![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Company
Note: This recap covers a very small sliver of time. People wanted to play out the "breakout" scene with all the optional rules turned on, just to see it in action!
Time: November 1, 2009 (11:30).
Place: Grandfather's island, south of mainland Greece.
Last Event: Taking Grandfather prisoner.
With Grandfather taken prisoner, everyone armed to the teeth with Russian hardware, and calls out to bring in the Greek authorities, the situation has become a waiting game. It's only a matter of time before the police arrive. Grandfather's men will be showing up much sooner, though, so a plan of action is needed. The general consensus is that it would work best to pose as rival gangsters, demand large quantities of diamonds in return for Grandfather, and try to exfiltrate on the yacht that will be arriving at the island shortly.
For this to work, the threat to Grandfather must look believable. Everybody agrees that sticking a bomb vest on Grandfather would go a long way toward helping with this. Without further ado, the Agents get to work. Wen rigs some munitions from the armory for the purpose. Jili provides four remote controls, which Wen wires to the detonators. Vinnie adds an anti-tamper switch. Once everything is ready, Zhang holds down Grandfather and the bomb-makers put him into the rig.
Meanwhile, Qoqa examines the prisoner who calls herself "Olga." Olga looks like she'll be fine physically, but might have some serious psychological injury. Qoqa quietly informs the others.
It isn't long before Hamid, watching the security cameras, warns that Grandfather's men are approaching down the corridor. He observes as seven armed guards sneak up to the guardroom door and start fumbling with the electronic lock . . . which won't open for them, because Jili recoded it. It's only a matter of time before they try something more extreme, though, so the Agents decide to play gangster and deliver some demands.
Anabel uses the intercom next to the door to address the men outside. She reminds them that her people have their boss, and then delivers her demands: €100 million in diamonds, and transportation to be named at a later time (she has the Дед Россия in mind, but she isn't tipping her hand), or she blows up Grandfather. Anything she deems stalling will mean a reminder in the form of a sliced-off bit of the boss' body . . . and she'll be sure to note who screwed up, so that Grandfather will know who to thank for missing ears and fingers.
On the security monitor, this causes one of Grandfather's crew to break off and run back upstairs. One of the others says that they've sent someone to speak with Grandfather's top "lieutenant" on the island. Anabel gives them one hour total, and encourages them to hurry.
Vinnie – who has some familiarity with gangsters, having been one – suggests that it would probably aid in the intimidation efforts if there was some way to show or otherwise prove to the men outside that the situation in the guardroom is everything Anabel implied it is. He recommends reviving one of the two guards Zhang kicked in the head, rigging him with a bomb vest, and sending him out to confirm that the boss is in the room, wearing explosives, and surrounded by well-armed kidnappers. The others agree, so Jili, Wen, and Vinnie get back to work.
The whole time this is going on, Klas and Lev continue to raid the armory. They load even more weapons, fill spare magazines, and set up a couple of PKM machine guns pointed at the guardroom door. By the time the guard is awake, wearing explosives, and made aware of the situation with Grandfather and his well-armed captors, the Agents are fairly bristling with firepower.
Anabel instructs the guard in Russian. She explains that he's about to be sent out through the door. She orders him to tell his associates what he sees – i.e., that there are many, many guns on Grandfather, who is one button-push away from being blown to chunks by a gang of desperate armed terrorists. Then she clamps the man's hand shut on a dead-man's switch and informs him that he'll die if he lets go of it. (In reality, this isn't armed yet, in case the man gets ideas . . . Jili intends to arm it remotely once he's outside.)
To make sure that the desired information gets to Grandfather's guys, Anabel uses the guard's cell phone to snap a photo of Grandfather in his new vest, surrounded by masked Agents with loaded RPG-7s and PKMs. She tapes the phone to the guard's vest, displaying the image on its screen. Once she's done, she activates the intercom again and warns the men outside to stand away, as she's sending out one of their pals. Then the Agents slip the door open, push the man out in the hall, and relatch the door.
This seems to produce the desired reaction . . . via the security cameras, Hamid sees the men outside making hasty calls on radios and cell phones. Jili tries to listen in on the comms traffic, but the transmissions are too brief and the guardroom's walls seem to be interfering with her equipment. At any rate, the gangsters back further down the hall and seem to be waiting for someone or something.
Seeing this, the Agents prepare to move. Ben and Zhang are assigned to security detail on Grandfather, while Hamid and Jili will escort Olga and Iannis (the Greek cop), respectively; all four are armed the way they arrived. Anabel adds an RPG-7 and a pair of spare rockets to her kit. JB, Klas, Qoqa, Vinnie, and Wen carry AK-103 rifles and plenty of ammo; Klas and Qoqa also load up on grenades, while Wen attaches a GP-25 grenade launcher to her rifle and slings a bandolier of grenades. Lev opts for an SR-2 SMG for tight corners, plus grenades. The four remote detonators are with Hamid, Jili, Qoqa, and Vinnie.
Hamid continues to watch the security cameras. After five or six minutes, he sees eight more Russians show up in the basement. These guys look like tougher customers, armed with assault carbines and grenades, and wearing gas masks, goggles, tactical vests . . . the whole nine yards. With their arrival, the Agents are officially outnumbered. However, these reinforcements join their associates down at the far end of the corridor and also seem to be waiting.
All of this waiting greatly concerns Wen, who decides to check the air vents for crawling commandos, fiberscopes, billowing gas clouds, and so on. She takes a good look, but neither sees nor hears nor smells anything worrisome. Whatever Grandfather's men are waiting on, it isn't obviously coming that way.
Anabel decides that it's time to send the men outside another message. Qoqa awakens the second of Zhang's two victims, and Jili, Vinnie, and Wen rig him the way they did the first. Anabel gives him similar instructions to the other guard, but appends ". . . and you have 30 minutes left." Hamid makes sure that he can send a voice signal to the man's cell phone, to keep lines of communication open. Then Lev and Zhang shove this guy out in the hall.
Before the Agents can see what happens, though, the power goes out. So that is what the gangsters were waiting for. The guardroom is lit by battery-powered backup lighting, but Hamid warns that the security console is down and probably won't be coming back up. There's now no way to spy on the men outside.
Anabel's reaction to this is to use the cell phone to order the men outside to turn the power back on . . . or else. However, the voice at the other end mostly seems amused, and informs her that the lines were actually cut, so there's no way to restore power quickly. Lev interrupts Anabel to warn her that the goal of the power cut is almost certainly to blind the cameras so that the men outside can move up. Given their equipment, he's positive that they'll try to assault the guardroom. Qoqa and Vinnie concur, nothing that it's likely that Grandfather's lieutenant has decided that he'd like to inherit a crime empire!
Lev claims that the men outside will act in a matter of seconds to at most a minute, depending on training and how much control whoever is giving the orders insists on having, so it's imperative to act. Qoqa decides that the thugs might not shoot immediately if they can actually see their boss, so she puts a pistol to his head and has Zhang help her manhandle him to the door. Klas and Lev tell her that as soon as she's out the door and has the Russians' attention, they'll jump out and hurl grenades. Wen grabs an RPG-7, has Anabel stand by with spares, and prepares to follow.
With this hasty "plan" made, everybody moves toward the exit. Hamid releases the manual lock and Zhang kicks open the door. More thin, battery-powered light floods in. As soon as the door is open, Qoqa roughly shoves Grandfather forward, Klas and Lev start cooking off grenades, and Wen arms her RPG and moves up behind them all.
Qoqa has only a split second to assess the situation, and perhaps three before, ready or not, Klas and Lev chuck their grenades. She looks down the corridor and sees that the well-armed gangsters are still at the far end but moving up quickly. Shielded behind Grandfather – her pistol to his head – she shouts a dire warning. This has the intended effect: Everybody in the corridor freezes for just an instant.
However, an instant is all that's needed. As soon as Qoqa is clear of the door, Klas and Lev dash out and hurl grenades down the hall. This causes the Russians to snap out of their surprise and react, but they can't react fast enough – the cooked-off grenades detonate an instant after they land, scattering deadly fragments and sending Grandfather's men reeling. Qoqa, knowing this was coming, bears Grandfather to the ground. Lev is fine, but Klas is nicked by a stray fragment, which fortunately stops in his vest.
Before the surviving gangsters can react, Wen lunges out, crouches just above Qoqa and Grandfather, and fires her RPG into the smoke and fire. The projectile streaks down the hall and explodes. Whatever the grenades didn't destroy, the rocket does. Wen seems to know what she's doing; the explosion is just far enough away not to flatten her allies, and the backblast is carefully angled away from Klas and Lev. Those two and Wen receive nothing worse than singed eyebrows.
When the smoke clears, none of the mob soldiers are in any state to fight back. A quick assessment by the medics is that nine are dead for sure and the rest will join them shortly. With that, the Agents grab their weapons and their prisoner, and start making their way out of the basement.
To be continued . . .
Their plan
I think I would have left one camoflaged sniper outside to cover them if/when they have to make their get away.
The other thing to try mgiht have been some premade booby traps hidden around the house and ground. Given that their are civillians around it might have been better to make these out of flashbangs/fireworks or alternatively set them to go off from a detonator. That way they could distract any opposition from asualting them on their escape.
What were all the optional rules added for the scene?
Re: Their plan
The only problem there is that their snipers are their best gunmen in general, and one of them is also their explosives expert. They're really more valuable indoors where there's trouble for sure than outdoors where they won't even know which exit their associates will take.
What were all the optional rules added for the scene?
A lot of time- and equipment-based skill modifiers for the explosives, several different complementary skill rolls for many tasks, etc. Some optional martial-arts related rolls for force-marching prisoners and determining which face or torso hits were really skull or vitals hits. Everything to do with finding each enemy's exact distance from each blast and calculating his concussion damage, and then finding large-area DR for each guy to apply that to . . . then rolling for fragments for each guy and determining random hit location . . . then checking for the outcome of each wound, making all the HT rolls . . . and then making the rolls for flash and deafness due to explosions.
Re: Their plan
Re: Their plan
We'd talked about leaving a sniper or two outside, but like Sean said, we didn't know where the group would be leaving from, and we had to rush into the situation without being able to plan much. A sniper or two would have been overrun if it had turned into a shooting war, which it seems to have anyway. If we're playing it by ear as much as we have, it's best to keep the group together. Besides, the only place with decent views would have been on top the helicopter hangar, right next to where we blew up the fuel tanks as a distraction, so that was out.
The optional rules were all brought out in part because this is my first real experience with Gurps, and I wanted to see the whole thing in action. Pretty impressive, and let me tell you: grenades are nasty.
Re: Their plan
I forgot all about the exploding fuel tank until I reread the last post. That did pretty much rule out hiding anywhere nearby.
Re: Their plan
We basically ended the adventure during tonight's session. There will be more shooting and insanity in that write-up, as well as another surprise revelation about the scope of Grandfather's crimes. But the Agents will get a well-earned rest . . . and I suspect that Torsten knows exactly what skills Qoqa needs to beef up!