***
White Five made the turn onto Gilford so hard on the HDT dirt bike that he left a skid mark on the asphalt of the entryway. The road had been dirt before the Army, but the Army liked things tidy and they had paved every road inside the facility before they had even finished building the wall. White Five rebalanced, and raced up to the gate and the guards in front of it. He slammed the brakes hard enough to gently pop the rear wheel off the pavement and startled both of the Army MPs. Neither of them was privy to Chess Team information of any kind.
White Five pulled an ID card out of his BDU blouse’s chest pocket and held it up for the guards. Before they had even stepped closer to examine the badge, he barked an order at them.
“Get it open fast, Sergeant. If anyone other than me comes toward this gate from the inside, you detain them at gunpoint, you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Greene clearly didn’t know White Five’s rank—in fact, when White Five was in 10th Mountain, he had been of equal rank to Mark Greene—but the man understood that the White Security Force was in charge. Without any rank insignia on their uniforms, the MPs weren’t required to salute or call them “sir”, but White Five knew Greene hadn’t just called him the same kind of “sir” he would have used for a civilian either. The chain of command was clear here, and the fact that White Five had just intimated that trouble might be coming seemed to have put the young sergeant on alert. That was good.
The gate opened and White Five raced inside along Gilford Avenue. He throttled the HDT hard, popping a front wheelie as he went. He wasn’t showing off though—he was just in a damn hurry. He raced right up the hill to the former abandoned campground and drove toward the vehicle entrance to the secret underground Labs section of the Alpha base. This was the same door that Knight, of the Chess Team field members, had used to gain entrance a few years previously, and which led to the defeat of Manifold and the acquisition of the property. The vehicle entrance, designated Post 1, was sealed with a thick steel door that looked just like a miniature version of the one that had slammed down over the hangar, nearly scaring White Five half to death. White Five, known as Pete Johnson until signing on with Chess Team’s Security Force, had expected no different. Without slowing the bike, he turned and made for the dirt path that would take him around the side of Fletcher Mountain to the helipad that was hidden by the canopy of trees above it. Johnson knew that the door off the helipad hidden under the trees with the diagonal approach would be likewise locked. However, he also knew that the steel security door at that location would be thinner than the others. And while the small amount of C4 explosive the team members normally carried on them wouldn’t have even put a dent in the security door now obstructing the hangar back at Central, the door over the entrance at the helipad would be shredded to razor thin slivers of shrapnel once Johnson was done with it.
A few hundred yards out from the concealed helipad, Johnson dismounted from his bike and took the path slowly, moving from cover to cover behind the maples and pines scattered across the hillside. He didn’t know if an actual hostile force was present or not, and if they were, he had no idea whether they might have left sentries, but he wasn’t taking any chances. Johnson had started seeing a local girl in town named Shelly. The sex was hot and the conversation was scintillating—she had studied philosophy at Dartmouth before coming back to town and taking over a small book store that her grandfather had run. Johnson was not about to get himself killed, not with a great woman like Shelly waiting for him each night.