The radio headset emits a hiss of fading static as Erick picks it up, then goes dead with a pop.
Cat gives him an ashen look. “You heard that?” she asks.
“I heard something,” the chaplain’s assistant confirms. “Do you need a break?”
Cat hesitates. She desperately wants out of the air traffic control tower, but she doesn’t want to leave Erick alone on sentry duty. “No. No, I’ll stay.”
Down in the carcass of the Luftwaffe C-160, Miko is busy looting the aircrew’s survival gear. Cowboy squeezes past the bodies to tear apart the console and splice in the dynamo from the hand-cranked emergency radio. It takes some creative engineering, but she’s able to power up the navigation avionics for a few minutes. She and Pettimore confirm the details of the flight plan that Pettimore found: the aircraft launched from a strip near Bremerhaven with an out-and-back flight profile suggestive of an airdrop about twenty kilometers north of Czestochowa, but it never made it to that waypoint.
As Cat is surveying the surrounding scenery, she catches sight of a lone figure in civilian garb moving toward the terminal. Through her binoculars, she recognizes Ellis and, with Erick on overwatch, goes out to make contact with him. Once the CIA operator is united with the team, he gives them a brief summary of what he saw in the city center and suggests they return to Kamiensk to brief Octavia and the NPCs and to have the doc take a look at Cowboy’s leg.
Pettimore collects the pilot and copilot’s dog tags for later faith services, as he can’t take the remains with him.
The team limps into Kamiensk around 1300. The day is still crisp and clear but clouds on the horizon are preparing to fulfill Hernandez’s promise of rain. Octavia, still bloody and exhaused from delivering a baby, comes out to meet them. She shoves the fatigue aside when she sees Cowboy’s leg.
The accelerated healing that the team has previously enjoyed is still in effect, but upon examining the wound, Octavia notes a patch of aged skin around the injury site. Lives spots, a mole, general texture – something more than the usual weirdness is happening. A fluid sample reveals a thick black sludge in Cowboy’s blood at the injury site. Octavia doesn’t have the equipment to analyze it in detail, but that color of bodily secretions is never good. Ellis volunteers that he’s O-negative and Octavia sets up a transfusion. Over the course of a few hours, the seepage from the wound site returns to normal.
Cat pulls Ellis aside and confides her radio experience, including her recognition of the speaker as someone she knows was KIA during TF Cobalt’s operation. She suggests that the oddities the team has been experiencing all have to do with time – voices from the past, accelerated healing, accelerated entropy. Ellis wonders aloud if the author of Roadside Picnic was on to something, and seems disappointed when Cat doesn’t get the reference.
Pettimore takes the aviators’ dog tags to Father Miroslav and asks him to perform last rites for the Catholic airman, and requests that the tags be buried in the churchyard. The priest is more than glad to do so, and asks Pettimore and Erick to attend him while he performs the ritual. Afterward, Pettimore asks Father Miroslav to take his confession. He’s not Catholic, but the amount of death he’s seen recently is weighing on him. The Pole eyes him and nods. “You’re not Catholic, but I think God will listen. Let’s take a walk.”
Ellis shows the team the video he shot of the meeting at the bank. It takes a while, with too many people clustered around a tiny LCD screen, and with many requests to rewind (and “enhance”). A few threads of observation emerge:
Octavia notes that Comrade is paying very close attention. He’s not growling, but his body language screams “enemy sighted.” The doctor also notes that the body language of the men in the video is very reminiscent of pack predators, and it’s even more pronounced when Shotkin is present. They’re more unified – not being puppeted, but the pack bond seems stronger. Which should not be a thing at all.
Pettimore becomes very interested in the large Rasputin-looking guy. He strains to make out details but he can’t tell if Shotkin’s apparent hatchetman is missing a digit on one of his hands. He also observes that the pairs of men sent out from the bank were messengers or couriers – they were roughly splitting up toward the four points of the compass, traveling with light combat loads and an apparent sense of purpose. He reasons that if the marauders are divided into gangs (or fiefdoms), then each group is likely to have its own headquarters… or fortress.
Betsy assesses the fortification work that the marauders did on the bank. It’s crude but solid, and they started with a robust building. She would not want to try blasting her way in there under fire.
Cowboy notes that the fire truck-turned-gun truck is riding oddly low on its rear suspension. It’s a rescue rig, not the type that would have an onboard water tank, so what’s back there? There’s some speculation that it’s full of gold looted from the bank. Then Ellis glances at Cat. “Ah… Cat, how big was that box that Task Force Cobalt recovered in Lodz?”
Cat flashes back. She didn’t handle the object that TF Cobalt paid in blood to extract from Politechnika Łódzka, but she saw it. It was dull steel, about the size and form factor of a large coffin. Heavy-duty handles welded to it, with rubber-footed rails similar to helicopter skids on the underside. A few telemetry and power ports on one side, but no apparent way to open it. Radiation trefoil stickers on all faces, but no other markings.
Only the Air Force technical crew attached to Task Force Cobalt touched the thing. Everyone else was under orders to stay at least five meters away from it unless specifically requested by the techs.
When Cat saw the techs loading the object into their truck, it looked immensely heavy. These guys were all near special operations levels of fitness themselves, not pencil-necked geeks, and six of them were straining to lift the thing. She’d estimate it at around half a ton. Once they got it up, though, they seemed to be more pushing it than carrying it – it moved weirdly.
Octavia cocks an ear at this. She pulls Cat aside, asks a few probing questions. She comes up with the thing having mass and inertia, but not being subject to gravity. Which is pure physics bullshit, but that seems to be the world in which she’s trapped now.
The immediate conclusion, however, is that whatever and wherever the box is, it’s not in the back of the fire truck now.
The team wibbles for a bit on what to do. There is clearly some bad weirdness happening in Radomsko, but what do they do about it? Do they go after Shotkin himself, try to break his toys, or write off the days spent here and try to divert around the city rather than tangling with a large marauder force?
At the end, they decide they need more information. Ellis, Pettimore, and Miko head back south for another look at what Shotkin has been putting into motion. What they find is about fifty marauders strung out in defensive positions across the city’s north edge. Ellis realizes that Shotkin must be expecting a probe from the 124th Motor Rifle Division after his guys whacked one of the Soviets’ patrols. This presents an opportunity… and the team does still have Katyushka Alekseev in custody…
Captain Sergei Andrejev rolls out of Piotrków Trybunalski with a company of rear-echelon troops turned infantrymen who are no happier than he is about the thunderstorm through which they’re traveling. They have their orders, though, and the marauders who wiped out one of the 124th MRD’s patrols will pay. His review of the ops plan is suddenly interrupted by his lead BTR slamming on its brakes and nearly sliding into a ditch. Looking up, Andrejev sees the BTR nose-to-nose with a UAZ-469 containing two people in piecemeal Polish fatigues. He curses, grabs his radio mic, and orders his men to deploy from their trucks. He stays dry for now – to coordinate, he tells himself – and tells the driver of the trailing HMMWV weapons carrier to swing out in case automatic grenade launcher landscaping is needed.
As his subordinate leaders are acknowledging the orders, an unfamiliar voice comes up on the frequency. Andrejev already expects trouble, so he’s not inclined to trust, but he buys his troops some time to get the other force under their guns. As he watches, a BTR-70K slowly rolls forward, turret ostentatiously traversed to the side. It stops and a man in a GRU major’s uniform hops out, followed by two heavily-armed women.
Andrejev sighs, hooks a finger at his RTO, and moves forward to parley. The major is in surprisingly good spirits, but seems to be waiting for a salute. If this is a trap, Andrejev isn’t falling for it – he learned not to sniper-check the Americans years ago.
The major claims to have intel on marauders around Radomsko. He’s surprisingly well-informed – so much so that Andrejev wonders just who his chain of command has been talking to about the mission he only received last night. Then the major drops his second bombshell: he has a survivor of the missing patrol in custody and he’d like to hand her off to Andrejev.
The captain is feeling distinctly paranoid at this point, but massacring a GRU operations team would look bad on his next officer evaluation. He sends his company medic forward, along with two of his more casual murderers for escort. The medic comes back a few minutes later with the missing Private Alekseev strapped to a litter, which confirms at least some of the major’s story.
The major takes the opportunity to expand on his earlier suggestion of intel. The marauders in Radomsko are more numerous than Andrejev’s intel briefing suggested, and they’re alerted to his expedition. Andrejev is rolling toward an ambush.
Andrejev considers. If this is a marauder ruse, it’s a damned complicated one, and the major does seem to know his stuff. The captain excuses himself, returns to his truck, and calls in the encounter. There’s a few minutes of silence, no doubt while HQ digests his report. Finally, his colonel comes back on the channel. The major and his team are to receive all available aid. As Andrejev’s mission is compromised, he’s to return to the garrison rather than sitting out in the rain burning fuel.
Andrejev squelches back to the major and extends the 124th’s hospitality. The major smiles broadly but declines; he and his team will be operating south of Piotrków Trybunalski for a few more weeks, and they need to get back to their mission now that they’ve delivered their warning and their rescuee. However, could he get contact frequencies for the 124th – just in case he has anything more to pass along?
As Andrejev watches the UAZ and the APC turn around and roll south, he replays the encounter in his mind. The major was the only Soviet uniform he saw, and none of the Poles appeared to speak any Russian. Weird, that – he’s never known the GRU to use that much local talent before. Maybe the major is going native…