Back to the Wreck

Recap — June 9, 2000

Where a prisoner wouldn’t break, a locked drive stayed locked, and the party went back for the one thing they could still reclaim — with the Prison watching every move.

By morning the party held everything that mattered and could use none of it. The drive, the key, the leverage — all of it in hand, all of it dead weight.

The night before had been quiet in the worst way. Archer crept out for a look and found The Prison sealed up tight, no lights, no movement — a contested box the DIA and GRU had locked down between them, giving nothing away. Stanislaw kept the watch. Pedro, run ragged and finally alone, came apart a little: days of stress tipped over into something lasting, and with no one around to steady him he took it out on the ruins, wrecking what the war had already half-wrecked. He came back to the others visibly frayed — irritable, wound too tight, no longer entirely to be relied on.

In the morning Mik sat down across from Zofia, still bound at the cottage, and tried to take from her what the disk wouldn’t give up on its own. It went nowhere. She saw straight through his angle and didn’t so much as blink at his threats — the friendly KGB handler he’d once answered to, refusing to give her defector an inch. Whatever broke in Mik then, he put two rounds through her knees for it. She still wouldn’t talk. By the end her composure cracked, just slightly — but she gave him nothing, and the Radom Zip drive stayed exactly what it had been: encrypted, unreadable, useless without the Soviet decryption device — and that device is with Birger, MIA and presumed somewhere in Russian custody. The one man who could open the disk is a prisoner himself. While Mik worked her over, Pedro’s hands shook through a failed scrounge that only piled on more stress.

So the party reached for the one thing still within reach. The APC — theirs all along, locked in the Prison garage while they were inside, then crashed into a small building just outside the walls during the breakout when a flashbang cooked off in the crew compartment. They’d left it where it sat to get clear. Now they went back for it. Stanislaw got down into the guts of the thing and started working — forty minutes deep and not yet running — while Archer, Mik, and Pedro spread out and kept their eyes on the wall, waiting for the Prison to notice them.

It noticed. Figures showed at points along the parapet through the afternoon, scoping the ground outside — once, then again, never quite committing. Then a rope ladder unrolled down the face of the wall and they came. One man descended all the way and moved on the very building the APC had buried itself in — straight toward Pedro’s overwatch. A second held the top of the wall with an AKM, covering the outside. A third stayed up to watch the yard within. The party didn’t wait to be asked: Mik, Archer, and Pedro opened up in a single coordinated burst and put all three down before any of them could turn it into a fight.

And then the quiet was gone. From inside the Prison, at the sound of the shooting, came the unmistakable noise of men reacting — voices, movement, the box coming awake. The session ended there: the APC still half-dead under Stanislaw’s hands, three bodies at the foot of a dangling ladder, and whatever the gunfire had stirred now stirring loud behind the wall.