Dawn over the hills north of Czestochowa reveals a low-hanging grey sky spitting intermittent rain showers. The team gathers for breakfast – for many of them, the first food they’ve been able to keep down in a couple of days.
As they’re gearing up, Kavaliova wanders over. “If you’re heading into the city, you’ll want to know what it’s like on the ground,” she offers. The picture she paints isn’t a pretty one. 1997’s Operation Rampart and the subsequent ADMs and cruise missile strike left much of the city impassable, and three years of no maintenance have only added to the issues. The whole area is thick with debris, craters, unexploded ordnance, and other hazards. Taking vehicles through the ruins will risk severe damage once a driver leaves one of the few semi-cleared routes. When Pettimore visited the copper mine before – three months ago by the calendar but a year ago subjectively – he and his then-companions arrived from the south, and hooking around Czestochowa to pick up his remembered route will consume far more time and fuel. Ellis bitterly makes the decision to hike in, leaving the vehicles back at the salvagers’ base with the merchants, Ortiz, Hernandez, Bell, and the temporarily one-armed Erick.
The team moves out, Pettimore on point. Betsy and Cat echelon behind him to watch for unexploded ordnance, with Ellis in the slot of the leading diamond. Miko pulls rear guard, with Cowboy covering Octavia and Comrade in the center of the formation.
After the first couple of kilometers, the truth of Kavaliova’s advice becomes clear. The terrain is treacherous enough for able-bodied people on foot. For vehicles, the obstacles would have negated any speed advantage and made them inviting ambush targets.
The team is moving roughly southwesterly, skirting Czestochowa’s downtown core and heavy industrial areas in a counterclockwise path. Betsy and Pettimore are the first to spot the pack of dogs off their left flank. There are maybe eight to ten of them, moving furtively about 200 meters out, but they’re definitely pacing the team and staying downwind of them. Through various optics, they’re clearly emaciated and sickly.
“That’s a lot of damn dogs,” Ellis observes somberly. “And if we shoot to drive them off, we don’t know who else will hear it.”
“But against seven humans and Comrade?” Octavia says, patting her protector’s shoulder. “They’d have to be desperate. They know what guns are by now. And we have a lot of damn guns.”
The team moves on, but Cowboy and Miko keep a wary eye out as the pack continues shadowing them.
Moving through the remains of a commercial strip, Pettimore glances to the right and spots a human silhouette in the shadowed rear of a mostly-intact laundromat. He signals for a halt, reorients the team, moves in. Ellis eases up to cover him.
There’s no reaction. It’s a body, slumped against the back wall. Judging from the condition of the flesh, it’s been here two or three months. A unmoving second form is huddled in a sleeping bag. Both are still clad in ragged woodland camo BDUs with 256th Infantry Brigade patches – the Louisiana Army National Guard component of 5th Infantry Division.
Octavia moves up to see if she can determine cause of death. There’s no obvious trauma sufficient to kill the two soldiers. Other indications, though, point to radiation poisoning. It’s an unpleasant reminder after the team’s own recent encounter with rads.
Cowboy recovers the dog tags and checks the names. No one is familiar with PFC Alison C. Beaudet (O POS, No Religious Preference), but Betsy flinches when Cowboy names Staff Sergeant Brian K. Reed (B POS, Methodist). Reed was a tank commander – she was attached to his platoon once or twice during the march down from cantonments, a few months and a couple of lifetimes ago.
There’s not much else worth salvaging: a backpacking stove, a kazoo, a copy of Clan of the Cave Bear. Erick says a few words and the team moves out.
Pettimore has been keeping the team moving toward the rugged mining country southwest of Czestochowa, using a couple of familiar peaks as landmarks whenever he crests a rise or can climb a stable pile of rubble to get his bearings. Between sightings, he’s been picking the route that offers the best compromise between being able to see what’s coming and offering available cover. Ahead, he can see he’ll have to make a choice. The best path here winds around a hillside, then diverges. To the right, the downslope hillside was once an open swath of grass and scattered trees, before a West German panzergrenadier company died crossing it. Beyond the burned-out Marders and their Gepard and Jaguar escorts, the remains of a light industrial complex are visible through the mist. To the left, the crest of the hill holds the shattered remains of a residential neighborhood. The rusting barrel of an artillery piece suggests the other half of the story.
Pettimore weighs his options, raises Thoughts and Prayers to survey the scene with its magnified optic, and goes rigid. Ellis gives him a concerned look. “Pettimore?”
Pettimore lowers his rifle. His face is streaked with more moisture than the intermittent rain can account for. “We were covering a tank platoon. They were going into this village… this kid, couldn’t have been more than fourteen… he broke cover, ran up, hucked a Molotov at the lead tank… and–” He can’t finish the sentence.
The team shifts uneasily. The breeze shifts, carrying the wind from the field of hulks. Betsy’s head snaps around as she catches a whiff of smoke, burning fuel, charring flesh. On the other side of the formation, Cat reacts similarly as she hears the nearest Marder emit the crackle of static and voices on the edge of intelligibility.
The hair on the back of Ellis’ neck crawls. He steps up next to Pettimore, looking for whatever brought on the sniper’s flashback. A flicker of motion in the corner of his field of view grabs his attention – one of the Marders’ turrets is rotating, bringing the autocannon in line with the team. He throws himself at Pettimore with a yell of “get down!” to the rest of the team. Everyone else flattens, guns pointing out as they scan for whatever threat Ellis saw.
Nothing moves but the vegetation.
Ellis slowly picks himself up and offers Pettimore a hand up. “Fuck this. Fuck all of this. Miko: take point. Backtrack and find us a route through those houses.”
Miko isn’t paying attention. His focus is through his binoculars, on the industrial park. There’s another Marder, half-buried under a collapsed concrete wall. There’s a neat hole in its glacis, but it appears otherwise undamaged. “Hey. There’s another tank thing out there. We should check it out.”
“Miko!”
“I’m just saying, there might be something we can use.”
“Miko.”
The ice in Ellis’ tone penetrates. “Okay, okay. Yeah. Houses. Fine.”
Interlude music: Devils & Dust, Bruce Springsteen.
Cowboy is keeping her PKM trained on the houses. They’re the best place for ambushers to be hiding. As the team ascends the hill, it becomes evident that this used to be a nice place to live. The homes are smaller, older, but cozy, once well-tended, with a fringe of shops on the edge of the neighborhood offering a few conveniences and comforts. But through the gaps in the walls, she can make out the shapes of sandbagged fighting positions, towed antitank guns…
Antitank guns in houses…
And unlike the rest of the team, she was here for Operation Rampart. She knows this target —
“Miko! Stop!” Betsy grabs Miko’s shoulder as he’s about to take his next step.
“What now?” asks Ellis, nearing his limit with the whole damned cold wet hallucinatory situation.
Betsy points to the ground at Miko’s feet, and the fist-sized olive drab sphere half-hidden by browning grass.
“I know what happened here,” Cowboy says hollowly. “The German advance was getting torn up. Polish militia set up in houses on the crest of a hill, antitank guns dug in.”
Ellis suppresses a yeah, I could tell that from looking at the battlefield, your point? face and gestures for her to go on.
“This was a residential neighborhood. It was early in the fight, we were still supposed to try to minimize civilian casualties. My battery commander had to get permission for the mission. And he ordered me to fire it.”
Cat, who spent the war other end of those radio calls, blanches. “You were in MLRS.”
“Yeah.” Cowboy gestures at the ground. “It’s all cluster munitions.”
“Goddammit.” Ellis looks around. “Any ideas?”
Betsy studies the area. “Move through the buildings wherever we can. The roofs are mostly intact. There’ll be less UXO in there.”
“How sure are you?” Ellis asks.
Betsy glances at Cowboy. “You know what we’re looking for. Back me up?” The other woman nods. “I can give you ninety percent. The rest of you need to be watching for the ten percent I miss,” Betsy tells Ellis.
“Get us out of here.”
It’s a grueling half-hour. Betsy leads the way, Cowboy a step behind with a hand on her shoulder, both women scanning the ground. Everyone else walks in their footsteps.
Miko, taking rear guard again, realizes Betsy is leading them through the wreckage of a toy shop. A display table is tumbled to one side, miniature train carriages scattered across the floor. He looks up. Amid a display of soggy, moth-eaten plush animals, a single intact stuffed bear glares out at him. It’s big, maybe half a meter tall, and one paw is wrapped around a plastic artillery shell. Miko glances around, grabs the bear, stuffs it into his rucksack, and hastens to catch up.
Once Betsy and Cowboy are sure they’re out of the DPICM footprint, the team picks up the pace. With Pettimore still taking periodic sightings on distant peaks he thinks he recognizes, they’re soon out of the ruined city’s residential areas and into less-developed areas scattered with various facilities that supported the area’s mining and refining industries.
Under other circumstances, a salvage yard full of heavy mining and earthmoving equipment would be a magnet for the team’s engineers and techs, but right now it’s just one more obstacle to navigate. Cat, rotating into the point position, leads the way into the shadowed depths of a massive repair shop. At the far end of the bay, a roll-up door is jammed halfway up its track. Cat and Pettimore each take a knee and ease rifle-first around opposite sides of the opening.
“Clear,” Pettimore reports. “Got a dead SPAA gun, ’bout a hundred and fifty meters out.”
“Clear,” Cat echoes. “Looks like an apple orchard. Crashed chopper. I think it was one of ours.”
“That’s the way we need to go,” Pettimore says, turning his head to check the horizon against his subjectively year-old memories.
“On it.” Cat ducks under the door and gives the area a quick 360ยบ scan. As Pettimore indicated, there’s a derelict ZSU-57-2 parked at the salvage yard’s far corner. It’s battered and burned, with one barrel broken and the other canted skyward. Its likely partner in mutual annihilation is the OH-58 that Cat had already spotted, folded roughly into the middle of the orchard with shrapnel scars pitting its canopy and fuselage.
The road skirts the orchard. Cat’s closest point of approach is maybe twenty meters from the wrecked Kiowa. She glances over at it again – and freezes.
Pettimore halts and looks at her. “Cat?”
“I know that helicopter.” Cat draws a shaking breath. “The serial number.” she points at the engine cowling. “First time I flew. Orientation flight for aerial observation at Fort Sill.”
Cowboy moves up in time to hear this. “Stay here, Cat. Miko, back me up?” The two move forward. Cowboy leans into the cockpit for a long moment, then trots back to the road. “The pilot wasn’t there. There… wasn’t much left of the observer, but this was still laced into his boot.” She holds up a dog tag. “‘Spec/4 Jermaine Torres, A POS, Baptist.'” She looks at Cat expectantly.
Cat shakes her head. “I didn’t know him.” She looks back at the helicopter. Memory frames it in a photo that used to be taped in her locker. “Just the bird.” She forces herself to turn away. “Let’s get out of here.”
This series of scenes rattled both my players and their characters. I haven’t been handing out stress very much, but I decided this was an appropriate time as everyone’s wartime experiences circled back around to perch on their shoulders. By the end of the session – which still has another post coming – I think every PC had at least one point of stress, and one or two of them were pretty close to breaking.
Two of my players are veterans and a couple more are serious wargamers, but the other half are not real dialed in on military matters. I did a lot of the virtual equivalent of passing notes during this session, priming each player for in-character delivery of stuff their PC would pick up on. Everyone leaned into it hard.