Chapter Ten: Watchdogs
After Sarah Waxer's quarantine recommendation had been approved by both the Center For Disease Control and the World Health Organization- which with Umbrella now made up a body known as the Joint Raccoon Syndrome Advisory Committee - one of the first measures instituted by both organizations had been to declare Raccoon City a no-fly zone. No aircraft were permitted within a hundred mile radius of the city's airspace. Nobody in. Nobody out.
Some had found a way around this order. The U.S. government, facing harsh criticism for its lack of response to the growing crisis in the city, had ordered in a detachment of Army Rangers to reinforce the police barricades already set up throughout the city. This order was given despite joint warnings from the CDC and WHO that the situation was too unstable for any personnel to be authorized on the ground in Raccoon.
Unfortunately - both for the soldiers who would be dispatched and the bureaucrats who had tried to prevent their leaving - the no-fly zone existed in name only. It was a barrier that existed as an imaginary line in the sky and a few lines of text on a legal document.
There was no way the American military was going to listen to the cry-baby whining of a bunch of suits who lacked the stones to do something themselves. The Rangers were going in.
Closely around the same time that General Robert Bosa decided to act unilaterally - sending in his boys and the bean counters at the WHO be damned - the Umbrella Corporation was playing a different game at the strategy hearings at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta. Spokespeople for the corporation argued that with no new information coming out of the city, Raccoon had to be considered as having gone "dark". Power could be out. Emergency services crippled. Even the CDCs lead researchers, who might possess the only answers to resolving the outbreak, could be dead by now.
More information was needed, the Umbrella representatives stressed. Beyond that, they raised concerns about the integrity of the quarantine around the city itself. All reports indicated that law enforcement had been depleted by both the virus itself and by the effort of trying to keep the sporadic rioting under control. There was, they said, a zero percent chance that any guarantees could be made about Raccoon staying contained.
"If even one person infected with Raccoon Syndrome were to escape to the highway they could hitch a ride virtually anywhere in the American Midwest," said one Umbrella spokesman. "If this scenario were to happen, then the infection which has devastated Raccoon would spread across the country like an oil slick through the sea. Potentially, we would be faced not with the nightmare of an epidemic but that of a pandemic."
This speech struck a nerve with all those present at the hearings. In only a few short sentences, the man had given voice to the fears each and every member of the committee had shared - silently, secretly - from the first day that the virus had been identified as nothing ever before seen. Raccoon Syndrome going worldwide.
Umbrella had proposed a solution that would, for lack of a better term, kill two birds with one stone. If the WHO and CDC would agree, they could have eighty members of the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasures Services scout the containment perimeter within the hour and report back about its status. If the internal quarantine had been compromised, as Sarah Waxer's last report indicated, then the U.B.C.S. would establish an external containment zone.
At the same time, U.B.C.S. helicopters would perform flybys over the city to gather data on the state of affairs inside Raccoon. No new information had come out of the city since Doctor Waxer's last report some hours ago. The news media that had been pouring out of the city, reporting a virtual deluge of frenzied violence, had gone silent almost all at once. If the scouting crews determined it was safe enough, then U.B.C.S. personnel would be sent in to assist the efforts of the Army Rangers, who the committee only learned about after the Army Black Hawks were in the air.
Between the two forces, Umbrella promised, order could be restored and vital information could once again be broadcast to the committee. If any infected residents had made it through the quarantine then they would be "found and controlled."
No one present, not even CDC Director Stanley Barnes, elected to ask just what the corporations use of the word "controlled" referred to. Perhaps they, like Barnes, already knew. Perhaps they, like Barnes, felt it was better to remain quiet and pretend it meant something else.
All the same, Umbrella had a plan - the CDC and WHO did not. Agencies, even ones as far reaching and powerful as the Center For Disease Control and World Health Organization, are still just collections of people and when people do not know what to do they become scared. Frightened people will listen to anyone who will promise to end their fear and confusion, to restore the natural order of things, to force the world to make sense again.
So it was that the Joint Raccoon Syndrome Advisory Committee came to vote on what became known as the Umbrella Resolution. It passed unanimously.
Permission was gained - officially in the case of the U.B.C.S. and unofficially in the case of the Rangers - for two missions to scout Raccoon City. There was, however, a third mission that did not exist in any of the records possessed by the Joint Raccoon Syndrome Advisory Committee. One that had been in place almost from the moment that the R.P.D. had lost control of their city.
For that matter, this mission - codenamed Operation Watchdog by White Umbrella brass - did not exist in any records or documents possessed by any organization. Plausible deniability was important for operations carried out by men who were, officially, ghosts and shadows. It was difficult to be a ghost when you had a paper trail chained around your neck.
Operation Commander Ruslan Yuskevich was a man accustomed to working in the shadows. He was used to going unheard, unseen and unnoticed. Yuskevich enjoyed the solace and anonymity of the dark and so he felt perfectly at home as he sat in the co-pilot's seat of the ACSV-Hawkeye, watching the streets of Raccoon through the glow of his scanners.
"What's the signal strength at now?" Yuskevich spoke into his headset mic, his voice lightly tinged with a subtle, Serbian accent. He did this deliberately, feeling it gave his voice character and an a dark air of authority. Yuskevich spoke English fluently along with half a dozen other languages.
"Eighty-percent, sir," the voice of his communication man crackled in the earpiece of his helmet. Corporal Marcus Rennings was one of the few Americans on Yuskevich's team. "All landlines and cell phones are jammed in addition to any dial-up modems. Radio signals will be down as well - they might be able to broadcast locally but there's no way anything's being heard outside the city."
"Is there any device powerful enough to broadcast through the signal?"
"I doubt it, sir," Rennings replied from his position in the rear of the Hawkeye. "Maybe a satellite phone but that'd be it. I don't think anyone in that shithole just happens to have one of those lying around either."
"Boost the signal to one-hundred percent," Yuskevich said after a moment's thought.
"That's a lot of output, sir. If anybody's monitoring the airwaves they might notice the anomaly and start looking for us."
"I'd rather be more cautious about preventing anyone from getting a phone call out than worrying about our scrambler being detected. Don't worry, no one's going to be looking for us, corporal," Yuskevich told his subordinate in a tone that was infinitely patient. "That's why they call this a black op."
Yuskevich knew that Rennings had a point, the Hawkeye's jammer took a great deal of power to spread a net over a city the size of Raccoon thick enough to ensure that not even the smallest signal was permitted to escape. Still, it was extremely unlikely that anyone in the city - if there was anyone left in the city - would be looking for the source of interference. Any survivors would almost assuredly blame the problem on the riots, assuming that the city's phone lines and power grid had been compromised in some fashion. Even if there were any paranoid enough to suspect third party subterfuge it was almost impossible that they would possess the technology necessary to detect the presence of the watchful Hawkeye air combat and surveillance vehicle.
Like all White Umbrella initiatives, the Hawkeye had been developed in secret, buried beneath the cover of bureaucratic fog and supported by borderline illegal research. The Hawkeye, for all official intents and purposes, had never been created.
The Hawkeye had been engineered for a situation just like the one that had befallen Raccoon. The corporation had nearly been destroyed after an accidental spill of the T-Virus had turned a town in Prague into a tiny piece of Hell. It had been difficult to contain both the flow of infected and information out of the town. If it hadn't been for a swift and brutal response by the U.B.C.S. - and a crafty story about anthrax woven by the Umbrella spin department - it was entirely possible that the each and every member ever employed by the multinational conglomerate could now be awaiting a trial for crimes against humanity.
Modeled after the U.S. Marine Corps' MV-22 Osprey prototype, the Hawkeye had been intended to reduce such difficulties if any spills were to occur in the future. Designed to "watch, listen and contain", the Hawkeye was outfitted with the latest in spy technology and armaments. High definition cameras, thermal sensors and night-vision imagers ran the length of the Hawkeye's hull, giving it a 360 degree view of the area it surveyed. The vehicle also possessed jamming devices capable of intercepting and blocking signals over three hundred miles away, including e-mails and instant messages.
Yuskevich recalled having heard some of the other B.O.N.E.S. operatives refer to the ACVS as the "Godeye". It was true, there was practically nothing that could escape the notice of the machine's numerous sensors and imaging devices - the magnification of the Hawkeye's high def scopes was powerful enough to view a mouse crawling through the crack of a building wall - but Yuskevich still thought this was a stupid name to give to something that was, essentially, a flying hunk of metal and wires.
When he had first come to America, Yuskevich had been fascinated and more than a little disturbed by its peoples' preoccupation with the notion of a Creator. It was a pathetic idea. There was no place for divinity in this world. Ruslan Yuskevich's entire life was testament enough to that.
If the Hawkeye sported a powerful set of eyes and ears then there was nothing lacking in the size of its fists either. Equipped with dual mini-guns, a pair of 40 inch cannons and two side-door machine guns, the Hawkeye did not need to shy away from a fight.
In addition to its outward arsenal, the Hawkeye also came equipped with an internal armory. Within the personnel cabin where the strike teams waited were banks of lockers stocked with everything from tear gas launchers to M249 light machine guns.
Of course, firepower is only one kind of strength.
The real advantage offered by the Hawkeye was that it mirrored the nature of the men who stood at its controls. It hid in the darkness, waiting for the right moment, before striking from the shadows. So much of warfare, Yuskevich had learned, was in convincing the enemy that you weren't there, watching him with unblinking eyes.
Unlike the Osprey prototypes that had inspired the Hawkeye's creation, the ACSV was mostly constructed from the same materials as Stealth fighters, reflective plates that made the helicopter impervious to sonar detection. Umbrella engineers had expanded on this metal though and added an element of their own, one that did not just neutralize radar but also bent light. The Hawkeye was invisible not only to sonar scanners but also to the naked eye.
Yuskevich wondered sometimes - but not often for such thoughts were frivolous and distracting - just how far Umbrella intended to spread its influence. The corporation possessed more wealth, resources and political clout than any other company on Earth. They employed minds that had developed technologies to rival those of even the most modernized militaries. Was it so unreasonable to think that, if they wanted to, Umbrella would be capable of owning the world?
Not conquering it, Yuskevich knew, that would be too...overt...too apparent for men so used to pulling strings from behind a shadowy curtain. They could own it though. That is the trend isn't it? The new empires will be companies not countries.
The Hawkeye continued to hover above the smoking ruins and shattered landscapes of Raccoon City, circling the city from 30,000 feet like a massive vulture, hidden among the night clouds. Inside the cabin the scanners buzzed and whirred as they streamed video feeds back to the array of screens in front of Yuskevich.
The OC's eyes flashed from monitor to monitor absorbing whatever information was present. Aside from the occasional click and hum of machinery, everything was perfectly quiet. In the personnel cabin two units, each ten men strong, of Biohazard Ordinance Neutralization Elite Squad troopers sat still as statues.
Recruited from the ranks of the U.B.C.S. and military organizations around the world - both public and private - B.O.N.E.S. soldiers were professional killers and none were more efficient than those belonging to Ruslan Yuskevich. Discipline was the value Yuskevich valued most and there was no shortage of that amongst his squads as they sat under the watchful eye of Captain Takimbe Azulu. The towering, scarred, cold-eyed Ugandan was a poor man when it came to the currency of words but all it took was a single flicker in those frigid black eyes of his and even the most unruly trooper fell into line with a rigid salute.
Yuskevich doubted his strike teams would be needed for this op but it never hurt to bring some backup along. One thing the Serb had discovered in his life was that if divinity was a pipe dream then predictability was an outright myth.
Especially when you work for the men I do.
Yuskevich tsked as he surveyed the pictures coming through over the infrared cameras. "Switch to night-vision," he ordered and Rennings flipped a switch from his station in the back.
One by one the monitors at Yuskevich's control seat changed to show glowing green and black images. Some practically screamed with bright emerald light where fires burned throughout the city. Yuskevich saved his eyes and ignored those screens. What he was really interested in was less dramatic.
Less dramatic? No. That is a matter of perception. We've just grown used to such sights. Yuskevich wondered what that said about himself as well as his men that they could become desensitized to scenes like the one playing out so far down below.
The creatures were practically impossible to spot accurately on the thermal sensors. Since their blood no longer circulated they did not generate any body heat. With the assistance of night-vision imaging though, Yuskevich could make out the infected with startling ease. The Hawkeye's name was well earned - it's NV technology was capable of capturing even the smallest particles of light and amplifying them up to one hundred times their normal size.
Zombies, tens of thousands of them, filled the streets. They moved with slow, sloppy steps, blindly bumping into one another without a care. Yuskevich watched as the pitiful creatures stumbled and tripped over fallen trashcans, newspaper boxes and other debris that had found its way onto the asphalt. Yuskevich increased magnification on one of the scopes as movement caught his eye.
Five of the infected had converged around a fire truck that had, ironically, flipped onto its side and crashed through a hydrant. A geyser showered the quintet but none of the carriers would let such a small inconvenience distract them from their meal. They crouched over the body of a man in a gore-spattered firefighter's jacket and overalls, tearing thick wads of flesh from the corpse's abdomen and neck.
Three bloodstained figures in street clothes - two men and one woman - were splayed on the ground near the infected and their dinner. All were covered in a variety of what looked like stab wounds, the skulls of both men were caved in and the women's neck hung on by a stringy tendon. It took only a second for Yuskevich to spot the axe that lay just out of the fireman's reach.
Ah. Tough luck, friend.
"Rennings," Yuskevich said, "give me an ETA on the U.B.C.S. transports."
"ETA," Rennings paused in the back, no doubt checking his own screens as he listened to the transmissions coming over the U.B.C.S. frequency. "Thirty minutes, sir."
Yuskevich nodded. "Patch through to HQ. Inform Director Waters that the city is approximately ninety percent infected now. T-carriers have overrun the city but the number of other B. is currently unknown. Nearly all police barricades have been compromised."
Even without the blockades Yuskevich knew there was little chance that any of the virus carriers would escape the boundaries of the city anytime soon. Even if his estimate was correct a ninety percent infection rate meant there still had to be some survivors left within Raccoon. Survivors meant a food source and so long as there was a food source present, the carriers would have no reason to venture far outside of the city limits in search of prey.
Yuskevich knew that knowledge of the Tyrant Virus made many of his colleagues uncomfortable. The thought that a man could be reduced to nothing but a debased, mindless monster, concerned only with satisfying the primal need to feed left even the hardest B.O.N.E.S veterans puzzling over the fragility of their humanity.
Yuskevich, however, remained unfazed. Humanity was not fragile, it was primal. Mankind was just another animal and like all animals he was driven by instinct. It was no one's fault that those instincts often happened to be base and impure. That was just how nature worked.
His headset clicked as Rennings switched channels to communicate with headquarters. After a moment, the corporal clicked back.
"Waters wants to know what the mission conditions are for Operation Watchdog, sir."
Mission conditions? If Yuskevich had possessed a sense of humor - which he did not - he would have chuckled. An entire city swimming with undead and who knows how many more of the genetically advanced virus carriers. Including at least two of the Tyrant series.
No support. No communication. No way out. No hope of survival.
"Tell him," Yuskevich said, "that the conditions are optimal."
When he had received his briefing for this op, Yuskevich had been told that Watchdog would be an evolving mission. Essentially that meant that the parameters and objectives of the operation could and would change from hour to hour or even minute to minute.
Yuskevich had been receiving his orders directly from the Director of Paramilitary Operations himself, Ronald Waters. At first, Waters had informed the major that his goal was to simply observe the situation in Raccoon and provide regular status reports. Once all hell had broken loose and the infected started to flood the streets, spreading the virus with every bite and scratch, Waters had told Yuskevich to begin scrambling all outbound transmissions from the city.
Only hours after the jamming signal had gone up, Director Waters had called Yuskevich over an encrypted channel. The conversation the two men shared had been quick, blunt and dry. Facts were discussed, confirmed and understood. Just like that, Ruslan Yuskevich was one of only a few to learn the full scope of the newest phase of Operation Watchdog.
U.B.C.S. soldiers would be heading into the city under the guise of staging rescue missions and assisting a detachment of Army Rangers in helping local law enforcement restore civil order. Of the eight squads being dispatched, only eight men - one per squad - knew the truth. At least, they thought they did.
These elite eight had been designated mission supervisors by command and all had received briefings separate of the others regarding the goals of Operation Watchdog. These men were to abandon their units at the first possible opportunity and monitor them from a safe distance. Each supervisor had been given a micro-computer capable of uploading data over a secure channel outside the interference of the Hawkeye's jamming signal. They would gather as much combat data as possible - including squad strength, number and type of B. engaged as well as the general performance of either side - then report to the clock tower outside City Hall for extraction.
Each supervisor had been hand selected from the U.B.C.S. based on their extensive psychological profiles. These eight, these Watchdogs, were the worst human beings possible - which made them the best men for such a task. They were borderline sociopaths. They suffered no empathy nor bouts of conscience. Not a one of them was burdened by the bonds of emotion or loyalty.
What these men - who thought they knew so much - were not aware of was the fact that there was to be no extraction. Not at the clock tower, not anywhere else for that matter. The dedicated server they had been told they would be uploading their data to actually rested in the cockpit of Yuskevich's Hawkeye. Once command had determined he had collected enough information from the supervisors, Yuskevich would simply fly away and radio in with a sterilization recommendation.
Watchdogs? Yuskevich snorted. More like lab rats.
Just what that sterilization measure would be, Yuskevich could not say. Whatever it was, it would have to involve enough heavy ordinance to wipe Raccoon City off the map. A few two thousand pound bombs ought to do the trick but Yuskevich did not think this would be the preferred course of action for his superiors. It left the potential, albeit a small one, for loose ends.
No, Umbrella is too cautious, too paranoid, to risk anything being left behind. A nuclear strike is much more likely. One tactical blast and everything here will be swept clean.
Of course, resourceful as the corporation was even they did not possess nuclear weaponry. If a missile was going to be launched against Raccoon it would take nothing short of Presidential consent to see it done. That would not be as difficult as it sounds.
Not when the government learns that its own special forces were unable to contain this nightmare. Not when they've already seen the horrors that this virus can unleash. They'll take a little bit of pushing but in the end they'll see that it's the only way and this place will disappear, carrying the truth with it.
How long it would take for a tactical strike to be ordered, Yuskevich did not know. That was entirely up to how much data command felt it was necessary to obtain and how the soldiers - the lab rats - performed. Truthfully, to both Yuskevich and his men, it did not matter.
Alternating, propeller-turbines kept the Hawkeye aloft and the low-impact, low-buffeting design of the rotors ensured that the ACSV generated almost no noise. Its extended fuel tanks meant that the Hawkeye could hover in place for days, even a week.
Yuskevich had his orders. He was prepared to stay as long as it took.
"We have green light authorization," Rennings said in the back, speaking over a common channel now so that Captain Azulu and the rest of the B.O.N.E.S. troopers could hear as well. "Operation Watchdog is a go. Repeat, Operation Watchdog is a go."
Yuskevich turned his eyes up to the night vision monitors. He watched as three more of the desiccated, blood-smeared virus carriers joined their companions to feast on the firefighter. Briefly, the major thought about the helicopters filled with U.B.C.S. soldiers that were speeding towards this necropolis.
He found that he felt no pity for those men whose fates had already been sealed. Nor did he feel any sympathy or guilt. Yuskevich wondered if he should see this as strange. It had been a long time since he had felt much of anything, after all.
Ruslan Yuskevich had been born in Belgrade, a city where it was hard to earn a living even for those who had money and Ruslan's family had none. His father had been a violent drunk and his mother had served almost solely as an outlet for that violence. When he was six, on a warm summer day when most boys his age would have been out playing football, Ruslan was at home, watching papa beat his mother to death. Later that night, papa had gone upstairs, removed his pistol from its place on the top shelf of his closet, stuck the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
After the death of his parents, young Ruslan had traveled from orphanage, to state sponsored halfway homes and back again. He had been shipped all over the city like a parcel that no one was willing to collect.
That all stopped when Ruslan turned sixteen. He was kicked out of the most recent orphanage he had been transferred to after putting two older boys into the hospital for trying to steal his jacket. If there was only one thing he had learned from his father it was how to hit someone so that they didn't get back up again.
Surviving the streets of Belgrade had not been easy but young Ruslan had been resourceful even in his youth. He had known what to do to get by and, more important than that, hadn't been afraid to do it. Ruslan had stolen, conned, grifted and manipulated to make sure he had enough to ate, a place to sleep and some money in his pocket.
At eighteen, he killed his first man. It was winter and Ruslan had been extremely cold. His victim had been wearing boots. Ruslan had been wearing none.
When he turned nineteen, Ruslan found himself working for some of the various organized crime elements within the city. He did their dirty work for them. Ruslan intimidated, extorted and murdered - things he had already been doing for years. He remembered how good it felt the first time he had gotten paid to do such things, though.
Ruslan had tired playing the workman for the criminal families after a couple of years. He had learned in his time dodging Belgrade law enforcement that, more often than not, the police were more crooked than the men they pursued. The main difference though - the one that had enticed Ruslan - had been the fact that when you enforced the laws, no one came after you for breaking them.
On his twenty-third birthday, Ruslan had joined the Belgrade police. It had been the easiest transition of his life. He intimidated, extorted and murdered. The pay had been less than what he made playing gopher for the mob but the power that had come with a badge had more than made up for that.
From the police it had been a short jump to the army. Yuskevich's mixture of fearless ruthlessness had put him on the radar of his commanders and he had fast-tracked to officer. It was then that he understood the power that came with a badge was a mere whispered compared to what could be gained when a man donned a uniform that gave him command over a couple hundred soldiers bearing assault rifles.
Yuskevich had always been seen as a good soldier himself, a reliable commander but it hadn't been until the war came that he had truly distinguished himself. His men had filled more graves than any others. His company had killed more Croats - exterminated more vermin - than any other. He had been decorated by Milosevic himself for his efficiency, bravery and dedication to his country.
Yuskevich still had those medals - somewhere. He could not recall exactly. He had never put much stock in military decorations. They were silly things that fools cherished.
He had not killed because it brought him any pleasure. He had not killed because he had loved the great nation of Serbia. He loathed the Croat scum but that was not why he had forced them to line up before the trenches nor why he had ordered his men to open fire as they knelt before the chasm that would be their final resting place. No, he had done so because orders were orders. A mission had to be completed - whatever the cost.
That is true loyalty. A soldier's loyalty. Yuskevich held this truth as perhaps the only thing he could ever know to be completely correct, above all other knowledge. Not dedication to his comrades, not loyalty to his men. No, it is loyalty to his mission.
Sometimes he thought it was this mentality that had led him to Umbrella. They understood what it meant to see a task through to its end - no matter how bitter that end was. They knew what it took to be the bully on the block, to rise above the rest and leave their stamp on the world.
Even now, they have no fear. They are not scrambling for cover, preparing lies to mask their deeds. Instead, they are moving pieces into place, enacting a plan to turn a disaster into an opportunity.
That was the mark of a true man. One who made his own opportunities. One who forced fortune, not waiting for it to fall into his lap. If Yuskevich had waited for his opportunities he would have been rounded up with the others by the UN and paraded before their kangaroo courts at the Hague.
When the writing was on the wall that the war would not end in the favor of those who had fought on the side of Milosevic, Yuskevich had used his contacts to change his name, forge new passports and falsify his identity as much as possible. This last task proved the most difficult to accomplish as a grenade blast had badly disfigured the right side of Yuskevich's face, leaving it a mangle mass of pocked, triangular scars. Nevertheless, Yuskevich had made it through the checkpoints without incident and immigrated to the States.
He had arrived with little more than the clothes on his back. His only contact had been a cousin that Yuskevich hadn't spoken to in nearly a decade but family was family after all and Oscar had only been too happy to help out his cousin.
As it turned out, Oscar had just been dismissed from his last job with a private military contractor and happened to be looking for work as well. He told Yuskevich that the Umbrella Corporation was recruiting for its own security forces. Apparently the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasures Services needed a few men just like them. From there, it had been a short jump before Ruslan Yuskevich found himself among the ranks of the B.O.N.E.S. command.
In the few years since making that jump Yuskevich had seen things that any sane man would have thought of as impossible, unimaginable. He had personally born witness to human experimentation, bonafide mad scientists, and real, live monsters.
Yet none of it had surprised Yuskevich - not for one second. The war - no, his entire existence - had taught the major to fully understand the depths of human depravity and greed. None of it was remarkable to Yuskevich, none of it seemed extraordinary or nightmarish. It was only business as usual.
Just like it is now. And it's time to get paid.
The sound of approaching rotors chopping through the air filled the major's headset. The U.B.C.S. were on their way. Yuskevich turned his attention back to the screens and waited for the killing to start.