Below the Burning Deck
Recap — June 11, 2000
Where one man slipped below the fire unseen, another climbed into the mouth of the gun that had found them, and a rocket went looking for the rock they sheltered behind.
The Zhuk lay grounded against the bank south of Zakroczym, its deck still burning, and nobody aboard had yet found a target. Mik used that moment. With a critical wound barely stabilized, he swam the last stretch of river, pulled himself up the hull, and slipped aboard unseen. Nobody raised a shout. He found a way below deck and began working through the boat compartment by compartment.
The rooms he searched were empty. There were no crew, nothing worth taking, and no sign of Birger. Each door he opened only told him where Birger was not. Overhead, feet pounded across the deck as one of the crew fought the fire, and the boat creaked on the riverbank around him. By the session’s end Mik was still below, still undetected, and still searching.
On the bank, Piotr went the other way: up and over the bow. He climbed the front of the boat and crept into the forward gun mount, the same gun that had torn into Mik on the river. Its gunner was waiting inside. Piotr was knocked cold and left slumped in the gun tub. Nobody saw him fall. To the rest of the party, Piotr had simply gone quiet.
Both of the Zhuk’s heavy machine guns were still live, and they started hunting the shore. A rocket came first. An RPG round screamed past Archer’s overwatch and burst in the trees behind him. It missed, but it told him he had been found. Archer abandoned the position and ran for cover beside Stanislaw behind a rock near the bank. The machine-gun fire caught up with him, and Archer was clipped by the heavy gun. The wound was light. Stanislaw patched him up behind the stone while the gunners raked the bank.
Farther back on the river, Pedro and the two fishermen were still coming on and had not yet reached the fight. The Honker was hidden a few meters back from the riverside with Zofia still tied inside. Neither had been found.
That was where the session ended. A second RPG round struck the rock Archer and Stanislaw were hiding behind, and nobody yet knew what was left of it.