He had aligned himself with the deck off the camouflage cabin and had dived under the water, using only the mask and his own lungs first. He would save the pony bottle for when he needed air. There were only a few minutes of air in it anyway. Although he wasn’t a big swimmer, he had large lungs and could hold his breath for a long time. He was easily able to swim down far enough to see the top of what would normally be the massive underground doorway leading into the submarine dock that was hidden under the cabin. The door itself stretched into the depths of the lake farther than he could see. A Typhoon class sub ran a draught of almost forty feet, with almost 60 feet of hull and sail above the water. They also had a beam of around 75 feet. Gino didn’t know just how much bigger than the sub the underwater tunnel was, but he knew it was the biggest damned door he’d ever seen—above water or below it. And right now, the door was locked tight, just like the rest of the facility. He had taken one small breath from the pony bottle, and ascended back up to the deck that hung out over the water off the decrepit cabin.
He had had only one option left. Back on land, fifty yards off to the side of the cabin in the woods, was a small storm drain grate set in front of a tunnel that laid horizontal to the ground and pointed toward the lake. Gino had seen the tunnel on the schematics of the base and had figured the tunnel and the cistern it led to was a storm drain that would deliver overflowing rainwater running off the road to the lake. He knew a small portion of it ran under an office in the Dock section of the base. That was how he would get in. He had used the blowtorch on the grate and slithered through the tight confines of the tunnel to the top of the cistern.
That was when he had realized what the cistern was really for, and when he remembered that the tunnel off the bottom of the cistern didn’t just lead under an office in the Dock section—it ran under a bathroom.
“This is gonna suck so friggin much.”
Gino slowly descended the rusted ladder, promising himself he was going to bathe for a week once he got out of this mess.
8.
Pinckney, near Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH
A sentry post had been installed at the gate on Gilford Avenue, the entrance to the former Pinckney Bible Conference Grounds. The entire campground and surrounding area where Chess Team had battled the Lernian Hydra was now owned by the US Army. A tan concrete wall, with a fence of concertina wire on top, had been constructed around the entire 15-mile perimeter. The public had been told there was initially a toxic leak that had occurred on the site, and that while cleaned up now and safe to the locals and the water supply, the Army had purchased the land and was keeping folks out on general principal. The local population of the town bought the story and secretly hoped that the site housed some cool, top-secret Special Forces training center.
The two guards stationed at the sentry post knew better than to think any cool spec ops stuff was going down. They had strict orders to rotate out every eight hours and to never enter the site at all. They figured it was still a hazmat site and hadn’t been cleaned up properly, although the Army had guaranteed them they were safe in the guard shack. The MPs stationed in the shack were two of the total of 12 men and women stationed in Pinckney to guard the site. The Army had purchased a large Victorian house in the local community, and much like the Marine Corps did with their Embassy Guards in non-hostile foreign countries, had housed the MPs inside the rambling structure, turning oddly shaped bedrooms into a dormitory under the eaves of the house. Every day MPs would journey from the house in town to the guard shack at the front gate of the Army site and to the wall around it.
Sergeant Mark Greene and Private First Class Ryan Davis had the guard shack duty today. The guard duty was better than the perimeter duty. At any given time, two MPs were in the shack at the gate on Gilford and three MPs were doing a walk around the huge perimeter. The perimeter duty sucked, because 15 miles was a long way to go on foot for anybody, and there was nothing out there on the wall but the surrounding woods. In the winter, they had to cross-country ski the circumference of the fence line and that was considered to be a bitch, but it was also the Army.
Besides the physical labor involved in the perimeter duty, the job was dull. Guarding a big empty patch of forest and former campground in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire. Nothing ever happened. The previous year a few of the very limited number of people authorized to visit the site would arrive and get passed through the gate. They would go in unescorted. The MPs had no idea what they did in there, but they would come out again sometimes hours later or sometimes days later. Then things had quieted down for months. Now the only people that would come were the five members of a security team that was guarding a different, but nearby facility. They were known only by their callsigns; each had a “White” in the name followed by a number. All twelve of the MPs had met the security team, and wondered about the callsigns and the lack of rank on their uniforms. Davis and Greene had spent long hours discussing whether those guys might be Delta, but ultimately they decided that the “Tightie Whities,” as the MPs referred to them, were probably just more security guards, based on the way they each held themselves and the kinds of questions they asked on their infrequent visits to the guard shack on Gilford.
It seemed like it was going to be another boring day of standing or sitting in the guard shack when Davis called out to his sergeant.
“There’s a Tightie Whitey coming. Look alive.”
Greene leapt to his feet and they both stepped out of the shack, their M4 carbines held formally across their chests.