Do Not Approach
Recap — June 10, 2000
Where Zofia finally gave something up, the fuel gauge made the decision for everyone, and a voice on the radio told them exactly where not to go.
The night went to the machines and the wounded. Stanislaw stayed down in the APC’s guts by lamplight, coaxing reliability back into the thing that had saved Mik’s life, while Mik held on shift by shift — every one of them another save against the bleeding, every one passed buying him six more hours. Water ran short enough that Pedro was drinking Archer’s share; by morning he’d made it right, scavenging out a working source while Mik, propped up and stubborn, put his gun back in order.
And then Zofia talked. Not to Mik, whose interrogation had cost her both knees and gotten nothing — it was Pedro who finally cracked her, and what she had turned out to be small and sharp all at once: Birger and the Soviet decryption device were set to leave Lodz — bound for Moscow. That was all she knew. It was also everything: the one man who can open the Radom Zip drive, on a road, moving, and every kilometer eastward one they’d never get back.
The fuel gauge ended whatever debate there might have been. The party was nearly dry, and staying in Radom meant dying in reach of a prison full of enemies. So they loaded up — Zofia coming with them, shattered knees and all — and turned the APC north up the Warsaw highway with a plan built out of thin hope stacked on thinner: find fuel before the tanks ran empty; link up with Piotr Liptak and his Polish resistance, positioned somewhere north of Warsaw; and — the desperate chance — cut off the Moscow transport carrying Birger, Piotr, and the device before it passed beyond reach forever.
The road gave them something almost immediately. Pedro driving, Stanislaw working the GLONASS detection set, and as they closed on Grojec the screen lit with a single contact: a lone truck, out ahead of them on the highway to Warsaw. Alone, moving, exactly the shape of the thing they were praying to find. And then the radio spoke over it — an automated Polish transmission, looping, flat, and absolute: “Do not approach. You will be fired upon.”
That’s where it ended: the APC still rolling toward Grojec, a contact ahead and a warning on the air, nobody yet having decided which one to answer — and Mik’s last save against the bleeding still sitting on the table, unrolled.