Vistula: Sandomierz

Between sessions Intel, 28 Aug 2000

In Sandomierz, you would have learned a couple more items in your venture into town, that I neglected to mention last time.

When you heard about the rumor regarding the gasoline cache, it was because there was a major influx of refugees during the last several months when Baranow Sandomierski was destroyed.
Other refugees reported being from Nowy Korczyn and Szczucin before that back towards Krakow, on the west side of the Vistula River. Locals avoid these refugees. Dark murmurs of plague.

Intel map 28 Aug 2000

Radio Intel

Lublin, as you’ve heard, has some Soviets there. You saw those rear echelon troops in the Sandomierz marketplace purchasing supplies, with some guards attached. But the city is under the command of Polish Colonel Zygmunt Grybowski, and his loyalist troops.

Marching troops

Radio signals from Lublin fall under two categories:
- Polish loyalist forces, which Maks has a good read.
- And presumably the Russians. It feels like them. But they’re not using the codes that Maks has. And they’re perfectly disciplined, compared with what Maks is accustomed to with Soviet HQ traffic. No transmissions in the clear.
Somewhere in the direction of Annopol/Jozefsov/Piotrwin/Solec, a point source is communicating regularly with Lublin Soviet HQ, content unknown.
Somewhere in the direction of Annopol/Jozefsov/Piotrwin/Solec, a point source is communicating regularly with Lublin Polish HQ, the usual communication with a smaller unit. They’re guarding a collective farm. There are more of these Soviet-style collective farms around Lublin proper as well.

The wreck of the last expedition, the Rseka Ksiezna (“River Princess”), Adam says it is just beyond those towns noted in the radio traffic. It had no tow then.

Old Adam will be nearly in tears as he recounts his story. They rounded a bend in the river to find seven battered and camouflage-netted pleasure boats of various makes tied bow-to-stern and stretching across part of the navigable channel.
Before they could take any action, mortar rounds were dropping
from the shore, and heavy machineguns had opened up from the shore and from the boats ahead. An old police cruiser, painted black and mounting a small, automatic cannon on her bow closed from a hiding spot on the far shore.
In moments, Ksiezna was afire. Uller, her pilot, steered her into the shallows on the west bank of the river. Uller, Adam and three of the crewmen made good their escape by diving overboard and swimming to shore, where they eluded heavily-armed marauder bands searching for them in the falling evening light.
“If it wasn’t for the fact it was getting dark,” Adam says, “they’d have had us. But they plundered poor old Ksiezna, though.”

All of this is drawn straight from Pirates of the Vistula.