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.