make sure they have something left to discuss when the dust settles. It's not like we're pillaging. The items go into sealed vaults until the wars are over, then they're returned to those they belong to. We simply serve as a safety deposit box in the meantime.

When I entered the archaeology program at Yale I never imagined I'd wind up traipsing around the world with a small army at my beck and call, instead of excavating fields in the middle of nowhere, but I like what I do. I like the people I work with. And—maybe more importantly—I know what I'm doing matters.

Well, as long as Georgie here doesn't get me killed.

I snapped the Pelican case closed and stood it up beside the cabinet, then slid the second, larger case over. Inside were the majority of the long bones. I placed it beside the first case and grabbed the third and final open case. This bad boy was filled with the last of the famous gold jewelry of the Gold Museum.

Most of the museum was emptied weeks ago when the HLA—the Hispanic Liberation Alliance—first moved into Costa Rica. The museum curator, having watched the terrorists pillage museum after museum as they stormed through Central and South America, felt strongly that the museum was in serious, imminent danger. Plus, the terrorists had made it known that they planned on bankrolling their latest coups by hocking every valuable they could find.

So it was kind of no-brainer.

Unfortunately, the staff wasn't able to access or retrieve any of the really valuable stuff in the vault kept in the museum basement before they were overrun. There was approximately half a billion dollars worth of artifacts (at least on the black market) still on-site, and I'm pretty sure you can imagine what dangerous people with half a billion dollars can do.

So they called us in. Only instead of having a couple of weeks to carefully plan the extraction, we got twenty-four hours. Which meant my favorite point man, Donovan, was still on assignment somewhere else. I was forced to take George.