Most of the team (less Arkadi and, of course, Ellis) heads out on another mapping and reconnaissance mission. This time, they’re southbound, exploring the region beyond the railyard and Opoczno. Fuel production is still barely keeping up with consumption, so they decide to march rather than piling into a vehicle.

The sky has been threatening rain all morning. The first raindrops are falling as they take a break at the highway south of Ponikla. Magda and Pettimore, out on point, are the first to hear the howling. Somewhere south of their position, wolves are agitated about something.

Another set of howls starts up from the southwest. They sound like wolves, but the cadence is off. It almost feels more like a conversation.

The team finds a defensible position and hunkers down, but there’s no sign of lupine aggression. After a few minutes, they move out, albeit with a bit more caution than before. The drizzle becomes a downpour as they pass the railyard, checking in with Arkadi, who’s there with the teenagers on a salvage run.

The team continues south into more of the mostly-abandoned farmland that’s the region’s prevalent terrain. Beyond the fields, a scraggly forest offers to mitigate at least some of the downpour. The dirt track the team is following intersects with another muddy road – this one revealing recent footprints. Pettimore hunkers down to inspect the tracks. It looks like about a dozen people, mainly in civilian footwear and including a few kids; a few of them are carrying heavy loads.

The team decides to follow. The tracks lead to a derelict house, half-collapsed and in the process of being reclaimed by nature. Pettimore, Zenobia, and Magda move in to take a closer look. Sure enough, the group they’ve been following is about a dozen refugees, who are currently engaged in an attempt to cook what meager rations they have. A few of them have hand tools that could serve as improvised weapons and one appears to be carrying a firearm under his coat, but they’re not a serious threat.

Pettimore takes up his bow,and slinks off in search of wildlife. Magda and and Red [who were not built with Empathy as a dump stat] move in to initiate conversation while the rest of the team holds position in case something goes sideways.

The refugees are standoffish, as expected, but the team’s negotiators win them over. Pettimore certainly doesn’t hurt the process when he returns and donates a deer to the stewpot. The refugees’ nominal leader, Roman Sobol [a good random Polish name], indicates that the group is traveling from Radom to Opoczno.

The team perks up at this. Radom is on their radar as the source of the ZOMO detachment that was threatening their farmer friends to the north of Ponikla, and, more recently, as the intended destination of the slavers who abducted Bianka, Tamara, and Pawel from the railyard.

Roman fills them in on recent events. The Radom ZOMO, which functions as the ruined city’s military government, is under increasing pressure from the Polish puppet government at Lublin (which Roman believes is, in turn, under pressure from Soviet Reserve Front HQ there). The new capital wants Radom’s arms factory restored to some level of function, despite the heavy damage it took during NATO forces’ withdrawal at the end of Operation Advent Crown in late ’97. The Radom ZOMO is responding by increasing labor quotas, diverting workers from the fields at the most critical point in the harvest, and demanding more work from the inmates at the POW camp.

Beyond that, Radom has seen a significant amount of westward Soviet troop movement over the past month, with couriers going both east and west with increased regularity and urgency. There are rumors that a NATO offensive somewhere around Lodz destroyed the units that were sent west.

The conversation is interrupted by more wolf howls – this time from the north. There’s another brief exchange, immediately followed by two explosions.

The team hastily gives Roman directions for reaching Opoczno without exposing themselves on the main road. They then gear up and move out, heading toward the noise of what now sounds like an intense gunfight. A couple more explosions shake the forest.

Smoke is rising over the trees as the team approaches the highway. They spread out and approach cautiously. Around a bend, armed figures are moving around a Soviet convoy that’s seen better days. The lead vehicle of the eastbound unit was a BTR-70, which is now on its side courtesy of what appears to have been a massive IED. Behind it, a Ural-375 with some sort of communications shelter on the back is fully engulfed in flames. Another Ural-375, this one the standard cargo model, appears intact, as does a UAZ-469 towing a trailered generator. At the rear of the convoy, a UAZ-469 gun jeep is leaking fluids around its four flat tires.

The Poles in the team are the first to recognize the insignia on the arms of the figures who are picking through the debris. It’s the white eagle on red of the Polish Home Army, the anti-Soviet movement that aligned with NATO at the war’s onset. Magda, herself a former Home Army fighter, has recently resumed wearing her own insignia, so she takes point as the team heads down to meet presumed allies.

The woman in charge of the ambushers comes out to meet Magda. She’s tall, with brilliant green eyes, delicate hands that look more suited to surgery or a piano than the AKM she’s holding, and an old knife scar across the side and back of her neck. She introduces herself as Marietta Rabarchak, a lieutenant with the White Eagle Battalion operating out of Skarzysko-Kamienna, a city about 40 kilometers southeast of their current location. She wasn’t aware any other Home Army forces were in the area; Magda has to quickly explain that while she’s Home Army, her companions are something of a grab bag.

(Red and Pettimore identify the convoy as a Soviet signals intelligence unit, probably returning to Lublin after doing unpleasant things in support of the forces that crushed the U.S. 5th Infantry Division. Unfortunately, the vehicles that might have contained the items that the team is most interested in – maps and radios – are on fire. Such is war.)

Rabarchak gives the team a quick summary of her group’s situation. The White Eagle Battalion holds Skarzysko-Kamienna and is focusing its efforts on the Soviet presence in the region. They’ve been hitting couriers and convoys along the main line of communications between Lublin and the forces in the west. They knew someone else was in the area after finding the remains of a GRU unit that they themselves hadn’t hit. They expect that the Soviets will start stationing quick reaction forces along the route; Pettimore infers that they’re about to change up their tactics in the hope that they can lure the QRFs into larger or secondary ambushes.

Before the team can get too far into the details, a trio of men emerges from the woods. These guys aren’t wearing Home Army colors; they’re dressed in ragged civilian attire under wolfskin cloaks. All are carrying scoped bolt-action rifles that probably saw service in the 1940s. Their leader, a dude with a pierced eyebrow and a beard that would do ZZ Top proud, walks up to the conversation and eyes the team warily. In monosyllables, he asks Rabarchak who the newcomers are. She explains and introduces him as Filip, an individual of some importance within an allied partisan group, the Bracia Wilkow.

(The PCs don’t recognize the name but the Poles in the party immediately parse it: the Wolf-Brothers.)

Filip gives the team some more stink-eye. He’s obviously assessing them as a potential problem. He locks onto Pettimore, steps into the sniper’s personal space, and sniffs. “Mm. Bearkiller. You’ll do.”

[Exposition at this point for the home audience: Pettimore is a legacy PC from a previous iteration of this campaign world. Early in that campaign, he was out hunting when a bear attacked him. He killed the beast with his sidearm, skinned and dressed it, and took one of its claws as a trophy necklace. All of the carcass except that claw subsequently vanished from the team’s HMMWV, with tracks and blood smears strongly suggesting that it got up and walked the hell away.

Pettimore still has the necklace, but he wears it under his shirt and no one in this campaign has ever seen it.]

While Pettimore is studiously not reacting to this, Filip shifts his attention to Minka and does the same thing. “You smell of the forge and old things. Good.”

And then he just walks away, gathering his two associates and disappearing back into the forest.

Rabarchak doesn’t have much explanation to offer. Apparently, the Bracia Wilkow are like that. They operate out of the forest somewhere south of here and west of Skarzysko-Kamienna, and they occasionally show up to support the White Eagle Battalion with reconnaissance and the odd sniper shot. And there are standing orders to not piss them off.

She checks her watch and realizes that she’s spent about as much time next to a burning Soviet convoy as she wants to. Her platoon wraps up the looting and begins loading up the usable UAZ and Ural. Red negotiates a communication dropoff at Opoczno; apparently, one of the merchants there is part of the White Eagles’ network. With that, the partisans head south and the PCs circle back to pick up Roman’s refugees and escort them into Opoczno.

This was a remarkably tense session despite the complete lack of combat. All of the players from that previous iteration are in this campaign, and they have unpleasant memories of men who associate themselves closely with wolves. Pettimore is the only PC who continued (or sideslipped) into this campaign, and my players are pretty good at not metagaming, but the paranoia was contagious.

With Miko badly injured, the team pulls in their horns and focuses on agriculture and infrastructure for the nine days it’ll take that shattered elbow to heal.

Pettimore, Leks, and Magda throw themselves into the harvest. July’s bounty includes black and red currants, cherries, potatoes, and barley. The month’s total yield from all fields harvested is an impressive 6,100 rations of food. On rainy days when working the fields is impractical, the team supplements this with foraging and hunting.

The more mechanically-inclined team members get to work on infrastructure tasks. The drilling rig enables them to sink another well (actually, two, but the first one came up dry – literally). Minka gets her forge set up, and her trial efforts produce a couple of the boar spears that Pettimore had requested a while ago. The team also puts some effort into assembling a welding torch, though they still lack a supply of acetylene.

Arkadi was always a hobbyist mechanic and he’s familiar with Volgas. Against Zenobia’s recommendations, he puts a few shifts into patching tires and body panels and reconditioning other components that caught Leks’ wrath. With the Volga restored to driveable condition, the village’s entire vehicle fleet is repaired. A week-plus of no travel also sees the available fuel increase as both stills are in constant use, though they still have a ways to go before reaching their goal of full fuel tanks and a reserve.

Finally, there’s some discussion of long-term infrastructure improvements. Zenobia and Red both want to restore electrical power to the community. Minka has recently come into possession of a stack of technical documentation for the region’s electrical grid, and there seems to be a small hydroelectric generating facility about 30km downriver (east) of Ponikla…

With obvious Warsaw Pact military activity south of them, the team is interested in getting eyes on more of the map in that direction. They load up the UAZ-469 for a reconnaissance push in that direction, heading south or southeast from the railyard.

While they’re prepping their gear, Malvina and Jacob approach them. Jacob’s eye socket has finally healed under Red and Minka’s care, and the two teenagers would like to get back to the railyard to check on their friends. They’ve been exchanging written communication (with a primitive duress/wellness code that Ellis figured out before he left on his mission) but they haven’t actually been back since the team brought Jacob in for surgery.

Arkadi, Zenobia, Leks, Minka, Red, and Miko squeeze into the UAZ along with the two teens. It’s a tight fit but the trip down is uneventful.

Arriving at the railyard, it’s… quiet. The other four teenagers have had semi-regular contact with the team and should recognize the UAZ, but no one comes out to greet them. The team fans out to search.

---

Miko heads into the woods south of the railyard and immediately picks up on signs that someone’s been here [4 successes on a Survival check… okay, we’ll go with it]. He finds an observation point or sniper hide, apparently occupied last night. About thirty meters back, there’s sign of a larger campsite with horses, dogs, and a horse-drawn cart. As best he’s able to reconstruct, about a half-dozen men with five horses came here yesterday, observed the railyard overnight, and departed a few hours ago.

He also finds signs of a fight. There’s no evidence of gunfire, but blood splatters, trampled undergrowth, and broken branches all indicate that something went down. He also locates the remains of a hand-woven wicker basket that was crushed in the melee along with its cargo of mushrooms and herbs.

---

Minka is accosted by the tabby cat who gave her and Magda a brief jumpscare on their first trip here. She follows the cat to a damaged and derailed baggage car across the yard. Seeing a gleam of metal in the car’s depths, she squeezes herself through the jammed, half-open door.

The rest of the team sees Minka disappear into the baggage car. A moment later, screaming and the sounds of a ferocious melee erupt! The team dashes in that direction, Arkadi in the lead.

---

Inside the baggage car, Minka finds herself fending off a panicked, frantic teenager with a knife who seems intent on stabbing her in the kidneys. Fortunately, her tool roll is in the way, and a couple of wrenches take the brunt of the assault. In between the stabs and the screams of “you’re not taking me!” Minka manages to disarm and pin her assailant. It’s Irena, one of the other teenagers.

Arkadi lowers his AK as Minka emerges from the baggage car, followed by a 16-year-old girl with wide eyes and a broken knife. Irena provides the pieces of the story that connect to Miko’s findings. Early this morning, slavers raided the railyard. She recognized two of the same crew that had tried to capture the kids a couple of months ago in the raid that cost Jacob his eye. She was scrounging for parts on the north end of the yard and escaped notice, but the slavers made off with the other three teenagers – Bianka, Tamara, and Pawel.

The team instructs Irena, Malvina, and Jacob to fort up in the railyard and head for Ponikla if they aren’t back after dark. Jacob assures them that they have some hiding places they haven’t shown the team yet (earning a fistbump from Miko, who appreciates teenage paranoia). Malvina hefts Zenobia’s old Glock 17 (which she semi-inherited when Zenobia upgraded to a Glock 18).

---

The team heads out on the trail. The slavers aren’t hard to track – light rain over the last few days has made the ground soft but not muddy, and they’re using farm roads through largely-abandoned countryside.

Zenobia, riding shotgun while Arkadi drives, spots a couple of large, angular shapes about a kilometer away. They look like tanks. There’s a general swearing and readying of weapons. Leks grabs the one RPG-22 he packed along (after the GRU fight, he’s less inclined to leave home without something that can handle at least light armor).

Binoculars are passed around. Leks, Red, and Arkadi, all with formal military training, are able to recognize the shapes of self-propelled artillery. They also pick out the signs of severe battle damage – these are derelicts, not actively-crewed vehicles.

The team approaches cautiously, Miko out in front on foot to watch for mines or UXO. The tracks they’re following do indicate that the slavers halted to check out the wrecks, but didn’t stay for long. The wreckage is old, several years of rust visible on torn steel. Overgrown craters tell the story: an American artillery battery stayed too long in its firing position and was wiped out with counterbattery fire. The three M109s are hopelessly beyond repair, as are the remains of two 5-ton trucks. The trio of M992 ammunition carriers is only slightly less damaged, but Minka, Zenobia, and Arkadi confer. If they took detailed measurements, fabricated a few drivetrain parts, and camped out here for a week with a good selection of tools, they might be able to strip two of the M992s to get the third back to operating condition.

That’s a tomorrow problem, though. The team has much higher priorities right now.

---

After another hour of driving, the road begins winding downward into a low, swampy area. On a bluff overlooking the road, a bombed-out building looms. It looks worth checking out. Arkadi slows the UAZ as it passes a stand of trees and Miko and Zenobia roll out into the scrub at the side of the road. As they collect themselves, they spot a sniper atop the ridgeline, tracking the UAZ with his rifle as it passes.

The UAZ rolls on to the north, holding the sniper’s attention. Zenobia settles herself into position and waits under her ghillie suit while Miko circles wide and ascends the west end of the bluff to come up behind the sniper. As he does so, he spots two more men in another patch of woods to his east.

Miko applies his hard-won patience and settles in to watch. After about five minutes, the sniper returns to scanning the road and the other armed men head back to a small campsite in a clearing. Miko resumes his stalk, slowly closing on the sniper’s rear with machete in hand.

---

About 400 meters north of the bluff, Arkadi pulls the UAZ behind a ramshackle abandoned barn. He, Leks, Red, and Minka dismount and begin moving back south. They’re trying for stealth but this isn’t the team’s sneakiest subset…

---

Miko is about 30 meters from the sniper when he sees the man tense and swing his rifle to the north. He can’t see his approaching teammates but he’s fairly certain what’s captured the sniper’s attention. He dashes in and swings down in a vicious attack, slashing both of the man’s Achilles tendons. The sniper loses his rifle down the bluff as he rolls away screaming, incapacitated with pain.

---

Distant screaming is the cue for the group to the north to move in. They abandon their stealthy approach and begin dashing south toward the bluff. Red and Leks curve around to a western approach while Minka and Arkadi head due south, hoping to scale the sheer rocks and flank whoever’s in the decrepit building.

Red takes the lead. As he approaches the dirt track that leads up to the building, he sees another armed man emerge with three large dogs. He flattens himself against the bluff to break line of sight, as does Leks – but a moment later, a grenade comes sailing over the edge of the cliff. Shrapnel strikes Red’s chest and the blast knocks both men down. Through the smoke, two of the dogs charge. One tears into Red’s side just below his armor.

Minka scales the bluff like a spider monkey and dashes for the armed man. Arkadi tries to follow her but pulls a hamstring [three total 1s on two successive pushed Mobility checks]. Minka gets in the man’s face – and gets her hammer in his face, too.

Leks dumps a magazine from his Saiga-12 into the dogs that are on Red, tearing them both apart. Before Red can regain his feet, though, the third dog makes it to the fight and latches onto his leg, doing enough damage to incapacitate him.

The man facing Minka flips his AK-74 to full auto and dumps most of a magazine at her. Amazingly, nothing connects. Minka’s reciprocal attack misses too.

Arkadi finally makes it to the top of the cliff and circles around the far end of the building. Coming up behind Minka’s fight, he hurls his tomahawk into the man’s back. The slaver crumples.

Leks picks himself up and moves in, bludgeoning the last dog with his empty Saiga [and reminding us again that he wants Minka to give the shotgun a bayonet attachment]. Minka turns from her fallen foe and leaps off the bluff, landing hammer-first on the dog.

---

Back on the west side of the fight, Miko sees three men running toward him from the camp. He pulls the pin on a grenade of his own and lobs it into their midst. All three drop prone from the blast.

With Zenobia providing covering fire (and not all that impressed with the M21 she’s recent substituted for her bolt-action Sako), Miko moves in for more machete work. He lops off a hand, lays open a chest, narrowly dodges a tear gas grenade, and closes on the grenadier. He’s about to cut that man down, too, when he sees another adversary at the campsite – this one holding a shotgun on the three missing teenagers.

Whatever the guy was expecting, it wasn’t Miko covering 40 meters through dense woods [in a single move action, thanks to ridiculous Mobility rolls] and tackling him to the ground. He recovers quickly, though, fending off the machete-wielding maniac with the barrel of his Benelli and firing a blast that nearly tears of half of Miko’s arm [shattered elbow crit]. Arkadi sprints into the thicket and puts a tight, professional burst into the man’s back before he can finish off Miko.

Miko pushes himself to his feet and goes back after the grenadier. The man tries to bring up his submachine gun but Miko steps in and tears out his throat with a backhand swipe before collapsing in pain.

---

Minka and Leks get Red back on his feet. He’s bleeding and wobbly but still fit to practice medicine. He hobbles over to Miko. Field surgery without anesthesia is no one’s idea of fun, but the team is able to stabilize Miko before blood loss becomes life-threatening.

Red and Minka check on the kids next. They’re shaken but physically unharmed.

Zenobia and Arkadi wander over to the one survivor, the man who Miko hamstrung. He knows he’s dead and isn’t particularly cooperative. Zenobia shrugs; she’s happy to leave him out here to be eaten by wolves. Arkadi, joined by Red once the surgery is done, eventually pries a little bit of information out of him. The slavers were taking the teens to a prison camp in the ruins of Radom. The camp commissar there has turned to human trafficking and pays well for young, healthy workers. When the conversation is done, Leks asks the others to walk away and quietly disposes of the slaver.

The team gathers the weapons and equipment of the fallen. The most notable items are an HK-69 with an assortment of smoke, paraflare, and CS gas rounds. Each of the slavers had a gas mask, suggesting that they made somewhat regular use of the tear gas as a capture tool.

Minka checks over the horses. They’re all basically healthy, albeit inexpertly cared for. All five are draft crossbreeds, typical of the prewar farm horses seized for military use once fuel and vehicles started running out.

The team hooks up the horsecart, piles Red and Miko into it, and heads back to the railyard. There’s not much question at this point: the teenagers are ready to pack up and move to Ponikla. Leks, Zenobia, and Arkadi stay the night with them to help them pack and to give them an escort in the morning, while Minka takes the badly-injured team members and the horses back to Ponikla.

---

Miko’s performance this session was a great illustration of the benefits and drawbacks of a melee specialist in this system. His well-timed grenade and its suppression effects probably kept him from being gunned down earlier in the fight, but as it is, he’ll be offline for nine days while he heals that shattered elbow critical.

In addition to the loot, Zenobia and Red both got Coolness Under Fire increases out of this fight. Character progression seems to be going smoothly. There was some discussion about needing to cross-train some skills to ensure that Leks isn’t the only one with Heavy Weapons.

This is the second indication the PCs have received that bad things are brewing over in Radom. With that to the east, the marauders of Tomaszow Mazowiecki to the west, and what looks like a major Warsaw Pact line of communication to their south, the PCs are starting to develop a picture of a threat environment that’s a bit denser than they may have thought a month ago...

After taking down the GRU convoy, the team pulls back to Ponikla for a few days of maintenance and agriculture.

Red and Leks drive back down to Opoczno with some of the team’s stash of gold bars, as well as one of Leks’ vacuum-sealed bags of cacao beans. They spend the day haggling with the local merchants and itinerant traders and return with:

• 10 doses of antipsychotic meds
• an industrial-size cylinder of compressed nitrogen
• 8 toothbrushes and 27 tubes of toothpaste, all in unopened original packaging
• 7 20kg sacks of locally-milled flour
• 4 barn cats, one of whom accosted Magda quite loudly on the team’s previous visit
• an Uzi with 4 full magazines (Minka thinks she can adapt the magazines to also work in the Colt 635 that the team captured from the GRU troops)
• a damaged M16A2 (Reliability 1/5) with 2 full magazines (acquired as a parts gun and extra ammo for Red’s problematic M4A1)
• 60 rounds of 5.56mm ammo
• 6 belts of 7.62x51mm ammo (Leks’ #1 priority by far, as he was getting dangerously low on MG3 food)

Pettimore heads out across the river in the newly-acquired Chevy S10 technical. He takes Stanisalw Jablonski, the one kid in Ponikla who hasn’t experienced a disappearance/missing time episode. Stanislaw was the village’s foremost hunter before Pettimore arrived and he reminds Pettimore a lot of his younger brother back in West Virginia, so the Marine sniper has taken the 15-year-old Polish orphan under his wing. They’re gone a couple of days on a trapping expedition, returning with two pregnant sows to add to the village’s livestock. They also make a stop by the highway maintenance garage to pick up the hydraulic log splitter that’s been sitting there.

For the rest of the team, it’s fuel brewing, harvesting (cherries, potatoes, and winter barley are coming in), and weapon and vehicle repair. Minka, Zenobia, and Arkadi combine forces to get the captured deuce-and-a-half back to full operating capacity.

With Ellis away on his long-term secret-squirrel mission in Tomaszow, his player needed another PC for regular use. Enter Arkadi Sokolov, a former VIP protection specialist in the KGB Ninth Directorate who defected to NATO in early 1999 after several years of increasing compromise and disillusionment:

Ranged Combat B; Combat Awareness, Mechanic, Melee, Rifleman

AKS-74U, vz.61 Skorpion, sap, tomahawk, KGB credentials

---

Arkadi Sikolov hasn’t been having a good summer. Once he was vetted and his handlers were reasonably sure of his reliability, the defector was farmed out to the special operations component of U.S. XI Corps, operating in northern Poland and along the Baltic coast. In May 2000, he was assigned to an intelligence support team that was inserted into Lodz. Their assignment was to prepare safehouses and emplace logistics for a SOF task force that was going to use the noise from the U.S. 5th Infantry Division’s deep raid as a distraction for another operation. He doesn’t know exactly what that op was supposed to be, but his team was preparing exfiltration routes not just for the task force but for up to four non-cooperative prisoners and a half-ton of sensitive material.

Their pre-insertion briefing indicated that Lodz was garrisoned by a Polish Border Guards brigade. Right before the 5th ID moved into the area, that garrison was reinforced by the Soviet 20th Tank Division. His team’s radios went down. They tried to exfiltrate to get a warning out, but things went sideways. He was cut off from the rest of his team and captured on 03 July.

Arkadi was held in Lodz for a couple of days by the military intelligence complement of the Soviet 20th Tank Division before being handed over to a GRU detachment from Lublin. They moved him down to Poitrkow Trybunalski, a slightly-smaller city, on 07 July. He was held there for a few days along with three Polish Home Army raiders.

On 11 July, four more Poles were brought in. These were all western-aligned defectors who had been integrated into the U.S. 5th Infantry Division. They’d been serving as line troops – specifically, part of 4-12 Cavalry. They were captured around Lodz while trying to probe the city’s defenses to determine just what 5th ID was facing.

He was held in Poitrkow Trybunalski until 14 July, when the GRU bundled all their prisoners and started moving them east, along with some captured American equipment (and Arkadi’s starting gear, which was seized as “evidence”). As far as he knows, he’s being taken back to Lublin for interrogation before his eventual execution.

Readers familiar with certain bits of first edition lore may recognize the op that Arkadi was supporting…

---

Meanwhile, in Ponikla, the team is curious about the apparent traders they saw near the railyard a few couple of weeks ago. Red, Leks, Minka, Magda, Zenobia, and Pettimore set out on foot (saving fuel – they want to build up a reserve) to explore southwest of that area. They cut through the railyard to check the message drop that they’ve been using with the remaining boxcar children, who they haven’t managed to recruit just yet [because I haven’t given the kids any more screen time], then head out along the road that the caravan was spotted traversing.

A few hours of careful travel through the forest and into more abandoned farm country leads them to a small rise overlooking a mid-sized town [Opoczno]. Some buildings on the community’s outskirts are in rubble, but the core looks intact, and plumes of wood and coal smoke are rising from the rooftops. In the farm fields north of the town, people are working, bringing in the harvest just as most of the locals are doing in Ponikla.

Pettimore and Magda sneak a little closer for detailed observations. They put eyes on a four-person militia patrol, as well as a crude bunker sited to command the northern approaches but currently unmanned. The folks working in the fields apparently know the patrol; there’s some casual banter amid the harvest work. The overall impression is of a functioning community, not one under duress.

The team circles clockwise around the town to get a feel for the area. On the south side of town, they sight a major highway and divert to check it out. Pettimore is the first to check the shoulders of the highway and see places where vehicles have pulled off for maintenance or crew breaks. He recognizes the signs of heavy traffic, mostly headed west – large trucks’ tire tracks and the tread marks of tanks and IFVs. Most aren’t crisp, probably a couple of weeks old, but there are signs of more recent passage in both directions.

The team approaches the town from the south – they’re already there and it seems prudent to mask the direction from which they actually arrived. They head up the road. On this side, they spot two bunkers with militia troops in them. As soon as the militia spots the PCs, a runner darts away into town. A few minutes later, the militia patrol shows up to backstop the bunker crew.

Red and Magda approach to negotiate. They’re met with curiosity and a reasonable level of suspicion, but Magda’s native accent and Red’s implied medical credentials smooth things over. The militia welcomes the team to Opoczno and peels off an escort to take them into town to meet the mayor.

The town square is war-damaged but still doing business. A few open-air shops are offering wares, and a quartet of merchant wagons are parked next to them. Across the way, a local watering hole is open – and appears to have some source of electrical power, as the neon beer sign in the window is lit.

More interesting, however, is the quartet of vehicles parked in the square: a BRDM-2, a Zil-131, an American M35 deuce-and-a-half, and a Chevrolet pickup with an M2HB on a pintle mount in the bed. The latter two vehicles both have bumper numbers identifying them as U.S. 5th Infantry Division property. They’re under the guard of a trio of Soviet troops. One of the junior enlisted and Leks get into a staredown before the NCO and Red corral their respective charges.

Pettimore plays it cool, but as the team enters the mayor’s office, he happens to glance past the vehicles. On the far side of the square is a damaged shop, its front blown out. Within its shadowed gloom, he sees a handful of men and women seated on the floor, guarded by a fourth Soviet trooper. One of the men looks up and catches Pettimore’s eye. There’s a flash of recognition…

---

Arkadi sits on the floor in a blown-out storefront, gnaws the stale bread that passes for prisoners’ rations in GRU custody, and contemplates escaping before the convoy’s meal and maintenance stop ends. The Poles in his company would probably back his play, but he’s the only uninjured one here, and the guards on the vehicles are keeping a close eye on the man detailed to watch the prisoners. His odds aren’t good.

The guards’ attention briefly goes to a small group of armed men and women being escorted in by the local militia. Arkadi considers seizing the opportunity, but then he recognizes one of the newcomers…

---

Pettimore excuses himself from meeting the mayor and wanders over to check out the shops and the traders’ wagons. He works his way around to the convoy guards. Pettimore’s primary weapon is a Dragunov, he’s in civilian attire, and he’s not displaying any obvious signs of American allegiance, so he’s able to elicit a little bit of information. The convoy is taking POWs and captured NATO equipment east to Lublin. However, the M35 doesn’t live up to the legends of American engineering, and it’s giving the detachment no end of headaches, especially since their regimental HQ pinched the platoon’s usual mechanic.

Pettimore excuses himself, tells the soldier to look him up for a drink when he gets off shift, and wanders into the tavern…

… where eight more Soviet troops look up from their meals to appraise the armed stranger who just walked in.

---

Meanwhile, the rest of the team meets Mayor Wiola Bosko and gets a briefing on the state of Opoczno. Mayor Bosko presides over about 1,100 citizens, down from the town’s prewar population of 15,000. Before the war, the major local industries were ceramic tile production, warehousing, and mechanical and maintenance services for both rail and highway transport. They’d been leveraging the remnants of the latter to set up some local trade, but a few weeks ago, the Soviet 124th Motor Rifle Division swept through the area and “requisitioned” all eight trucks that Opoczno’s citizens had restored to service. Bosko expects they’ll be back for regular infusions of fuel and food, but with only about fifty trained militia, there’s not a lot she can do.

Bosko is open to negotiation with other communities in the area. There’s a bit of small talk as each party feels out the other’s intentions and the PCs avoid being too specific about the precise location of their community. They eventually wander out to find Pettimore and lunch.

---

The chill in the tavern dissipates as the Soviets decide that Pettimore isn’t an immediate problem. The lights flicker as the man astride a bicycle dynamo generator coasts to a halt, having paid off his tab. The barkeep welcomes Pettimore and asks if he’ll be working for a meal or if he has something to barter. Pettimore grins, reaches into his ruck, and pulls out a roll of prewar toilet paper.

Barkeep: Pal, I can’t make change for that.

Pettimore opens a tab; he knows the other PCs will be arriving.

Over some pretty good venison stew and fresh bread, Pettimore deploys awkward Pig-Latin to inform Red that the Soviets are holding prisoners, and he recognizes one of them. Arkadi Sokolov is a Soviet a defector who Pettimore worked alongside during a few deep recon missions on the Baltic coast in the fall of ’99. With a known ally in a jam [and an illuminated “new PC” signal], the team quickly decides they’re going to break Arkadi loose. The mechanical problems the Soviets are having with their captured deuce-and-a-half and their lack of a mechanic suggest an option…

The lieutenant in charge of the GRU platoon “suggests” that it’s time for his men to change the guard shift and start trying to fix that American truck. Four of the troops kill their beers, gather their weapons, and head outside. A few minutes later, they’re replaced by the four who were on guard duty. Looking out the window, Zenobia sees the truck’s hood go up and parts start coming out.

Pettimore leverages his earlier conversation with the guard detail to negotiate a loan of his cousin, Zenobia, who’s a pretty good mechanic. The lieutenant agrees to let her try… she can’t do any worse than his men. Actually, she can do much, much worse, but it won’t be evident for a while…

Zenobia gets to work under the hood while the rest of the team checks out the merchants’ offerings. There’s no time for commerce right now, though – there’s an ambush to set. As soon as Zenobia is done, the team hightails it out of town. They know the route the Soviets will be taking. Pettimore catches Arkadi’s eye and gives him a sign.

---

About three kilometers east of Opoczno, a Chevrolet pickup technical rolls along at the head of a small GRU convoy. Its driver weaves around a cratered and pothole-riddled stretch of road. The two cargo trucks following it aren’t as agile, and the uneven asphalt repeatedly punishes their crews’ and passengers’ kidneys. Under the hood of one of the trucks, undersized and improperly-torqued bolts have been working their way loose, and this is the final insult. The truck’s driver curses and pulls over as a horrifying metallic clatter and the flailing of a loose belt emanate from the engine compartment.

This is Minka’s cue to touch off the directional mine that Leks has emplaced. The blast flays the left side of the BRDM-2 bringing up the rear of the convoy. When the smoke clears, the barrel of the armored car’s coaxial machine gun is skewed at an unhealthy angle.

The rest of the team opens up on the Soviets. Pettimore and Zenobia catch the gunner on the technical in a sniper crossfire and he falls, the .50’s barrel swinging skyward. Magda, Red, Leks, and Minka rake the vehicles with gunfire, trying to take out (or at least suppress) as many of the drivers as possible.

In the canvas-covered bed of the Zil-131, Arkadi has been waiting for a signal. This certainly sounds like one. He goes for the guard’s eyes and the Poles rise up alongside him. There’s a confused and inconclusive melee that terminates when Arkadi body-checks the Soviet soldier over the tailgate. The man hits the pavement headfirst.

The technical’s driver and front-seat passenger succumb to the massive amount of gunfire being directed their way. Leks sees the unattended M2HB in the truck’s bed and sprints through the firefight toward it. He leaps into the technical, yanks the machine gun’s charging handle, and swings it around just as the BRDM-2 pulls around the cargo trucks! His first burst chews through the armored car’s turret, fouling the ammo feed of its remaining weapon. The driver frantically reverses to put the M35 between his ride and the Estonian while the gunner struggles to get a usable belt into the KPV.

The team keeps up the pressure. Most of the GRU troops never get a shot off [suppression is a harsh mistress]. Arkadi and the Poles boil out of the back of the Zil. Arkadi reclaims his tomahawk from the man who’d taken it as a war trophy while one the Poles grabs the guy’s AK-74, and the mob is off toward one of the troops who’d managed to dismount.

The BRDM crew gets their KPB back into action and rolls forward. Leks stands his ground. 14.5mm rounds tear through the forest but, amazingly, Leks avoids taking a hit. His return fire injures the driver but the armored car is still in the fight – and still a threat that can turn this entire combat around.

From her firing position, Minka runs forward. Repeating her stunt from the fight with the marauders in Mysiakowiec, she hauls herself atop the BRDM and slams a Molotov cocktail through the gun port! Flames erupt within the vehicle as burning liquid begins running out the wheel wells and devouring the brake lines and tires!

Amazingly, the BRDM’s crew stays in the fight. Their fire is ineffectual, though, and Leks weathers the storm unscathed. As the flames reach his legs, the driver bails out, and Arkadi extinguishes him with a tomahawk blow. This is enough for the commander and gunner to throw in the towel. Red rummages through the trucks for a fire extinguisher, but just as he finds one, the BRDM’s ammo starts cooking off. There won’t be much left to salvage.

The Poles collect arms, ammo, and personal gear from the fallen and say their farewells to Arkadi. They’ll hole up in the area for a while and nurse their wounds before trying to find their way back to the vicinity of Lodz. Three of the GRU troops survived the fight, and while one of them breaks and pleads for clemency, the other two are made of sterner stuff. The Poles agree to take them off the team’s hands. Arkadi collects the rest of his gear from the back of the Zil before tossing the truck’s keys to one of the Poles.

Zenobia crawls back under the M35’s hood to undo her earlier sabotage and get the truck in shape to crawl back to Ponikla via the rail yard. Pettimore pulls Arkadi aside for a catch-up chat and gets Arkadi’s briefing on his recent experiences around Lodz. As Pettimore listens, he realizes with mounting horror that Ellis was right. It’s not the July 2001 that he thought he was living in. It’s July 2000 all over again – and at dawn yesterday, the U.S. 5th Infantry Division went down fighting as four Warsaw Pact divisions closed their jaws on Kalisz.

---

This was a solid session. Despite nearly going off the rails with shopping, we got in some great roleplaying (Pettimore’s player was in top form) and a good fight. I was a bit concerned about the BRDM-2 because the PCs deployed without any antitank weaponry whatsoever (they have three RPG-22s, an M72 LAW, and a few rifle grenades gathering dust in the armory). However, taking the technical out of the fight with the opening volley, and Leks’ immediate seizure of the M2, bought them some breathing room. I was not expecting Minka to conduct another boarding action, but she continues to make this stuff work despite the difficulties and multiple rolls she has to make to pull it off.

Red, Zenobia, and Leks limp back to town with a semi-conscious Malvina, a concussed Minka, and a slightly-used black Volga in tow (literally, in the latter case).

Minka will be on light duty for the next few days while her abused brain heals. The rest of the team settles in to attend to a variety of tasks around Ponikla: rebuilding their diminished fuel stockpiles, helping with the harvest, running the drilling rig, hunting, foraging, patrolling the area. But for Red, it’s time to do Science!!

After performing a field necropsy on some of the men who abducted Malvina, Red took blood samples from them. He has a microscope and some of the other makings of a laboratory, so he grabs Léonard as a lab assistant and settles in for a few days of research.

The following is a lightly-edited, low-effort copy and paste from our Discord server.

---

The blood of the four dead neckless mooks looks normal.

The samples Red took from the three men in black and the two creepy doctors appear to be blood to casual inspection, but under a microscope, it’s a red liquid without red or white blood cells or platelets. However, there is something in solution. It appears to be regular faceted geometric shapes with well-defined planes and edges, slightly smaller than red blood cells. The shapes are inert and a dull gray in color.

The sample of Malvina’s blood has the normal components you’d expect – plasma, red and white blood cells, and platelets. However, her blood also contains similar faceted shapes. These, however, are dark red and they appear to be independently mobile.

---

Red tests the samples to see which of them display the previously-observed behavior of boiling/sublimating when exposed to iron. Malvina’s blood does not have the same reaction, nor does the mooks’ blood. Running that test with the MIB blood samples under the microscope shows that the cause is the little geometric shapes undergoing what looks like extremely rapid oxidation.

---

Malvina is recovering rapidly but her caloric intake is about 1.5x normal and she has about a degree of fever.

---

Red and Léonard get together with the other PCs and the village elders (Léonard has been somewhat adopted into the elders’ ranks but this isn’t a decision he can make unilaterally). He wants to get some blood samples from other children who were abducted – but but he doesn’t want people to worry about the kids or, worse, invoke some sort of superstitious belief that they’re tainted. Léonard suggests spinning this as a routine medical exam (Minka’s probably the only other person in the village with enough medical knowledge to call bullshit) and the elders sign off on it.

All of the children’s blood samples have the same shapes in them, with the same color and behavior as Malvina’s. They’re also more prevalent – three to four times the concentration seen in Malvina. When Red pulls another sample from Malvina to compare, the number in her bloodstream has increased from what he saw the previous day.

---

Red: So they are replicating.

Referee: Leonard, who has been tracking the village’s food stores (you’re not in danger of starving if nothing fucks with the harvest), adjusts his glasses. “Um. Doctor. I’ve noticed something else. When you and your friends have come back from a mission wounded, you’ve also been consuming quite a bit more than I’d expect. I’d thought it was just the increased demand of, well, fighting and marching, compared to the starvation rations of the last two years, but…” he trails off and nods at the room where you’re keeping Minka under observation. “In my experience, people with concussions can’t keep food down well. And she just had second breakfast.”

Red: He’ll start with himself.

Referee: They’re in there. Slightly greater amount than Malvina’s current concentration, less than the village kids.

Red: This gets even more interesting…

---

Red spreads his net a little wider, testing Léonard for a baseline, then getting a sample from Stanislaw, the one kid in the village who has not yet been abducted. Léonard also has the shapes. Stanislaw does too, but his are noticeably more motile.

Red fires up a motorcycle and heads out to check on the farmers across the river; he’d promised them medical assistance anyway and this seems like a good opportunity to see if they’re a control group. One of Fryderyka’s partisans rides shotgun on the other BMW.

The farmers don’t have any history of child abduction, though a couple of them do ask jokingly if he’s seen a black Volga driven by a couple of nuns [Coolness Under Fire check to not react…]. Their blood samples, once Red gets them back to his lab, are normal. He does also note that the farmers get their water from wells on their farms, not from the river.

---

Red turns his attention to the river. With the additional equipment and information taken from the museum site, he has decent capability to analyze water quality. While he’s been working on blood research, he’s had Miko out gathering samples up and down the river.

The river is fairly clean… much cleaner, in fact, than he’d expect for a European river with heavy prewar industrialization. He lacks a direct prewar comparison sample (the museum project was on the Vistula, which the Pilica flows into), but he’s seeing maybe a tenth of the industrial chemical contamination that was in the Vistula’s 1996 reading.

There is one sample that Miko took on the south bank of the Pilica, immediately upriver from the ruins of Kozlowiec, that is… weird. It’s not reacting to any of Red’s chemical tests, but under a microscope, there is a weird oily-metallic rainbow shimmer to it that looks like something in solution that’s too small for his microscope to resolve clearly. That same sample has trace amounts of refined hydrocarbons – some sort of petroleum fuel.

---

This was a fun reveal to run, and it led to a roleplay-only session for the PCs to discuss Red’s findings and figure out WTF to do . The general conclusion is that… well, they can’t do much, and these things (Leks throws out “nanotechnology” from a bootleg movie tape he once watched) seem to be mostly beneficial. They do also discover that the… okay, call them nanites… are averse to strong magnetic fields.

Once Magda hears Red’s findings, something clicks for her as one of the village’s primary communal cooks. Whenever someone has come back from a mission injured, they’ve been eating about 3,000 to 4,000 calories a day while healing.

---

While all of this is happening, Zenobia sits down with Leks, Minka, and an assortment of wrenches. The black Volga offends her. She wants answers.

Other than the damage the PCs inflicted in the process of capturing it, it appears showroom-fresh despite being a 29-year-old model. It’s clean, it has no wear or corrosion, all the rubber and synthetic parts are in good condition, the tires look new. As previously noted, the tank is full of actual gasoline, not alcohol fuel. It appears to have a factory-fitted armor package – ceramic plates in the doors and the back of the rear seats, and bullet-resistant glass [Armor 2 on all facings]. There are no serial numbers on any parts and it has no registration tags.

(None of the firearms recovered from that fight have serial numbers or proof marks, either. They aren’t lasered or filed off – there are just blank spots where numbers apparently were never engraved in the first place.)