After consolidating and reorganizing, Leks is leading Bell, Cowboy, Pettimore, Magda, Minka, and Novotny in a headhunting raid against the ZOMO command post. This is their best chance to disrupt the ZOMO assault against Von Bahr’s unit to ensure that their allies retain control of the derelict-but-repairable hydroelectric power plant.
Ellis wasn’t able to extract an exact location for the command post during his interrogation of captured Soviet QRF leaders – they legitimately didn’t know – but the team has a general idea. They’re looking for an elevated position a few kilometers southeast of the battle, close enough that the Soviet-supplied radios will enable the ZOMO commander to control his maneuver elements and mortar battery. Magda takes a look at the map that Zenobia recovered from the QRF HQ and points to a string of low hills. “There.”
In a small dot of woods a few hundred meters south of the position Magda indicated, Magda, Pettimore, and Cowboy slip out of the idling OT-64 and head north. As the stealthiest characters on this operation, they’re charged with pinpointing the CP’s location and calling in the rest of the raiding force. Because they have good Recon rolls and it’s no fun to play out hours of aimless searching, they find it, creeping in from the east amid light woods.
It looks like the ZOMO field force used this as a base camp before the cavalry and mechanized infantry moved out for the assault. A large number of tents are scattered around a clearing atop the hill, but none of them appear occupied at the moment. Trench lines to the north and south host a quartet of disinterested sentries. The hill’s crest to the west provides a natural barrier there. In the center of the camp are parked a Land Rover 110, with spray-painted camouflage over its original British paint scheme, and a UAZ-469, wearing ZOMO markings and sporting a large radio antenna. A half-dozen people in mixed ZOMO and Soviet uniforms are clustered around the rear of the latter vehicle.
Without radios, the team is back to more primitive methods of signaling. Cowboy tosses a red smoke grenade out of the treeline to the south. There’s an immediate reaction from the command post. Shouted orders send the nearest sentry climbing out of his trench to investigate. He’s almost to the source of the billowing crimson cloud when he sees and hears the OT-64 bellowing its way up the slope toward him. He turns to shout and run.
Cowboy opens fire on the cluster of officers. She’s carrying a PK and the heavy 7.62mm rounds tear into the group, dropping one of the ZOMO officers and suppressing the rest. The two Soviet advisors are faster to react, ducking for cover and moving to the rear of their Land Rover.
The roar of a large engine turning over alerts the recon team that they’ve overlooked a major and potentially fatal detail. On the north side of the camp, the crew of a BTR-50P is cranking their ride. From the factory, such a vehicle wouldn’t have been much of a threat to the oncoming OT-64, but it’s been up-gunned. A DShK heavy machine gun is pintle-mounted at the commander’s hatch. Of greater concern, though, is the SPG-9 recoilless rifle whose long tube sits atop the roof.
Magda sprints toward the BTR. She’s not much of a mechanic but she knows that most engines stop if you punch enough holes in them. The crew is focused on getting their weapons into action against the OT-64 and doesn’t see her until the muzzle of her Tantal is jammed into the engine’s cooling louvers.
[Does a BTR-50’s engine bay even have cooling louvers? I don’t know. Nor do I care. It was an awesome maneuver in play.]
Magda dumps an entire magazine into the BTR-50P’s engine compartment [bypassing the armor]. A cloud of dense white smoke erupts as thirty extra 5.45mm holes exceed the engine’s designed tolerances. Magda has just forcibly parked the ZOMO’s greatest anti-armor asset… but its guns are still in play.
Bell pulls the OT-64 onto the map just in time for an SPG-9 round to sail over his head. He begins driving evasively, throwing off the gunner’s aim for a follow-up shot but also giving Leks, Minka, and Novotny a horribly unstable firing platform.
Despite the swerving and bouncing, Leks’ hand on the KPV is steady. His return fire tears into the BTR’s glacis. The loader slams a round home, though, readying the SPG-9 for a second shot.
Fire begins reaching out from the trenches as the sentries react. Rounds ping off the OT-64’s hull and further damage the coaxial PK. Leks, undeterred, keeps hammering the BTR. Minka returns fire from the overhead hatches while Novotny dismounts and charges a trench.
[We really need to have a chat with Miko’s player about these tactics…]
Cowboy shifts fire to the Land Rover, tearing its suspension to shreds. The Soviets continue pulling gear from the back of the disabled vehicle. Pettimore sees one of them loading an RPG-16 and puts a round close enough to suppress him, but the anti-armor rocket launcher is still in play.
Magda, isolated at the camp’s northeast corner, comes under fire from the north trench’s sentries. She pulls back around the BTR’s corner, reloads, and begins trying to suppress the vehicle’s crew to keep them off their weapons.
Minka reloads her GP-25 and puts a 40mm round into one of the trenches. The ZOMO officer and sentry there are hurt [which the explosives in enclosed spaces rule from Urban Operations definitely facilitated], but neither man goes down.
A heavy rifle round slams into Cowboy from a heretofore-unrevealed sniper team atop the western hill crest. Pettimore reciprocates with a headshot, demonstrating why he’s the superior sniper, but the spotter is still in action. He’s nestled in behind a G3 and he flips the selector to full auto and continues firing on Cowboy. She goes down with a shattered elbow, bleeding out. Pettimore adjusts fire and coolly puts a round into the spotter too.
[The sniper team was up there observing the battle with a spotting scope. It took them a couple of turns to reorient on the unexpected fight and pick the best target. They should’ve gone for Pettimore first]
One of the northern sentries exits his trench and rushes Magda. There’s a close-range exchange of fire which ends both both parties injured and out of ammo. Enraged and desperate, Magda pulls her gardening knife and charges her adversary, but the initial exchange of blows shows she’s outmatched. Pettimore attempts to intervene in the melee, but his rifle finally fails him, going down to 0 Reliability:
A rifle butt smashes Magda in the face and she falls. The ZOMO trooper’s triumph is short-lived, as Pettimore swaps weapons and drops him around an arrow in the stomach.
Leks continues trading 14.5mm volleys against SPG-9 shells. The ZOMO gunner can’t seem to hit. Leks isn’t so handicapped. His KPV finally chews through the BTR’s front armor, killing the commander and sending the driver (who’s been hiding in his seat with nothing to do) into headlong flight.
Novotny overruns the southeast trench in a point-blank exchange of fire that ends with him standing atop two dead ZOMO.
Pettimore drags Cowboy into cover and begins applying immediate aid to keep her from bleeding out.
A final volley of fire from the ZOMO survivors disables the OT-64’s coxial PK. Leks curses, turns over the turret to Minka, and dismounts to press the assault with his MG3. The Soviets go down in a barrage of fire, having never gotten a shot off with their RPG-16. This is enough to force the three surviving officers, the BTR’s driver and gunner, and the one remaining sentry to surrender.
This was an ugly fight, ending with two PCs down, one with a crit. The dice made the BTR-50 tougher than the numbers say it should have been, but its crew passed a surprising number of Coolness Under Fire checks to avoid forced bailouts. For all that, they got like four or five SPG-9 shots off and never actually scored a hit.