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...
