On the morning of 15 October, the team breaks camp and crosses the Warta over Betsy’s newly-repaired bridge. There are a few scrapes and shudders, but all three vehicles pass without incident. The convoy shakes out into its usual order of march and rolls southwest toward Czestochowa.
The sun is climbing toward what passes for noon in autumn when the point vehicle’s crew spots a village coming up on the side of the road. It’s apparently abandoned. Stopping a few hundred meters out, the lookouts glass the area. The graveyard has a number of fresh graves. A brief conference reveals no particular inclination to stop and check it out. The team goes overland to skirt the deserted community, picking up the crumbling road again on the other side.
Midafternoon brings another noteworthy sight, this one of greater interest. As the team is approaching an intersection, Erick and Betsy sight two armored vehicles a few hundred meters back along the side road, half-hidden in a copse of trees. The team halts, reverses to break line of sight, and dismounts. Pettimore, Ellis, Erick, and Betsy creep in for a close recon.
As is so often the case in the Poland of 2000, the vegetation tells the story. Although brown and withered with frost, it’s had a couple of years to overgrow the vehicles. The team IDs them as British: an FV434 armored recovery vehicle towing an FV432 APC. The APC bears the marks of an RPG hit to the engine compartment and a subsequent fuel fire. The ARV is halted where it hit an antitank mine.
“Freeze,” Pettimore hisses. “Nobody sets out just one mine.”
Betsy checks the ground at her feet, takes a knee, and starts scanning. “Cut me a probe and some stakes,” she murmurs to Ellis. The agent draws his knife and swiftly dismantles a nearby sapling. Betsy goes to work. A half-hour yields a safe path back to the convoy. Another hour, and she’s convinced that she’s found and safed the other three AT mines.
The team moves in for a damage and loot assessment. The surviving crews or later scavengers have mostly stripped the vehicles of anything usable, but the FV434 yields a couple of items too heavy for a dismounted crew to carry off: a hydraulic power unit with a spreader/cutter tool and a rotary rescue saw. The FV432’s crew compartment also contains a Colt 635 and four magazines.
Both vehicles are disabled, but the damage is mutually exclusive. In theory, it might be possible to piece together one working light AFV from the two derelicts. Octavia and Cowboy put their heads together and lobby for trying to restore the FV434. The allure of an armored workshop, even with empty tool lockers, is too strong to pass up.
It’s a day and a half of hard work to transplant the FV432’s tracks and running gear to the FV434. The ARV is barely functional [Reliabilty currently 1 with a permanent cap of 4], but the engine will turn over. The driving experience is akin to being locked in a rolling rock tumbler, but the team hopes it’s enough to get someplace with more security and better facilities for making permanent repairs. Octavia dubs it Lazarus and bravely volunteers to drive. Comrade whines unhappily and takes the commander’s seat so he can ride with his head out of the hatch.
The morning of 17 October sees the team back on the road, approaching Czestochowa’s northwestern outskirts. The terrain is lifting into rugged and forested hill country, reminding Pettimore and Erick of home. The road is cut into a hillside, with the right (west) side rising sharply and the left (east) side dropping away into a shallow valley. The convoy is approaching a roundabout when the sound of gunfire erupts from the west. It’s close, just over the hill crest to the west.
The drivers slow as everyone else searches for the source of the gunfire. The cadence is that of a pretty serious gunfight, small arms intermingled with heavy machine guns and the occasional clatter of a light autocannon.
Without warning, an armored vehicle with a massive gun erupts from the treeline on the hillside above the road, turning sharply to cut in behind Lazarus and Industrial Light and Mayhem at the back of the convoy. Octavia yanks Comrade down into the armored crew compartment and buries the throttle, trying to outrun whatever is coming at the unarmed and barely-functional ARV. Aboard ILM, Miko swings around the gunring’s M249 and begins bouncing ineffectual rounds off the vehicle’s glacis.
The UAZ-469 and Comms are farther down the road, unable to immediately engage. Cowboy is in the BTR-70K’s turret, though, and she immediately recognizes the problem: it’s a SAU-122 self-propelled howitzer. The main gun is clamped in its travel locks, but at least four men in Soviet uniforms are riding tankodesantniki-style – and firing back into the woods at unseen pursuers.
The team is light on anti-armor weapons. Comms‘ KPV is their best immediate option for dealing with the SAU-122, but turning around to engage will be problematic at best. Ellis orders Bell to turn right, climbing the hill in the beginning of a clockwise circle that will put Comms on the SAU-122’s back trail. Aboard the UAZ-469, Erick follows suit, swinging wide to let the larger vehicle take point.
Ortiz tries to slew ILT through the roundabout, but a tangle of wrecked cars forces her to slow to a crawl. The SAU-122’s commander opens up on the truck with his DShK. Rounds tear into the cargo compartment. Ortiz slams on the brakes. She and Cat look at each other and fling their doors open, bailing out to get away from the massive amount of combustible and explosive material back there. Miko stays on the SAW, chipping the SAU-122’s paint and forcing the desantniki to abandon their mount.
“What the hell would spook somebody with a goddamn howitzer?” yells Pettimore as Comms mounts the hill.
“A bigger howitzer,” Ellis replies grimly, then grunts as Bell stomps the brake to avoid a head-on collision with a HMMWV. Beyond the smaller vehicle, everyone aboard Comms and the UAZ can see a pair of LAV-25s bouncing cross-country in pursuit of the SAU-122. Ellis grabs for the radio.
Erick brings the UAZ to a screeching halt as well, slewing to one side to avoid a collision. The HMMWV’s gunner has his M2HB pointed directly at the ex-Soviet vehicle. Erick, Betsy, and Hernandez raise their hands, hoping that between the three of them, they have enough remaining scraps of American uniforms to be identified as friendlies.
There’s a brief, intense flurry of gunfire. It abates as the SAU-122 rams its nose into the hillside and stalls out. The desantniki are sprawled in the ditch, extinguished by a quick and vicious crossfire from Comms and both LAVs. Approaching the SAU-122, the team finds its crew dead in their seats, victims of a massive volley of fire from Cat, Miko, and Ortiz that somehow punched through already-weakened rear armor.
An uneasy silence falls at the team and the new arrivals regard one another. Cat, Pettimore, Ellis all recognize the tactical markings on the other guys’ vehicles. They’re from Bravo, 1-116 ACR – or, more formally, B Troop, 1st Squadron, 116th Armored Cavalry Regiment (Idaho National Guard). 1-116 ACR was attached to the U.S. Army’s 5th Infantry Division for the spring 2000 offensive into central Poland. About a week before the division arrived at Lodz and ran into a massive Soviet counterattack, B Troop received new orders direct from Northern Army Group HQ in West Germany. 5th ID never heard from them again, and the assumption before everything came apart was that they had run into massive Soviet forces and been captured or wiped out. Neither Cat, Pettimore, nor Ellis was party to exactly what those orders involved…
… but they’re here now. The HMMWV’s front-seat passenger dismounts and approaches Comms and the UAZ under the watchful eyes of his gunners. He’s of obvious Native American extraction, much moreso than Erick’s mixed heritage, and is wearing BDUs with first sergeant’s stripes. Introductions occur with a degree of mutual wariness; he identifies himself as John Wheeler, SNCO of B Troop. Some exposition reveals that the SAU-122 crew was the last remnants of a marauder band from the former Soviet 129th Motor Rifle Division. B Troop has established itself as the protectors of a community some distance to the west of here and has been conducting local stabilization operations.
Ellis pulls the team aside for a conference and to assess the damage to ILM. The DShK rounds tore through the cargo compartment, missing the munitions and fuel but trashing the precious still beyond repair. Worse, from Cat’s perspective, her rucksack also took a direct hit, nothing identifiable remains of her chocolate stash or other personal effects.
The team is so close to Czestochowa, their goal, but the prospect of making contact with friendlies – who appear to be at least partially “awake” – is a powerful lure. Even Pettimore agrees it’s worth the detour. There’s some more negotiation, but the outcome isn’t really in doubt. The team mounts up and heads west with their new friends, rolling toward Dobrodzien.
Things sort of fell apart for me in August with a home purchase and move combined with one of the annual busy seasons at work, so this post is from four-month-old notes. As a result, accuracy and detail are somewhat less than I might hope. But this gets the broad strokes, and it wasn’t a bad place to pause the campaign for real life again.
