These session notes are only about eight months overdue, backlogged from when we went on hiatus.
The team discusses what to do with the prisoners. Field-expedient executions aren’t off the table, but Leks is back in Ponikla and no one really has the stomach for whacking a handful of injured guys who were trying to leave. In the end, the threat of being handed over to Shotkin is enough to convince them to accept exile; they start walking northeast.
The team camps at the second marauder band’s former bivouac to heal up and finish the repairs on the PTS-M, which they intend to hand over to Kamiensk’s citizens along with its AGS-17. Combined with the small arms they’ve accumulated, that should make the village a harder target – and give it some emergency mobility. Overnight, Ellis hears a brief but intense firefight somewhere to the northwest – in the general direction of Kamiensk, but probably not involving the village itself.
There’s still one marauder splinter group to deal with, but intel gathered from prior reconnaissance and Kamiensk residents’ testimony suggests that this will be an easy sell. These are nine Georgians led by a Daniel Gelashvili. They’re currently holed up in an abandoned junkyard, trying to get a trio of Polski Fiats into working order.
Ellis dives into his ruck and pulls out an item he’s had since the start of the campaign:
Gelashvili’s crew is minding their own business, wrenching on their tiny little technicals, when their lookout starts shouting in panicked tones. A minute later, a command-variant BTR (recall that Comms is a BTR-70K, which any motor rifle veteran would recognize by the extra antennas) rolls through the gate. A well-groomed man with a commanding presence, wearing a Soviet uniform with a GRU major’s shoulder boards and collar tabs, leaps out of the commander’s hatch and begins not-quite-berating them. He’s ignoring their AKs, but perhaps the AKs are not pointed at him because the woman in the BTR’s turret looks like she’s gone to the market to find a reason and her shopping basket has room for all nine of their heads.
It takes Ellis about ten minutes to thoroughly confuse the Georgians, extract every scrap of useful intel from them (basically nothing new, only verification of what the team already knows), and convince them to finish fixing up their piecemeal cars and fuck off toward the eastern horizon at their best possible speed.
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
– Sun Tzu
Betsy is the first to smell the smoke.
The team is on the way back to Kamiensk when the familiar aroma of burned-out vehicles alerts them to the evidence of the firefight Ellis overheard last night. A cautious approach reveals the aftermath of an ambush. At the crossing of two farm roads, a GAZ-66 light truck and a BRDM-2 armored car sit, both riddled with bullets and RPGs and burned to their frames. A number of dead Soviet troops are scattered around the vehicles – while a few of them made it out of the truck and got to cover in a rubble pile, they didn’t last long against whoever hit their patrol. Vehicle and uniform markings indicate these troops were from the 124th Motor Rifle Division – or what’s left of it after its run-in with the U.S. 5th Infantry Division – which is now based about 20 kilometers north in Piotrków.
There’s a pile of smashed tech: flashlights, compasses, a boombox with a collection of hair band cassettes, the scorched remnants of the BRDM’s radio. Everything of direct military value has been taken.
Pettimore starts spiraling out to see what other signs he can find. He finds one, all right – a blood trail, leading southeast through the tall grass. The rest of the team fans out behind him and moves in cautiously.
About a hundred meters away from the ambush site, the bodies of two more Soviet troops lie discarded on a rocky outcropping. Erick and Octavia try to move in to take a closer look, but Comrade does not want his human anywhere near the scene. Erick does manage to get in an examination, assisted by Octavia’s shouted-at-a-distance-over-an-agitated-working-dog questions/suggestions. Both soldiers have bullet wounds, but they appear to be survivable. They weren’t given first aid, and there are indications of rough interrogation. The cause of death, however, is… peculiar. Each one has a ragged wound, roughly circular, at the hollow of his throat and down into his torso. Erick can’t be certain without a full autopsy, but from what he can see, it appears that the heart and lungs were removed – forcefully – through that wound track. There’s a surprisingly low amount of blood splattered around, too, for what amounts to not-quite-open-heart-surgery.
Octavia blinks. “Vampiric Roto-Rooter?”
“Blood-O-Rooter?” Cat chimes in.
“I am disinclined to stay in this area,” Ellis declares, speaking for the whole team. No one objects to expending a couple of jerrycans full of fuel for field-expedient cremation.
The team is about to re-mount when Comrade takes an interest in the rubble pile. There’s another body – or, rather, a survivor. It’s a young woman, also in Soviet uniform. She’s unconscious with fragmentation and blast injuries in addition to the blunt trauma from having a stone wall fall on top of her. Octavia and Erick stabilize her and prep her for transport.
Cat gets a nav fix and realizes that this happened only about two kilometers from Kamiensk. There’s some concern that the town may have been raided by the victors – but when the team returns, they’re met with confused looks. The villagers heard the gunfight but it didn’t sound close enough to be cause for concern, and they didn’t see any fire, muzzle flashes, or headlights.