Out of the Prison, Into the Ruins
Recap — June 7–9, 2000
Where the party’s safe haven came apart, the Radom Zip drive finally changed hands, and an old ally showed his true colors.
The safe haven was finished, and everyone in it seemed to know before the party did.
It came apart at The Prison near Radom on Wednesday the 7th. Pedro had already been snatched in the night by Kascper’s man, Jakub; Mik went looking for Kascper at first light and fumbled it badly — a double-botched recon that nearly got him killed on the draw. Stanislaw pressed an ear to the radio and listened to the GRU and DIA circling each other over the airwaves — two intelligence services arriving for the same thing, neither willing to be second. There was no holding the place. By midday the party tore free of the Prison, and in the scramble they finally got their hands on what all of it had been about: the Radom Zip drive, carried the whole time by Kascper himself.
They ran with it on foot into the city and went to ground in the gutted shell of a KFC as evening fell. That was where Zofia found them — the friendly-but-never-trusted KGB agent who’d always claimed to hold the key to the disk — and made her move to take it. What she didn’t account for was Mik. He had been KGB all along, slipped into the party to steer them to exactly this drive. Across that ruined room he chose his side: he turned on his own handler, refused to surrender the disk, and the party fought Zofia down and took her prisoner. They slipped out of Radom into the dark with the drive still in their hands and Zofia in custody.
Thursday the 8th was the war doing its quieter work: hunger. Days without proper food and water had hollowed everyone out — starving, dehydrated, fraying. The win slipped its leash early, too: under Pedro’s exhausted watch, Zofia got loose and vanished into the city. The drive stayed; the key walked away. The party scraped together four bottles of water and turned to the land to survive — Archer cut the trail of a moose, Mik put it down, and they spent the day butchering and cooking while Pedro, run down to nothing, was sidelined by stress.
That evening, a KGB jeep lit up on their tracking gear, parked at a cottage on the edge of town, and Mik and Stanislaw went to watch it. They weren’t the only ones interested. Kascper — alive, and bolder than he should have been — broke cover to steal the jeep. Stanislaw tried to talk him out of it and got nowhere; Kascper gunned it, and the noise drew the lone KGB agent out of the cottage. Mik ended both problems with a single shot — Kascper dead at the wheel, the agent down — and out of the dark stepped Zofia, who had circled back to her own man after escaping, now with nowhere left to run. She surrendered a second time. Stanislaw walked back to tell the others, who were just lifting moose meat off the fire, and they returned to collect their leverage: two PM Makarov pistols, five clips of 9×18mm, water, and a ration.
By the small hours of Friday the 9th, the party held everything that mattered and none of the rest. The Prison behind them sat silent, locked down, a contested no-man’s-land between the DIA and GRU. They had the drive. They had the key — Zofia — bound and sleepless in front of them. And Mik, the defector who’d burned his own service to keep that disk, settled in to ask her what was really on it.
The session ended there, in the grey before dawn, with the question still hanging in the cellar air.