[Raellus]

It’s about 0630 hours on July 29th. The sun has crawled above the eastern horizon, disappeared into a low, thick overcast. The cloud cover has a sickly, greenish tinge today.

While the Diamonds wait for the last of the prisoners to reach the woods east of the POW camp, Sarge switches seats, leans forward so that he’s almost nose-to-nose with Captain Walker. The OT-64’s troop compartment is fairly spacious for an APC, but it doesn’t offer any real privacy.

“I’m not liking the idea of wandering the woods with 30 jumpy friendlies- makes blue-on-blue a real danger,” he starts, just above a whisper. “Plus, if Ivan’s going to go after ‘em, they’re gonna start by sweeping those woods. What if we zig instead of zag, head west, maybe even draw Ivan away from the prisoners?”

Walker considers the suggestion for a few seconds before responding, “Isn’t there a river just east of here? The Prosna, is it?

“Yes Cap'n, but Pole Position can swim.”

Walker removes her K-pot, slips on a Warsaw Pact-issue padded AFV crewman’s helmet, plugs into the vehicle’s intercom system.

“Willis, how long will it take to prep Pole Position to swim a river?”

There’s a pause, long enough that Walker wonders if the intercom is working. “Less than five minutes,” Grease finally replies. “Just gotta set up the trim vane, test the props- then should be good to go.”

“Okay. We’re gonna head west, look for a good crossing point,” Walker says.

Aside from a thin haze of smoke over the forest, beyond where the road enters the tree line up ahead, there’s been no further sighting of the Soviet reaction force. When the last of the freed POWs is out of sight, Grease executes a three-point turn, backtracks through the hamlet, before turning right on to a paved two-lane heading west, towards the Prosna River. The paved road stops about 460m from the river, but a dirt farm track leads from the terminus right up to the riverside.

It takes a while to find a spot where the slope of the both near and far banks is gentle enough for Pole Position to make ingress and egress with minimal risk of getting stuck. The Prosna itself is only about 12m wide- less than twice the OT-64’s length. It’s possible that the APC’s wheels won’t even leave solid ground during the very brief crossing.

After successfully crossing the Prosna and lowering the bow-mounted swim vane, the Diamonds head south, following a dirt path that parallels the winding river.

“What the… is that snow? In July?” Honeybear asks, from up in the gunner’s cupola. Nobody makes out what he says. A few gray flakes drift into the troop compartment through the open air-guard hatches.

“Button up! Everybody, button up now!” Bird shouts from the vehicle commander’s seat. There’s a scramble in to shut all of the roof hatches. For reasons beyond any of the Diamonds’ grasp of meteorology, it’s snowing ash- likely radioactive- that’s somehow managed to escape the upper atmosphere. It's not an unknown phenomenon, though. All of the Diamonds have heard of the infamous "rain of death". However, not everyone realizes what the danger was (and still is) until Pole Position is locked down, and there's a moment of relative calm in which to share information.

Between the ash and the already dim morning light, visibility through Pole Position's various view ports is significantly diminished. It’s hard to see beyond about 100m. Grease slows the APC and continues to follow the riverside tracks. A few minutes pass before Pole Position emerges from the ash fall as if having rolled through an ephemeral curtain.

“Are you feeling OK?” Sandy asks the team radioman. P.R. is staring at his upturned K-Pot, held in his lap, his face looking pale and waxy. “I think I’m gonna be sick,” he announces, just before vomiting into his helmet.

“Shit,” Sarge mutters, quickly removing his own helmet, into which he promptly joins P.R. in emptying his stomach.

Trapped in the close confines of the locked-down crew compartment, some sympathy vomiting inevitably ensues. For a couple of minutes, Pole Position plays host to a veritable puke-fest. P.R. and Sarge can't stop.

Walker looks meaningfully at Deacon, the team's de facto medic.

"Could be radiation poisoning," he offers.

“Willis, look for a decent place to stop,” Walker instructs over the intercom.

“Looks like maybe a church up ahead, ‘bout 300m; couple other small buildings too, maybe a road running east-west,” Grease responds.

“There’s some trees a little over to the right where we could set up and observe,” Bird suggests from the commander’s seat. Grease repeats this for Capt. Walker.

“Sounds good. Head for the trees, stop there.”


REF’S NOTES:
After discovering that I don’t have any playing cards that I could use to generate a random encounter with the Oracle at home (I know, I know, I could have just used the encounter deck, or used an app), I pulled another card from the encounter deck: Rain of Ash! Although the PCs were able to get “indoors” quickly, I decided to roll for Rad Attacks anyway. Only P.R. (2 permanent rads) and Sarge (2 permanent rads) failed their Stamina rolls (using only their STR attribute, since neither had the skill); the other PCs rolling d6s were very lucky (and Sandy & Honeybear both rolled successes on their two d12s). I went ahead and rolled to see if anyone gained permanent rads from the rad attack and, fortunately, no one did.

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