“White Five, get to Post 2. If it’s locked down like here, blow the door. Rendezvous inside the hangar. Four, you’re with me.”
White Five raced away from the looming steel door and down toward the security team’s parked, matte black, HDT M1030M1 all-terrain motorcycles. HDT had manufactured the bikes for the US military to run on JP-8 fuel or diesel. But Deep Blue had had these retrofitted to run on biofuels. Carrack didn’t know how much better for the environment they were, but he knew they were wicked fast. In seconds, White Five was astride the bike and tearing off down the unpaved road toward NH49, which would take him down to the small hamlet of Campton, and then on to Pinckney. The journey by the curving mountain roads was 18 miles, but Carrack knew the distance was a lot shorter via the straight underground rail tunnels Ridley had installed to connect the three sections of the facility. If White Five could get into the base down in Pinckney, he’d be back in less time than it would take for him to get down there.
The hangar door Carrack remained in front of with White Four, was set into the side of a mountain, about 10 miles northwest of the Pinckney Bible Campground, where Chess Team had discovered entrances into the facility. Those entrances were now designated as Post 1 (a concealed vehicle tunnel leading to a loading dock) and Post 2 (a door next to a helipad that Manifold had cleverly placed under a canopy of trees, where the pilot of a helicopter would have to fly in and out of the trees at a 45 degree angle). After the Lernian Hydra episode, and the subsequent cleanup, Deep Blue had arranged for the military to purchase the campground and had paid off the families of those affected for their silence about the incident. The last thing the US government wanted was a bunch of families on the news yelling about seven-headed monsters in New Hampshire and a giant military cover-up, so people had been paid well.
The exploratory team sent in to sanitize the Manifold facility had eventually discovered that the portion of the facility Chess Team members had seen only made up a third of the overall compound. On a map, the three main sections of the facility formed a capital letter A, with the section under Fletcher Mountain that had its access at the campground forming the lower left point of the letter. Deep Blue had designated that section of the compound Labs, because it was where Richard Ridley had conducted his experiments into regeneration. Labs also contained a full gymnasium, barracks, an armory that Manifold had been kind enough to leave behind and access to a cavern that ran deep under the building.
This section of Alpha, designated Central, contained the hangar Chess Team would use for its vehicles, the computer rooms and surveillance equipment that Deep Blue would use to orchestrate Chess Team field operations and a variety of smaller labs and offices. Central sat at the top point of the letter A.
Finally, the lower right leg of the A-shape was the Dock. Carrack couldn’t believe it when he had actually seen the place. A full-fledged submarine dock, hidden in an underground complex, some 60 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Ridley had apparently discovered and augmented a natural cavern that ran under the New Hampshire seacoast and all the way up to Lake Winnipesaukee, where the underground Dock had been constructed on its northern end. Longer than the Panama Canal, Deep Blue had called the tunnel an ‘absolute genius work of engineering,’ and Carrack understood that it wouldn’t have even been possible for Ridley to construct the tunnel, if it hadn’t mostly been in situ as a natural cavern. Carrack was still blown away by the man’s audacity, and his execution of the project in total secrecy.