Interlude 2:

Wheels in Motion

The room was dark, the better to see the large screens on the far wall. The long table in the center wasn't oriented to make viewing the screens easy, but then, the images weren't pretty.

One was a satellite image of an A-10 Warthog's crash site. The plane's wreckage was still burning, its broken body lying in the middle of a school courtyard like a dead bird. No one was sure what had shot it down, but that was the only explanation. Such aircraft didn't just fall out of the sky of their own accord. The pilot's family would have to be notified, although that was something for the Air Force to worry about. The men at this table had a narrower focus.

Another screen was a view of City Hall. This one was an unmanned drone circling the area, equipped with thermal imaging cameras. It had witnessed a pitched gun battle between the police and an unknown group of hostiles. It was time stamped for four hours earlier. It was cued up and rewound itself, constantly replaying.

The third screen showed an earlier engagement, between another group of police and another (or possibly the same) unknown party. This one was also cued up.

"It's too risky" said one of the men. He was a political appointment from the current administration, an individual whose ties to this mess ought to have gotten him thrown out, at the very least. Treason accusations were already being discussed. This was, after all, a war. Even if not all the combatants knew it as such.

"Look at that" said another man, this one a five year veteran of SOCOM. He gestured toward the screen, where a giant was smashing its way through a group of police with what looked like a handheld minigun. "We've wasted enough time. All our best estimates were wrong. What we thought was still ten years away is happening right here, right now. And it's not happening in Baghdad. It's happening here, in our own country, in the middle of one of our own god dammed cities! And the whole thing is live on TV."

Several of the screens were pirated feeds from news networks. The best coverage was coming in, surprisingly, from Fox, whose local affiliate just happened to have been fortunate enough to be outside the city when everything went down. She'd grabbed her camera crew and headed for one of the roadblocks the Colorado National Guard had set up, making her, if not the first reporter on the scene, then at least the longest lived. National Broadcast Company and Cable News Network had managed to insert their own reporters onto the scene as well, and there were now even reporters being allowed into the extraction zone set up downtown. Now everyone in the world could watch as Raccoon City tore itself apart.

And that was what it boiled down to. The US government had known Umbrella was up to no good for several years. The Company had the government penetrated, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency both remained relatively clean (Congress was another matter). What was even better, the President Pro Tempore of the Senate (third in line of Presidential Succession) knew of this, and was willing to back the play of the men in this room, at least until the next elections in 2000. Rumor had it the current Vice President planned his own bid for highest office. The men around this table intended to make sure this didn't happen.

Enough was enough.

Umbrella had fucked up one too many times. It was that simple. While the government could look the other way as long as Umbrella was turning out products like Aquacure without proper FDA tests (the First Aid Sprays had been virtual lifesavers in both DESERT STORM and GOTHIC SERPENT, with a 100% survivability rate among all administered cases), things had just gone too far. Something had to be done. Umbrella was going down.

In the end, it came down to a vote. Only the political appointee abstained. His own career would be over with the President's, once everything came out, but he still wouldn't put his name in favor of the company that had given him its patronage.

The man at the head of the table, the current Director, Central Intelligence, picked up a phone next to his chair. His eyes drifted over to watch the battle that had raged earlier in City Hall, as a giant pulverized the head of some poor cop.

"The mission is a go" he said calmly, careful not to say too much, even though this was an STU, and therefore the most secure form of government communication. Still, he was giving marching orders to a unit that didn't exist, whose name wasn't even written down, that was so black as to be completely invisible, and so the forms had to be observed. "Send in ECHO."

Several hundred miles away, at Special Operations Command in Florida, soldiers began to board transport aircraft for the long flight to Denver. From there they'd be married up with heavier equipment (in this case, Nighthawks, the stealth variant of the Army's venerable Blackhawk transport chopper) and deployed into the city. While they were under orders to render assistance to any survivors they found, their mission's objectives were much more specific.

And so it began.