These session notes are only about eight months overdue, backlogged from when we went on hiatus.
The team decides to spend a few days in Kamiensk making the area more habitable. Pettimore and Ellis (whose players were out for this session) take Hernandez and the UAZ and head east along the team’s backtrail to look for the Soviet deserters who’d been plaguing the town. Cat and Miko head out on foot for the same purpose. The rest of the team, under Betsy’s direction, begins surveying Kamiensk’s abandoned buildings to see what construction materials can be easily stripped for use in repairs or fortifications.
Cat has been through this area before, though it was mostly dark and Task Force Cobalt didn’t have much contact with the locals. Still, she knows a few landmarks – enough to effectively guess where a small marauder band might choose to hole up to avoid attention from Soviet regulars. After all, she did some of that same thinking a month or two ago.
The scout team finds the first marauder band in a former small dairy farm. There’s not a lot of activity, so it’s hard to get an exact count, but Cat and Miko estimate roughly a dozen men. They’ve dug a fighting position to cover both road approaches to the farm and have emplaced an SPG-9 recoilless rifle there. Other than that, they appear to be poorly-equipped, with only small arms. No vehicle or mounts are in evidence.
The team regroups, confers, verifies some details with Father Miroslav, and identifies these guys as a band of Kazakhs led by one Bulat Kadyrov. Father Miroslav’s description of Kadyrov suggests that he has his eye set on becoming a petty warlord somewhere. The team decides to stage a night raid.
Cat sneaks in and opens the fight with a grenade into the SPG-9 gun pit. Miko, meanwhile, has been low-crawling up to the farmhouse’s kitchen door (west side), and is nearly overrun when a fireteam of angry, half-awake Kazakhs comes boiling out that door. He spends the rest of the fight playing bullet tag with them.
In the gun pit, Cat is putting suppressive fire on the house’s south face with her M4. It jams, so she picks up an AKM whose former owner is no longer using it. That jams, so she picks up another Kalashnikov. This one at least lasts the fight.
Betsy is maneuvering to the southeast while Erick is maneuvering to the northeast. Both of them are trying to get firing angles on the house’s front door (east side). There’s some inadvertent crossfire action, thankfully with no effects on friendlies beyond suppression.
The team ends this fight with a stack of dead marauders and, for once, no major injuries. High on success, they decide to go after another group on the following night.
The second target is Oybek Musayev’s Uzbeks (remember, these three bands used to be one group before they fractured along ethnic lines). Pettimore and Ellis have located them farther east, where they’re encamped in the ruins of a small river+crossroads town. Interestingly, they appear to be trying to salvage a derelict PTS-M amphibious transport.
Another night raid seems like the way to go. This time, the team decides to secure the PTS-M first, since it’s some distance from the main camp. Cowboy, Pettimore, Cat, Octavia, and Comrade go after the vehicle while the rest of the team moves into position to hit anyone moving toward that location from the village.
The team’s stealthy approach is blown when Octavia attempts the swim and succumbs to the weight of her gear. Comrade drags her onto the sandbar where the PTS-M is stranded, but the splashing alerts the three guards there. Cowboy shanks one, Pettimore drops a second with an arrow through the throat, and Cat, Comrade, and Octavia subdue the third. There’s no gunfire – the blocking force actually has to start making noise to alert the marauders’ main body.
In the aftermath, the team discovers that the PTS-M is almost in working order – and it’s mounting an AGS-17 automatic grenade launcher.
Interrogation of the prisoners reveals that the marauders of Przedbórz (which is about twenty kilometers southeast of Kamiensk) didn’t stick together long after their Pyrrhic victory over Task Force Cobalt. The prisoners don’t know what happened, but they’ve heard that a bunch died of infighting or unspecified medical causes. Of the survivors, maybe three or four are still squatting there. The rest joined with Shotkin’s band. He doesn’t know anything about any scientists or material they may have recovered from TF Cobalt.