[no successes and a 1 on a pushed Driving check – I treated this as a ramming attack, with the UAZ-452 losing 3 points of reliability]<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe reason for the sudden stop glimmers in the OT-64’s headlights: a tangle of jagged metal stretching across the road. Arkadi, Alexei, and Zenobia dismount to inspect it. The drivers, and Leks in the gunner’s seat of the APC, stay with the vehicles, as does Red. Minka gently backs away from the collision and pulls off the road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Up close, the obstacle appears to be an improvised spike strip: a metal chain with scrap steel crudely welded onto it. A rope tied to the right end of it leads into a nearby house. Arkadi flips down the team’s one precious night-vision monocular and tries to scan the area, but the headlights overwhelm the first-generation light amplification tube. He turns to call out to Janek to kill the lights –<\/p>\n\n\n\n
– and a machine gun opens up from the house directly ahead of the team. Alexei and Arkadi both take hits, but stay on their feet. Zenobia, shielded by the two men, drops flat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
[ At no point during this sequence did anyone match or beat the 2 successes the ambushers rolled on their initial Recon check. ]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
The ambush’s jaws close as three riflemen pop up in the windows of the house to which the rope leads. A round smacks into Alexei’s unprotected head and he drops [no helmet, full health track filled and cracked skull critical result]<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n[ I felt rather guilty at this point, and throughout the fight, as Alexei’s player (who also runs Pettimore) was basically sidelined before taking a single action. ]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nLeks swings the turret. The machinegunner’s head disintegrates under 32,000 Joules of muzzle energy. The assistant gunner takes a round through the house’s wall and drops out of sight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Zenobia shakes herself off and crawls to the OT-64’s far side for cover. Minka bails out of the UAZ and dashes to Alexei. Seeing Arkadi pulling him under the OT-64, she maintains her momentum, heading for the riflemen to the east. Janek pops out of the driver’s hatch, slides to the ground, and fires past Minka, buckshot tearing into one of the assailants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The ambushers have one more hole card. Motion to the west catches Red’s attention. His mouth opens to call a warning as the RPG fires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The rocket slams into the turret just forward of Leks. The concussion rocks him as the HEAT jet tears into the KPV’s ammo stowage. The blast hurls Janek, Arkadi, and Zenobia to the ground. Red ducks as every window on the UAZ’s right side shatters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
[ Amazingly, no one took more than one point of damage from this. Explosives continue to be underwhelming in this system. ]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nRed gets his M4 into action, suppressing the RPG team before they can reload. Arkadi recovers and hurls a fragmentation grenade, which lands true but fails to detonate [three successes on the attack but nothing on the damage dice, keeping the streak going]<\/em>. Still, it’s enough to keep them out of action.<\/p>\n\n\n\nZenobia leans around the OT-64’s rear corner and puts her M21’s sights on a window. Her patience is rewarded when one of the riflemen pops up – just long enough for her to put a round under the lip of his helmet. Minka takes the opening and hurls herself through another window, taking the last of the trio to the ground. An exchange of hammer blows versus bayonet stabs leaves Minka bleeding superficially and the attacker misshapen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The a-gunner reappears to the north, having recovered the machine gun. He opens up on the cluster of PCs huddled between the UAZ and the OT-64, but his only effect is to draw Leks’ wrath. The Estonian can’t hear anything but there’s nothing wrong with his eyes – or his coaxial PKM.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The RPG team doesn’t last long once it has the team’s undivided attention. Janek puts a buckshot charge into the rocketeer. Leks tears the ammo bearer apart with a sustained burst through the wall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Leks, tell the farmers we’re going to be delayed a while,” Red orders as he preps for surgery. Minka hastily sweeps the shattered glass out of the back of the UAZ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Arkadi looks up from his inspection of the ambulance’s collision damage. “Once you’re ready, it’ll drive, but it’s going to need more work than I can do here.” He glances at Red. “I didn’t have time to say it in the fight, but… those were M16s.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Yeah.” The doctor exhales. “Better check that out.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of the bodies are clad in ragged U.S. Army summer-weight BDUs under civilian winter gear. Aside from the RPG-7, all their weapons are older American designs: M16A1s, an M60, a couple of 1911s. All are also wearing U.S. Army dogtags. In a nearby house, Janek finds seven bedrolls and sets of minimal field gear, along with a couple of small personal effects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Where the hell did these guys come from?” Minka asks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Leks gestures to the edge of town. “Tracks come in from the southeast. I’m starting to wonder if the Radom POW camp is turning people loose to cause trouble for the area.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Red wraps up his unscheduled cranial surgery and pops an epinephrine. He’s going on 24 hours without sleep and has one more procedure to get through. “We’re moving out. Call back to Ponikla. Get Scott to send a squad with the technical to secure the bridge behind us.” He looks over at seven bodies laid out alongside the street. “And if Father Maciej is willing, he’ll be needed for last rites.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Dog tags?” Leks asks, letting the collection twist in the pre-dawn light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Red sighs and holds out a hand. “I’ll put them with all the others.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The team crosses the river without incident and arrives at the Laska farm an hour later. Red immediately heads to yet another surgical intervention while Minka tends to the other injured defenders. Arkadi borrows some tools and begins field-expedient repairs on the UAZ, somewhat aided by Alexei once the East German teenager regains consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Leks, Zenobia, and Janek confer with the farmers, who are still on high alert after the previous night’s gunfight. More details are forthcoming in person. The trouble started shortly after dusk, when two armed westerners approached the farm. The families mobilized their militia as a precaution. In very broken Polish, the woman demanded food. Negotiations did not go well. When the Laska patriarch ordered the pair to leave, one of the farmhands gestured with his AK to emphasize the directive. That’s when more outsiders, unseen up to that point, opened fire with a machine gun. In the ensuring fight, the woman was killed by rifle fire, and the man was run down when the farms’ technical, arriving at high speed, didn’t bother to slow down before entering the fray. The technical opened fire on the muzzle flashes, and this apparently was enough to drive off the attackers. They left behind the two bodies, as well as a couple of blood trails and a traumatically-amputated foot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The bodies in question are of a type with the ambushers the team encountered on their way here. Leks makes speculative noises and sniffs them. “Blood trail, you said?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The pursuit isn’t immediate. Everyone is suffering from enough sleep deprivation to cloud their judgement, and several are wounded. In friendly surroundings with a Leks-trained militia on high alert, the team feels safe enough to crash for a shift without posting their own watch. They awaken in late afternoon and, after a meal and a nod to hygiene, are ready to investigate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Arkadi pulls Alexei aside. “I appreciate your devotion to punk style. I appreciate your willingness to cover my flank even more.” He holds out a steel helmet taken from one of the downed ambushers. “But from now on, please fucking wear this.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Leks takes point. No one comments on the fact that his eyes now have a tapetum lucidum shine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The trail leads to the east. Zenobia and Janek cover Leks’ flanks while the rest of the team follows a couple of hundred meters back in the OT-64. About six kilometers from the Laska farm, Leks spots a thread of smoke rising from a hilltop. The team members who’ve been out to the North Farms before – at this point, everyone but Janek – recognizes the location. It’s another derelict farm, well-scavenged by this point and not currently worth the effort to recolonize. But someone is clearly using it for shelter. Leks can make out a single sentry making irregular rounds through the compound.<\/p>\n\n\n
\n
Twilight Maps’ Patreon was awesome while it lasted. I don’t begrudge him his success in going pro for an instant but I do miss the pipeline of fantastic maps.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe point team pulls back to confer with the rest of the team. Red looks around: Pole, Pole, Russian, Pole, East German, Estonian, Polish APC. “I should probably be the one to talk to them. What do we have for a white flag?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With an obvious OT-64 and a less-obvious sniper covering him, Red hails the sentry. Two more figures dash out of the farmhouse and take cover, but there’s no immediate gunfire. Both sides – or both spokesmen, anyway – establish themselves as Americans. The sentry stands up. “Well, you may as well come on ahead. It’s not like we could stop you anyway.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The team rolls into the compound and posts a guard on the OT-64, just in case. The sentry introduces himself as Malcolm Carlisle. “Used to be a spec\/4. Infantry. Don’t guess that matters much any more. Y’all come on in, get out of the cold.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Inside are the last two members of Carlisle’s group. One is the former owner of the amputated foot; he’s unconscious and barely stable. The other is a woman whose right hand is wrapped in a bloodsoaked ball of scrap fabric. As Red and Minka check the injuries – the man will need surgery and the woman is down to three digits on that hand – Carlisle and his companions lay out their tale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Radom POW camp had 312 inmates, all enlisted and junior NCOs and almost all from the U.S. 5th Infantry Division. Every commissioned officer and senior NCO captured after the Kalisz pocket collapsed was taken farther east to Lublin. The camp was guarded by Radom’s ZOMO (formerly the communist regime’s riot police and political dissident suppression arm), and the guards had grown progressively more paranoid and brutal after some sort of battle in September had cost them most of their Soviet support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the night of October 24, the prisoners heard screaming from the guard quarters. When morning came, no guards showed up to unlock the prisoner barracks. What did <\/em>show up was a British Army officer, keys in hand, accompanied by a squad of British troops and a few heavy transport trucks with civilian drivers.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Brit introduced himself as Major Wilt Garrard, a representative of the new political leadership in Warsaw – a Baron Czarny. He offered the assembled POWs employment with the baron, where they could put their skills to use in re-establishing order across a new pro-western Poland. They’d be fed, housed, clothed, equipped – and paid, once the baron restored a functioning economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not everyone was expected to be interested in this offer, Garrard said. For those who just wanted to go home, he had another offer, and information. The leadership of the British, Canadian, and American forces still in Europe were assembling a repatriation convoy with the support of the reunified German government. The ships were set to depart the port of Rostock at the end of November. Anyone who wanted to make the journey could accompany him as far as Warsaw, which would give them another couple of days to consider the baron’s offer. If they still declined, no hard feelings – they’d be given basic arms and equipment and what transport assistance the baron could spare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For those who didn’t want to make the trip across a hostile Poland, the baron still understood, and hoped that they might settle in the area to stabilize things on a local level. The trucks contained some equipment, supplies, and small arms to get them started on that endeavor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the end, the camp split into three roughly-equal groups: those who felt that signing on with Baron Czarny was their best option, those who wanted to make the run to Rostock, and those who wanted to strike out on their own for whatever reason. In the case of Carlisle and his crew, the baron’s offer sounded a little too good to be true, and they didn’t like their chances of getting across that much hostile territory in winter. Together with another band of stragglers led by a Roy Andrews, they decided to take the handouts and try to find someplace safe to survive the winter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Carlisle’s group, originally under the leadership of Chad Bergstrom, headed northwest from the camp along with Andrews’ band. On the night of October 25, they took shelter in an abandoned riverside town – Mysiakowiec. Andrews got it into his head that the signs of encampments elsewhere in the ruins meant that the place saw regular traffic, and he proposed setting up a tollbooth operation. Andrews and his inner circle were sounding irrational enough that Bergstrom, Carlisle, and their friends opted out of the plan and departed the next day, crossing the bridge to put more distance between themselves and the POW camp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
(Subsequent clarifications confirmed that Andrews’ crew was the group that ambushed the PCs.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The group spent most of the day wandering in circles before finding an inhabited farm. Bergstrom told the group to set up and cover him in case things went bad, then went forward with Lindley, the only member of the group who spoke any Polish (and she only barely could). The intent was to bargain labor for food, and maybe establish a basis for further deals from there. Carlisle and the others were too far back to hear the negotiations, but they saw when one of the farmers raised an AK to threaten the negotiators. That was their sign to open fire, but they weren’t expecting the response they provoked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When Carlisle runs down, Red asks for a moment to confer with the rest of Ponikla’s defenders. The consensus is that they’ve heard two sides of the same clusterfuck. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Red asks Carlisle’s group what they want to do. They’re still disinclined to try to make it to Rostock – all the more now that two of them have sustained permanent injuries. At this point, they’re tired, lost, hungry, and demoralized. They just want to find someplace safe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Red confers with the group again. No one has strenuous objections to taking in more strays – but Carlisle’s story has opened several more cans of worms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s a cold late-autumn night in Ponikla. Snow is still on the ground from the season’s first heavy snowfall, but about a quarter of the village is gathered around two oil drum fires outside the radio studio, where Alexei is hosting the first Minka’s Home Remedies Hour. In the machine shed that’s become the village’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kaserne-on-the-borderlands"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2046"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2058,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2046\/revisions\/2058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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