The River Runs South
Recap — June 10–11, 2000
Where a warning led to a fair trade, a lost friend came out of the wreckage, and the only way to Birger ran south with the river.
The voice on the radio had said Do not approach. The party approached anyway — carefully, and talking first. At the Grojec airport they found local Polish occupants willing to deal rather than fight. The bargain was clean: the party’s Russian APC for a Polish Honker 4012, plus enough fuel to get moving again. They left on good terms, lighter on armor and heavier on speed, with the road to Warsaw open in front of them.
Then Stanislaw’s GLONASS set found an abandoned troop-transport truck on that road.
It was not Birger in the truck. It was Piotr, hiding in the wreckage of a car nearby, and Mik knew him at once from Lodz. Piotr was alive, intact, and dressed in the last things the road had left him: a Russian uniform and an AKM. Birger was gone.
Piotr’s account made the gap between them worse. He and Birger had overtaken the Russian soldiers moving them and taken their vehicle. Then spike strips stopped the truck across the highway. Another Russian force — one apparently working against the original prisoner transport — hit them in the confusion. They fired before realizing that the men in Russian uniform were the prisoners in disguise. By the time they understood, it was too late: Birger had been taken. Piotr held them off long enough to disappear into the roadside wreckage and wait.
There was nothing useful in keeping the transport. The party left it behind and took Piotr with them, following the trail north of Warsaw to Serock, a small town on the river. There, behind a house, they found the ambushers’ garage and their parked UAZs.
Only Mik and Piotr went forward. At the garage’s side door they found what the enemy had left for them: a grenade positioned to drop when the door opened. It went off, catching Piotr with a minor wound. The people inside had heard the recon coming and fled before the party could put eyes on any of them. The trap was their farewell.
Then Mik heard an engine on the river behind the garage.
A Zhuk-class patrol boat was pulling away. Birger had to be aboard — or at least the men who had taken him. Mik opened fire and scored hits, but not enough to slow the boat or change its course. Its forward gun answered. Mik went down critically wounded, and the river carried the Zhuk away.
The party regrouped at the Honker with both wounded men holding on in the back. The boat had turned south, toward Warsaw. The road ran alongside the river often enough that the Honker could beat it for speed — if they could read its destination, choose the right bridges, and stay close enough to cut it off. The session ended with the Polish truck racing south along the road, the wounded clinging on behind it, and Birger somewhere ahead on the water.