There is something profoundly American in the way Timur finds the survivor: at dawn, perched on a sniper-watched rooftop inside the quarantine zone, holding an unfurled national flag. After radioing Ash about the situation and getting the confirmation not to shoot, he twitches the OTs so that the scope flashes in the brightening sunlight.
The survivor pulls down the bandana covering their face, revealing a broad grin. They raise an arm and wave, and it's surprisingly difficult not to wave back; in this nightmare made real, as they struggle to not eliminate but simply hold back tides of literal monsters, every bit of humanity and hope is precious.
And if there's one survivor in the quarantine zone, there are probably more. Doc is going to be insufferable about the nuclear option now.
Timur lets the lens of the scope flash in short and long bursts, spelling out F-R-I-E-N-D, but the survivor doesn't seem to respond. Maybe they don't know Morse.
"Any sign of a weapon?" Ash asks over the radio.
"Negative," Timur replies, but it doesn't mean much. The range is fairly extreme, and the survivor is wearing baggy black clothing; he can't make out enough facial features to determine age or gender, let alone the outline of a dark firearm held against the body. But how could anyone survive inside the quarantine zone without arming themselves?
The survivor stopped waving and looked to the side, then abandoned the flag and slid down the side of the sloped roof. They vanished from Timur's sight, and about ten seconds later a grunt loped across the section of roof where they had been sitting. It slipped on the draped flag, tearing it nearly in half before regaining its footing and continuing onwards.
If he had seen that sort of symbolism in a painting, Timur would have shaken his head in disgust; anything so utterly unsubtle was nothing but political propaganda. In real time through the tiny round view of the OTs' scope, though, it makes his heart sink.
He radios the update to Ash, whose voice is coolly professional when she acknowledges. He can only wonder if she feels disappointed as well.
Timur waits half an hour for the survivor to reappear, monitoring the ripped flag with a sniper's endless patience, but they don't show. At the end of that half hour his shift of zone-watching ends, and he trades places with a Navy SEAL—not Blackbeard or Valkyrie, just a member of some of the SEAL units called in to assist/reinforce the Rainbow operatives—and leaves the nest.
He trudges to the mess tent, already feeling a bit too warm under the New Mexico sun and knowing that the temperature has only just started its daily climb. None of the Spetsnaz operatives are pussy enough to bitch about the heat, but only Tachanka seems totally unbothered by it; he claims that the Chihuahuan Desert and the surrounding Sierra Madre ranges remind him of Afghanistan, where he had been blooded as an operative and found his signature LMG.
On the other hand, Tachanka could give rocks lessons in stoicism, so who the fuck really knows? The heat, the frustration of being unable to gain any sort of advantage over the ever-adapting Chimera virus, and now the survivor's disappearance have put Timur in the blackest of moods. Whatever expression is on his face makes the non-Rainbow operatives avoid him when he enters the mess and gets in line for his food.
Kapkan nods a greeting to him when he sits down with his tray, and Finka pauses in her conversation with her mentor/sparring partner to look at him. She has a fine-boned but stern face that, with her scar and cold eyes, make her handsome rather than beautiful—Tachanka seems to like her well enough, however, and Timur can at least appreciate her features if not find her attractive.
"Well?" Kapkan asks, speaking Russian for the sake of privacy.
Gossip spreads through a military camp faster than through a group of nosy grandmothers. Timur swallows a sigh along with his reconstituted eggs and shrugs his shoulders.
"Black clothing, kind of small," he answers, "probably not military." An operative would have tried to establish radio contact, or at least have recognized Morse. But the idea of a civilian surviving inside that hellhole for the three and a half weeks they've been (barely) containing the virus is pure fantasy.
"And?" Finka presses.
"And the range was 1600 meters," Timur says. "I couldn't see anything else."
Except the grin, just barely, and the wave of happy acknowledgement.
Both the Spetsnaz operatives accept the explanation without comment. The infected hostiles (zombies? monsters? alien mutants?) have been pushing at the edges of the quarantine zone, trying to break through. With either no weapon or one small enough that Timur hadn't been able to spot it, the survivor probably hadn't been able to get any closer.
Kapkan notices Timur's focus on his food and steers the conversation away from the survivor, letting the sniper eat in peace as his thoughts chase each other in useless, wondering trails. Does that one survivor represent a group, or are they alone? Do they have some sort of special trick for avoiding detection that would be useful for Rainbow to know?
Or has the Chimera virus finally learned how to infect a human host without altering its appearance, and the "survivor" is nothing more than a Trojan horse?
Timur loses his appetite after that.