Paul Rhodes

Paul Rhodes is a former member of the Last Man Battalion (LMB) and an engineer currently working with the Joint Task Force. He is in charge of the Technical Wing in the Base of Operations and works to keep the power, supply lines, and communications network intact for Manhattan.

Biography
Born and raised in Central Jersey, Rhodes has always lived a restless, peripatetic life. After he attended Rutgers, he bounced around several tech startups, never staying anywhere for long. He settled in Manhattan long enough to find a wife, but lost her when her office fell in the World Trade Center North Tower collapse on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Afterwards, motivated by revenge against the terrorists but embittered by a disdain for what he considered the tepid response of the U.S. government, he joined the Last Man Battalion private military company instead of the U.S. Armed Forces. In 2003, his LMB work took him to Iraq where he served as an engineering contractor. He left Iraq and the company after becoming the sole survivor of a harrowing roadside ambush that decimated his team. Grappling with the enormous burden of survivor's guilt, Rhodes retired from military contract work and returned to live in Manhattan.

After the Green Poison outbreak, Rhodes offered his services to the newly-consolidated Joint Task Force and quickly rose to become its chief engineer. When a local power outage affecting the JTF Base of Operations was traced to generator failures in the Subway Morgue, Rhodes led a team down to investigate, but then went dark himself. Thanks to a daring rescue op by Second-Wave Division agents, he managed to fend off a Cleaner assault led by a union boss named Benchley. Rhodes reactivated the power grid, sending juice back to JTF's Tech Wing.

After returning to the Base of Operations, Rhodes guided the agent to fix the power in the Times Square, WarrenGate Power Plant, and Rooftop Comms Relay, successfully prevented power outage on the island as well as restored power on the island.

When a friend of Rhodes inside the Last Man Battalion defected, he called Rhodes to send a squad to get him to the Base of Operations, in exchange for Intel on the LMB. Rhodes then sent a 3 men JTF squad to retrieve him. Unfortunately the LMB found out about the betrayal, and sent a squad to kill the JTF squad and the traitor himself. In desperation, Rhodes asked the agent to aid him in rescuing his friend. The agent then followed the ECHOs, to where his friend was, and successfully rescued him by eliminating all the surrounding LMB forces. Rhodes then thank the agent and sent another JTF squad to retrieve him back to base.

During an incursion at the Port Control Transit Terminal against the Cleaners and their new weapon, Benitez called Rhodes to aid the squad of Division agents in destroying Dragon One. After multiple attempts, Rhodes successfully destroyed the weapon by dropping a giant metal pipe on it.

Personality
Since losing his wife on 9/11, Paul Rhodes has assiduously avoided intimate relationships. His experiences working for the Last Man Battalion have turned him cynical and somewhat "twitchy" with an odd penchant for hardcore conspiracy theories. Rhodes is certain that powerful interests of the "deep state" variety lurk behind the scenes, manipulating the events surrounding the smallpox outbreak. This unfortunate worldview also explains his lingering trust issues regarding the Division.

Truly unconcerned with appearances and painfully blunt, Rhodes is also widely considered to be "scary smart" according to the Division's personnel dossier. Part tech genius, part expert weapons engineer, Rhodes's deepest allegiance is to competence. His peers are familiar with his highly tuned "bullshit sensor". His critics know him for his disdain for authority. However he's highly motivated by a keen sense of the common good.

He also tends to have a low opinion of the government and The Division.

Haven Leader
Prior to the events of Warlords of New York, Rhodes is sick of the Division and their lack of accountability, decided to leave and establish a new civilian settlement in Lower Manhattan called Haven. Later on, the New York City Hall was attacked by Aaron Keener, resulting in massive casualties to the JTF and Division forces stationed there. Rhodes allows Faye Lau and Roy Benitez into Haven, albeit unhappily as he still holds a grudge against The Division and Faye. Rhodes low opinion of Division agents is shown when the player shows up in Haven, much to Rhodes disapproval, vowing that if the "blood and violence" of the Division followed them into Haven, he wouldn't forgive them.

During the Warlords campaign, while the player progresses in hunting down Keener, Rhodes continues to begrudgingly help out, if only to have the player leave quickly once Keener is eliminated. This shows most prominently during the Tombs mission, in which Rhodes states "... should be done in no time thanks to ISAC. You don't deserve this technology. You really don't."

After the events of Liberty Island, where Keener is eliminated by the player and Lau is revealed to have gone rogue to assist the Black Tusk, Rhodes states, during a conversation between Alani Kelso and Benitez, that he never trusted Lau. He does, however, now trust the player more than when they arrived. When the player talks to Rhodes after the final cinematic of the campaign, he states that "you can't trust a system without checks and balances," and that the abuse of power and corruption of said unchecked power "happened to Keener, it happened to Lau, it can happen to anyone."

Appearances
Paul Rhodes Пол Родс
 * Tom Clancy's The Division
 * Tom Clancy's The Division 2 (Warlords of New York Expansion )