Re: Strolling along minding your own business when....
The next morning dawned without a cloud in the sky. Wringing water from everything that could possbily have been wet, it's decided to stay put for a few hours to catch up on sleep and allow your socks to dry...
The remainder of the day finds your small group making steady progress towards the south.
Late that afternoon, you arrive at the location of the previous evenings ambush. It had been a small unit, maybe twenty five, thirty men, three deuce-and-a-halves, and a couple of Hum-Vees, all strung out along the main road. Someone had been awfully thorough, helmets, jackets, boots, and all their equipment, weapons, and ammo were long gone. Somebody even took the trouble to gather up all the spent shell casings. There must have been quite a few of those, because the trucks looked like swiss cheese. It must have been quite a firefight, and it didn't last long. They'd been caught in the open by heavy automatic fire from at least three different spots along the woods thirty metres from the road.
They didn't have a chance. One truck had burned; the others had been shot to bits and then stripped of everything useful: tyres, engine parts, canvas tops, they even drained the crankcase oil. It was like a plague of locusts had hit, leaving the bare bone skeletons and a sick-sweet death stench. Whoever had knocked off that convoy had gone over the place with a fine toothed comb and done it fast.
The field is littered with debris from the looting, mostly torn articles of clothing, broken truck parts and equipment, empty boxes and a few discarded shell casings missed by the scavengers. Footlockers stuffed with papers have been dragged from the trucks, opened and rummaged through in a ruthless search for valuables.
Marks are found at several points in within the woods to show where a large force had set up machineguns to sweep the road in a crossfire.
A few minutes on the site and one of you finds some shallow graves. Obviously somebody else had been here since the ambush and had made some effort to treat the dead with respect.
A few more minutes and all of you come to the same conclusion - there's nothing left that you can scavenge. A stand of trees and shallow depression provide an ideal campsite for the night a few hundred metres from the ambush. Being only an hour or so till dark, it's decided to stay there the night before moving on early the next day.
During the night the sentry is flipping through the radio frequencies in a vain attempt to discover some useful information. Most of the radio traffic of late (since the US5th Infantry Divisions destruction) had been in either Polish or Russian and most often also encrypted. Around 2am, he stumbles upon the last few words of a transmission in English and uncoded. While some english has been heard from time to time, usually it had been a weak signal (most likely originating some distance away) or a plea for help (unit in the process of being overrun). This was a strong signal and the tone certainly calm. The message itself was interesting simply because it mentioned the ruined city a few kilometres to your east - Czestochowa.
Morning again dawns clear and blue and your small group is quickly on the road south again. A kilometre or two later and a ruined village is spotted. A strong smell of smoke and ashes mingles with a slight odur of distilling alcohol...