The River Turns West
Recap — June 11, 2000
Where a scout was left to read the river, strangers were hired into a fight they knew nothing about, and a bridge rained fire onto the Zhuk.
The Honker stayed ahead of the Zhuk, but speed alone would not catch a boat with a river full of choices. Archer and Stanislaw worked over Mik in the back of the truck and finally stabilized the critical wound its forward gun had given him. Then the party split its attention between the man they were trying to save and the man still somewhere aboard the boat: Piotr kept the Honker moving while they sent Pedro out on foot with a radio to watch the river forks and tell them which way the Zhuk turned.
They expected the boat to run east eventually, carrying Birger and the Soviet decryption device toward Moscow. Instead, Pedro watched it take the water leading west toward a bridge south of Zakroczym. He radioed the turn, and the rest of the party raced ahead to set an ambush. The course made no sense. Whatever destination the Zhuk had chosen now lay somewhere other than Moscow — perhaps as far away as the Baltic — and nobody yet knew why.
Pedro was left walking back toward the others until two fishermen found him along the road. They offered him a faster way for a hard price: an AK, a helmet, and some rations. Pedro paid it without telling them what they were sailing into. Soon their fishing boat was speeding after the Zhuk with Pedro and both fishermen aboard, all three chasing a fight only one of them knew was waiting.
At the bridge, the others disappeared into position. The Honker went under cover among trees off the road with Zofia still tied up inside. Archer settled into overwatch. Mik, barely stabilized, and Piotr hid beneath the bridge, waiting for the chaos to give them a chance to board. Above them, Stanislaw turned twenty liters of spare fuel into an improvised bomb and kept the remaining eighty liters ready to make certain the first blast would matter.
At Archer’s signal, Stanislaw dropped the bomb onto the Zhuk and sent the rest of the spare fuel down after it. Fire rolled across the deck. The boat lost the river and beached itself on Piotr’s side. Mik went into the water and began swimming across to infiltrate it, while two pirates came off the burning boat and caught Piotr beneath the bridge. Before they could finish the confrontation, Archer cut both of them down with machine-gun fire.
That was where the session ended: the Zhuk grounded with its deck aflame, its machine guns still active but searching for targets; Piotr exposed on the bank; Mik swimming for the boat; Stanislaw above them on the bridge; and Pedro closing fast from behind with two fishermen who still had no idea what they had agreed to join.