The Tragedy of Chernarus III: Beyond the Acheron

Poja · June 13

The Tragedy of Chernarus
Beyond the Acheron

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This thread serves as the third part in the anthology known as The Tragedy of Chernarus and concerns the events of June 2024 and later. Other threads lay the backstory for not only the Pojački Emergency and the subsequent Chernarussian Conflict but also the establishment and growth of Chernodrinsk both during that conflict and in its aftermath.

An unrecognized, breakaway state, Chernodrinsk was formally established by refugees escaping the Chernarussian Conflict and has since grown into a mafia state under the control of various criminal syndicates as well as the militant group the Chernarussian Red Star Brigade (Chernorusskaya brigada Krasnoy Zvezdy; CbKZ). Classified as a terrorist organization by the Pojački government, the CbKZ was born out of the militias of the Chernarussian Conflict and still fight that very conflict demanding Chernarussian independence. The CbKZ dominates the political landscape of Chernodrinsk but does not have so much power that it can oust the criminal syndicates - nor can it afford to do so. Long since a nuisance and an irritation to Rugi, the CbKZ have been a focus of many law enforcement and intelligence operations over the years. The CbKZ have made a number of criminal activities their primary source of income and many hardliners have accused them of "rejecting their roots," which has led to a minor power struggle within the group, bringing us to where we stand today.

This thread will serve as part of my Chernodrinsk expansion. For the other parts, please visit the links below as they are formed. This is a story in progress but all will be revealed to completion in the end, weaving a tragic story in Pojački history that goes back to time immemorial and will haunt our children's children's children.

With respect to this thread's title, Beyond the Acheron, imagery is drawn from the famous epic written by Dante, the Divine Comedy, specifically the first and most well-known part, Inferno about Dante's journey through Hell. The Acheron is one of five rivers of the Underwurld and its purpose does vary by source but for the sake of our purposes here, we are using Dante's version. Acheron, in Dante's work, forms the border of Hell and metaphorically forms the border between Poja and Chernodrinsk only here, Charon won't be ferrying souls across. I hope you enjoy.

Understanding that nothing happens in vacuum in a roleplaying community all are invited to take part in this whether it is posting their internal reactions or taking a more active role. Regardless, I only ask that you message me on our Discord just so we can iron out the specifics. I am not going to discourage anyone from participating but I can only ask that we adhere to the boundaries of realism and cooperative writing.

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Poja · June 13

Table of Contents

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Part I
- Prologue: Fireworks
- Chapter I: Disbelief
- Chapter II: A Shattered Peace
- Chapter III: Demands
- Chapter IV: Our Nightmare
- Chapter V: A New Dawn

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Edited September 5 by Poja (see edit history)

Poja · June 13

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Prologue
Fireworks

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Poja · June 14

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Chapter I
Disbelief

Wednesday, 5 June 2024 | 02:00 hrs [UTC-3]
Chernodrinsk, Lygorod | 50 km from Chernodrinsk-Chernarus Border

Ilya Salnikov was an old man in a young man's profession. Fifty-two, which was more than double the age of the men around him, Ilya had lasted so long thanks to an unhealthy mix of discipline, experience, and luck. Truth be told, luck was likely overrepresented on the pie chart of reasons why he was still alive and though it might run out one day, would certainly run out one day, that day had yet to come and so long as it was on the distance horizon, he wasn't very concerned with it on a day-to-day basis, leaving those thoughts only for the moments of darkness or drink, where they belonged. Nothing but business was on his mind now as he walked almost inaudibly through the thin whisps of fog that settled around the area on this chilly, crisp June morning.

In the mountainous geography that surrounded Chernarus, the temperature was always about five degrees cooler and even more so over the past week as steady rains brought the temperature down even further into the low teens and brought about late-night fog. If he'd been a more philosophical man, Ilya would have thought the crisp, cool air and the wispy fog was a foreshadowing on what was to come but he only saw the tactical advantages that lay before him, nothing more and nothing less. For now, the wispy fog was simply just something he had to walk through to get to his destination, a sizeable but formless building not eight hundred meters in the distance. Made only slightly visible because of its contrast against the background, it sat in a lot with no lights, bathed in a darkness that only a moonless night could cast. Metaphors upon metaphors slipped past him in the light breeze, swirling the fog but not his mind.

Of course, this wasn't to say that Ilya was a dimensionless being, he was simply too much business and not enough of anything else. Perhaps that was more of an affliction than it was a benefit but in his line of work, Ilya couldn't afford anything less.

When he reached the building, he went through a beat up, unmarked side door and found himself on the inside of a cavernous building that was open floor-to-ceiling, end-to-end. He stood on a cracked, concrete slab that was strewn with dirt and debris, the detritus of neglect. Once a 25,000 m² warehouse, it was hardly a sight anymore. The remnants of its old life still lingered, a broke down forklift, faded lane lines, overhead bay markers, inadequate fluorescent overhead lighting, and of course a small shipping office that was a structural engineer's nightmare. That office was to his left, empty and abandoned but not reappropriated like the warehouse had been.

Ilya let his eyes adjust to the change in lighting, which was in stark contrast to the moonless darkness outside. Here, the few still operable fluorescent lights cast columns of light against the backdrop of harsh shadows, illuminating some objects and ignoring others. Those objects happened to be thirty-two military trucks, a mix of cargo trucks and light armored cars, arranged and parked with neat precision in three rows facing what used to be the dock doors for semi-trailers. Ramps had been built to allow ingress and egress by these vehicles but any inspection of them would reveal shoddy construction and deteriorating stability. Ilya had personally done that inspection but deemed them "good enough." They only had to work twice and half of those obligations had been fulfilled when these vehicles entered this building so many days earlier, trickling in at the darkest hours of the night, headlights off, guided by care and patience. Illya had seen to the arrival of each and every one of these trucks and ensured that they were placed in the appropriate positions before inspecting each and every one of them meticulously. The success of the operation hinged upon each truck being an exact replica of another one down to the very serial numbers and markings.

With his eyes adjusted, Ilya checked his watch and looked out ahead. Men milled about, quietly talking amongst themselves. Some noticed his arrival, others did not. In the former was a man named Kiryl who was half Ilya's age and irritating beyond tolerance after two or three beers. To keep him occupied, Kiryl had been given the otherwise menial but important task of spray-painting over the few windows in the warehouse with several coats of black paint. He'd even been tasked to take care of a few skylights. Though everything looked good, Ilya knew the true test of his work would be tonight and as he saw the man and approached him, he could sense the pride in Kiril for a job well done.

When it was plain to Kiril that Ilya was heading his way, he snapped to and those around him did the same. He was within a cluster of eight other men, a complete rifle squad. He was his squad's deputy squad leader and would have carried the rank of mlađi vodnik or junior sergeant, had he been in a conventional man's military. Ilya would have been a general-brigadni or a brigadier general. Such was the vastness between the stations of both men that when Ilya approached the squad, no one dared speak, not even the otherwise ambitious squad leader. "Kiril," Ilya spoke, looking up at the skylights above, "I believe you've done an otherwise satisfactory job," his native Chernarussian carried with it the accent of someone from the countryside, not unusual for members of this outfit.

"Thank you sir," Kiril answered. Ilya had nothing more to say nor did he wish to dwell alongside Kiril too long for the man had an unusually strong odor of onions and cabbage coming out of his mouth. Whatever these men had eaten had been something foul and its traces apparently still lingered. Ilya had no other stops to make, no other men to address, nothing further to review. Each squad had their own checks and men in charge of them and those men were entrusted to do everything necessary so that those higher up would not need to bother themselves with the minutia and instead focus on things that mattered most of all.

Ilya worked his way through the vehicles until he came to the frontmost vehicles in the rows. Each row was neat and orderly, identical to the row beside it and at the very front were two light armored trucks positioned in such a way as to lead the rest out of the building. It was here that Ilya stopped and found the only man whose station was higher than his. "We're ready," Ilya said as he stood before the man who was using a redlight flashlight to read a map.

"Good, that means we're on schedule. Assemble the men and have a count done. I'll address them," he said without ever looking up from the map.

With a nod of assent, Ilya turned around and walked back the way he came, shouting, "Men assemble" on the way. Without gripe, without chatter, with only the sounds of feet shuffling and conversations ending, the men assembled in lines as Ilya walked past them. "Squad leaders, count your men!" Ilya shouted again, his voice echoing in the cavernous warehouse. Coming to a stop somewhere near the center of everyone, he waited in silence for a minute while squad leaders counted. "Sound off," Ilya called next and one-by-one, the squad leaders sounded off that each and every man was accounted for and thus, before Ilya, stood 213 men. He was number 214 and coming up beside him was the last man, the man in charge of this entire operation. "Men, at ease," Ilya said before taking a step back, at ease himself.

"Men, I don't believe I need to tell you the gravity of this operation. I may be leading it but it will be you who execute it. You have trained, you have trained again, and when you thought you'd had enough training, you trained yet more. Tonight there will be no training. Tonight we execute the real thing. Each and every one of you knows his role, each and every one of you knows the contingencies. You've memorized them over and over again and for that I couldn't be prouder. Tonight you will be me proud, you will make yourselves prouder, and you will make Chernodrinsk proudest. That is all!" He stood back and rendered a salute and those in front of him, all 213 men, rendered one in return. "Dismissed!" With little commotion, the men did as they were told and filed into their vehicles. The man turned to Ilya and put his hand on Ilya's right shoulder. "This is going to be historical. The traitors and the tyrants will feel our wraith like never before."

Nothing further was said. The man walked off, back to his vehicle, back to his map, back to his own thoughts. Ilya would enter the vehicle next to his. It would take another ten minutes before everyone was ready, before the vehicles were started and running. Only then were the lights in the warehouse cut off, casting the interior into darkness. No one turned on their vehicle's headlights and two bay doors were opened, each one bathed in the glow of a red lamp. Ilya's vehicle departed second and behind him, row after row, thirty vehicles follow. The doors were closed and those that remained behind began a methodical sweep for any remnants of the soldiers' presence. It would take hours before they swept through the entire place, took away the red lamps, and vacated the premise themselves and when they had it was as if no one had ever been there, as if no one had staged a thirty-two vehicle, 215-man fighting force there, as if nothing ever happened.

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Wednesday, 5 June 2024 | 04:25 hrs [UTC-3]
Chernodrinsk-Chernarus Border

Ilya looked at his watch. We're still on schedule he thought to himself as he looked out at the road ahead. In front of him was the lead vehicle in the entire convoy. Thus far, the journey from Lygorod had been quiet. They took backroads that were sparsely traversed even during the daylight hours, let alone at this late - or early depend on how you viewed the clock - of an hour. We're still on schedule, he thought to himself again, pleased thus far with the uneventfulness of the journey.

Ilya had handpicked each driver in the convoy, having put them through significant driving tests. Graduation to the role required that one pass not one but two tests. The first test was to operate the vehicle of his assignment, at night, in blackout conditions, avoiding a number of obstacles along the way. The second was to do the same thing but in a five-vehicle convoy so that not only did the drivers have to pass individually but as groups. If each driver could do this in a group of five vehicles, they could do it in a group of thirty-two vehicles. Each man that drove was required to be able to see well at night without glasses or contact lenses and to be able to drive with both their natural vision and night vision goggles, a set of which was atop each driver's head, ready for use along the way since the entire journey from Lygorod to the border would be made without headlights or any lights of any kind, lest they get spotted.

This was just one piece of the plan that Ilya had been instrumental in developing along with a half-dozen others. For years, they had been planning this as a small group, compartmentalized amongst themselves taking in codes and having secret meetings out of the direct or peripheral vision of anyone not privy to the operation. Secrecy was the most valued aspect of this entire operation and that they were in the midst of executing it was a testament to their ability to maintain that compartmentalization and the secrecy required.

Ilya had fought to keep the execution of the plan as simple as possible. Complexity in combat lead to men dying and to failure. This wasn't meant to be a one-way suicide mission and thus the men who were taking part in it needed to be able to execute it properly without worrying about when their "glorious death" was about to be upon them. Yet, no matter how simple the plan could be, there were several waypoints along the way that could make or break the operation and one of those was fast approaching, the border checkpoint.

Lygorod had been fifty kilometers from the border but the drive had been closer to seventy with the snaking roadways and unideal route. They were now approaching five kilometers from the border and this make-or-break moment was upon them. Behind Ilya's vehicle was another identical vehicle but behind that was a truck with nine men. Right on cue, that vehicle shot out from its place on the convoy and accelerated past everyone and away into the darkness. We're right on schedule, Ilya thought to himself once again as the vehicle ripped past, the wind wake blowing right through Ilya's open window, adding to the diesel fumes that were already swirling the vehicle from its position as the number two vehicle.

The convoy itself drove on for another three kilometers before halting in an otherwise abrupt and surprise manner to anyone looking at it from the sidelines. In fact, none of these vehicles had visible brake lights, all of them having been taped up to prevent the light from leaking out into the night. This is why it was so important to train the drivers. They needed to be able to drive in these conditions without headlights or brake lights, without the moon, without streetlamps, with only their own vision or the aid of night vision goggles. Furthermore, it was important because the convoy itself needed to be operated in such a precise manner. The vehicles themselves had to be replicas of vehicles in the Chernarussian Territorial Army but so too did the driving tactics of these men. They'd memorized the Pojački manuals cover-to-cover and they were carrying them out now, driving the precise way that the manual stated. Nothing could seem out of place beyond. Even as large as the convoy itself was, military convoys on the highways wasn't so rare a sight that they would arouse immediate suspicion. So long as they could pass a basic litmus test, they could carry out their mission. That was what Ilya pushed for during planning and it was why they were starting off with a high degree of success.

Having stopped just two kilometers from the border, the convoy waited for several minutes. In Ilya's vehicle, all was silent except the rumbling of the diesel engine. His driver had his night vision goggles down and was scanning the area just as the two men in the back were. Ilya was focused on the radio, listening for the signal to proceed. He held his breath and waited for what seemed like more than minutes but not quite hours until finally, someone broke squelch three times in rapid succession. One…Two…Three… he counted in his head. Ahead of him, the leader's vehicle began to move and so too did his moments later. The convoy was moving again.

Two minutes later, the convoy reached the border checkpoint and passed unaccosted through the open gate. Anyone looking at the concrete shack that made up the border checkpoint would see no lights on, no sign that anyone was there, no indication that it was manned. That was because it wasn't manned on this night, of all nights, and that wasn't by happenstance. The organization had seen to it that money passed from one hand to another and the lieutenant in charge of staffing the checkpoint had his men stationed elsewhere on this evening, which was unusual in and of itself but he covered his tracks by simply stating that another unit was on duty for this night and that they had "swapped schedules." Instead of a four-man team sitting at the checkpoint with assault rifles and manning a general-purpose machine gun, there was no one.

That's one, Ilya thought to himself knowing that now they were beyond committed. There was no turning around anymore. They were on Pojački soil, more importantly they were on Chernarussian soil. It was here that headlights were turned on, to drive down Pojački highways without headlights was to arouse a significant amount of suspicion and any highway patrol officer would be well within his right to stop the convoy, which would mean a radio call that a "large military convoy" was being pulled over at a specific spot on a map. If the right person was listening, the entire operation would be tanked right then and there. That was why Ilya had checked out each vehicle personally, to see that their headlights were working, that their tires were properly inflated, that the unit insignia was stenciled on correctly, that the flags were in place, that nothing would suggest these vehicles weren't part of the Chernarussian Territorial Army. If someone looked further then the vehicles, they would find that each and every man was wearing the same uniform as his Chernarussian counterparts, even down to the unit insignia. This was as far as Ilya had prepared because it was as far as could be practically prepared. If someone pressed further, they had two choices, they could try to talk their way out of it or they could draw first blood. The former was preferable to the latter because whenever someone made a traffic stop, there would be a check-in and that check-in would happen long before they reached their destination. That would put every police officer for miles on the hunt for a "large military convoy," which could not be easily hidden. Thus, everything had to be perfect. The vehicles had to be driven accordingly and that meant headlights on and taillights too.

When the entire convoy had passed onto Chernarussian soil, they halted yet again. Two men from each vehicle got out and quickly uncovered the taillights, ripping the tape off and stowing it inside of their vehicles. It took less than a minute to accomplish and from there, they were back en route, looking like nothing more than a large military convoy driving on the open highway at an otherwise ungodly hour. It wasn't necessary usual but neither was it unusual. In and of itself, they wouldn't arouse too many suspicions.

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Wednesday, 5 June 2024 | 07:45 hrs [UTC-3]
Chernarus, Birogarsk | Birogarsk City Hall

Ilya watched the sunrise from his seat in the vehicle and noted the way the light changed the landscape ahead and around him. They'd been driving for hours now, snaking their way through southern Chernarus. For the first hour, they'd seen only a handful of other cars and trucks on the road. Even tractor trailers, which often moved at night, were sparse in these rural areas though there had been a dozen or so parked alongside the highway in designated areas, their drivers fast asleep. Ilya, and everyone else for that matter, had been watching out for police vehicles but none had been seen. Ilya thought that he might have seen one around 05:50 but no flashing lights had materialized and so he put the thought out of his mind.

After dawn, the traffic did begin to thicken ever so slightly, just enough to be noticeable but not enough to slow them down. Per convoy regulations, they were already going slow enough, maintaining only 65 km/h on the highways and sticking to the rightmost lanes. This caused some issues for vehicles entering the highway at the wrong time, forcing them to halt and wait for the convoy to pass. One inattentive driver even wound up missing his exit as he found out that he could not cut through the convoy to make is exit. His gesturing and screaming from inside of his vehicle were largely ignored by the drivers of the convoy. What did he think he would accomplish anyway? These men had rifles; he had a cup of coffee. By and large, drivers kept to themselves. A few honked horns and the soldiers waved, like soldiers do. "We are normal" was the message they were sending and the message was getting through.

Close to 07:00, their destination began to materialize ahead of the convoy and signs whipped past saying the distance, BIROGARSK 50 KM. To the north, it was lit from the side as the sun rose above the horizon and climbed its way into the sky. The volume of traffic increased the closer they got and they were within the city limits at 07:25, right on schedule. Minutes later, as they exited the highway and entered the city itself, the convoy split up into three sections. Ilya watched from his window as vehicles peeled away, five here, five there, the rest staying in tow. Here we go he thought to himself as they stopped for a red light.

The first five vehicles to separate made up Echo Platoon. Thirty-nine men in one light armored car and four trucks bumped along the road adhering to local speed limits and traffic laws. They kept in formation and turned away from the outer ring road and towards the city center. Behind them, traveling a similar route would be another thirty-nine men in another five vehicles, Foxtrot Platoon. That left the other four platoons as the main convoy, heading to a third destination.

Echo Platoon was led by a man named Artemiy, a rough man in his mid-thirties with more tattoos than visible skin it seemed. He smoked like a chimney, drank like a fish, and had never lost a brawl. His men were incredibly loyal to him and he was incredibly loyal to them. Perhaps the most favored of all of the platoon leaders in the operation, there was a reason his platoon had been given the honor of "kicking things off" and that entirely rested on the man's capabilities and the capabilities of his platoon. In each and every evaluation, he and his men scored the highest. There was no disputing it. Foxtrot Platoon almost always came in second and thus that was why they were operating independently as well but alas, it was Echo's "time to shine," so to speak.

From his seat in the lead vehicle, Artemiy looked at his rifle between his feet and unhooked his seatbelt. He picked up the handset for the main radio and broke squelch five times, his unit's signal that they were good to execute. One break came in return, the affirmation to proceed as planned. There would be no further communications. Artemiy put the handset back and saw their target materialize two blocks in front of him. They stopped for a red light and Artemiy reached to the radio mic affixed to his left shoulder. Keying up the transmit button, he said only a handful of words but each man listening, which was his entire platoon, knew what those words meant. "Echo, option one alpha."

The light turned green and the vehicles moved forward. A block later, they sped up and sped right through the light as it was turning from yellow to red. No one on the opposite side of traffic dared to challenge them and moments later, they skidded to a halt in front of their main target, city hall. Artemiy and the thirty-eight men in his platoon poured out of their vehicles in seconds. Without orders they split into four groups with Artemiy leading the first group. With nine men in tow, they blew through the doors of city hall and immediately began to open fire. Behind him, nine men waited, the squad leader counting in his head to 120 for when he would burst through the doors and begin to attack. The rest of the men formed up around the vehicles providing full, 360° coverage to protect both the vehicles and the rear of the attacking squads. Nineteen men would go into city hall and Artemiy wanted all nineteen men to come out and be able to move right into their vehicles and not get bogged down in a gunfight.

Leading the first squad into city hall, Artemiy and his men fired indiscriminately. Everyone who fell in their sights would be shot. Their assault rifles barked rounds one and two at a time, each man maintaining full trigger discipline. They moved quickly and purposefully as one unit and then as separate units were necessary due to choke points. They didn't fire from the hip or spray rounds everywhere, instead they fired from the shoulder in controlled shots. One man carried a large, automatic weapon and he fired in short bursts, his rounds tearing through everything they contacted, whether it be file cabinet, walls, or flesh. Where they came up to closed doors, they kicked them in and tossed in grenades but they kept moving. Those in the rear protected those in the front and in seconds, the ten-man unit was in front of the mayor's office. They burst through, Artemiy laying waste to the mayor's secretary who was frantically trying to find cover.

Most in the city hall were still stunned. The lightning pace of the attack meant that people had little time to think and many froze where they were. Some dove under desks only to be shot by rounds piercing through the thin metal or wood. In the mayor's office, his secretary was hardly reacting when she was facing the barrel of an assault rifle. Artemiy's round caught her in the chest and send her flying backwards onto the floor, dead before she hit the ground. The men moved forward, slamming through the doors to find the mayor and some of his aides in an early morning meeting. Artemiy and his men opened fired, raking them with rounds, killing everyone to the last man by which point the second squad of nine men was moving into the building to conduct "mop up operations." Plainly put, this was a more methodical search of the building to kill anyone left alive. Wearing gas masks, they threw tear gas around to bring people out of hiding, lobbed grenades into offices and where they expected people might take cover, and they carried cans of gasoline that they dumped onto everything and anything flammable. Artemiy and his squad joined them and the slaughter continued unabated for five minutes, at which point they'd done as much damage as they needed to do and began to exfil out of the city hall though not before Artemiy and his men tossed matches and lighters into the puddles and pools of gasoline, instantly starting an uncontrollable conflagration that would ultimately burn the building nearly to its foundation hours later. In their wake, they left twenty-nine men and women dead, including the mayor and his senior staff. Twenty-one were wounded, some critically, few escaped injury all together.

Outside, Artemiy and his men began the second phase of their attack. Some men got into the vehicles; others walked alongside. They had a three-kilometer drive to make and they would do so causing absolute pandemonium along the way. They shot at cars, sending drivers ducking for cover; shot into buildings, shattering windows and ricocheting bullets into bedrooms and kitchens; and, they shot at people in the street. Their objective was two-fold, the first being to cause as much chaos as possible as to paralyze the city's first responders and the second was to grab hostages. Artemiy and Echo Platoon would cause a significant number of casualties on their three-kilometer trek and in the process take 165 people hostage, all of them at gunpoint. At first, they threw them into the trucks and then piled them on top of one another until they ran out of room. The rest were marched alongside the trucks, cowering at each gunshot. Those that tried to flee were shot and left to die. Those who stayed were allowed to live. Three kilometers later, they reached their secondary objective and, in their wake, more than a hundred people lay dead, dying, or injured. Dozens of apartments had been shot through, dozens of cars lay stopped in the middle of the road, many with their engines destroyed and steaming, immovable except by tow truck. Blood stained the pavement for three kilometers and anyone who survived it could only look up from where they'd hid and realize that in the blink of an eye, the wurld before them had transformed from a quiet Wednesday morning, to the pits of Hell.

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Wednesday, 5 June 2024 | 07:47 hrs [UTC-3]
Chernarus, Birogarsk | Police Headquarters

In much the same way that Echo Platoon struck City Hall, Foxtrot Platoon would strike their own target. Like Echo Platoon, they moved through the city adhering to all of the local traffic laws and they had a slightly further journey to make though by their own luck, they didn't run into anything but green traffic lights along the way. Sitting in the back of the second truck but the third vehicle in the convoy, Gleb looked over the seven men of his squad who were seated around him. "Cold as ice! Lock it down!" He shouted to them as he heard over the radio his own platoon leader's execute code. "All right!" The truck sped up and he felt it, knew what would come next and braced himself as the vehicle skidded to a halt. As it did, the rear gate was dropped and out poured his squad. He was the last to go, ensuring that everyone got off safely and once the driver climbed out, his nine-man squad was complete.

They moved quickly, assembling up on the front door of their target, the city's police headquarters and where all of the city's cops were dispatched from morning, day, and night. They would be in the middle of morning roll call, every cop for an entire shift in one place at one time. Normally, this would be suicide but owing to a very - until now - safety-oriented policy, policemen weren't allowed to be armed in the station. In fact, Birogarsk was one of the few cities in the country that had such a rule, largely born out of one too many incidents. Policemen retrieved their duty weapons from their lockers only when they were setting off for patrol, not before, and when they returned, they were required to deposit them back into the lockers before they proceeded into the station. Until this morning, it had never been an issue but when the first ten men of Foxtrot Platoon burst through the door and opened fire, the cops found they had no means to defend themselves.

Of course, this didn't stop them. Many ran to get their duty weapons, others picked up whatever was closest to them and charged. Virtually all of them were in their vests and outside of civilian employees and a few detectives, this might have saved them except that their vests weren't rated for the high-powered rounds out of Foxtrot Platoon's assault rifles and light machine guns. Those rounds tore through these vests with little effort and cops were felled before any could so much as touch a shooter.

Like with Echo Platoon, Foxtrot Platoon would attack with two squads. The other two would remain in cover for them against returning police vehicles, since it was shift change after all, and any potential reinforcement threats. By this point, the attack on city hall was well underway and reports were flying into emergency line switchboards of gunfire. Radio calls to the police units on patrol were firing off as well and then came nothing more than a haunting silence after the only dispatcher on duty reported, "Shots fired at HQ…request…" That was her last transmission. Her body would be found later, slumped over in her chair, her hand still clutching the ancient microphone, half of her head missing.

Gleb and his men moved in right behind the first squad, hefting the gasoline cans that would be used to light the building on fire. Unlike at city hall though, they waited on thirty seconds, mainly because they were dealing with a significantly more capable enemy than bureaucrats and civilians in city hall. In fact, it would be second squad that caused the majority of the casualties at the police station, shooting many officers in the backs as they tried to flank the main element. Wearing a gas mask of his own, Gleb tossed a pair of tear gas grenades shortly after entering and members of his squad tossed a half dozen more. Then they switched to the fragmentation grenades, throwing them into offices and behind cover, well away from where the main element was. The attack, not unlike city hall, was fast, very fast, too fast to be countered. The closest anyone got to the firearms lockers was six meters. When Gleb stepped over the officer's corpse, he recognized the man and for the hair of a second felt some pity for him. Months earlier, Gleb had worn a hidden camera and gotten a tour of the police headquarters and it had been this man who'd given it to him. What a small wurld, he thought to himself in that brief moment of pity before he continued on, signaling to his men to pour the gasoline. It would take them a little longer than it did at city hall to finish their attack but eight minutes instead of five, while it might seem like an eternity, was not long enough for any significant reinforcements to appear. Two police vehicles approached, lights and sirens blaring, and both of them were shot up before they got within fifty meters of the headquarters. The single policeman in each car was killed, the only armed resistance the city's police force could have mustered was no match for the high-powered, 7.62×39mm bullets of a light machine gun banging away at 700 rounds per minute. After both vehicles had been stopped, a pair of RPGs were fired into them, turning both vehicles into giant fireballs. City services were paralyzed.

Gleb and his men vacated the headquarters leaving thirty-nine officers and eight civilians dead, including the dispatcher, not including the two dead cops in their burning vehicles. Twenty-one officers and another nine civilians were injured, left to flee the burning building. In the midst of it all, no one knew that the city's police chief had been killed in his office by the blast of a grenade, his body peppered with enough shrapnel that he died almost immediately. Along with him, the most senior officers in the city's police force were dead or dying, unable to escape the inferno that the police headquarters became. Like city hall, the building would burn for hours but firefighters were left helpless, unable to combat the blaze as pistol and rifle rounds from the station's armory cooked off throughout the course of the blaze, each gunshot sending everyone for cover though no one would be killed or injured from the ammunition cookoffs that happened.

With the station vacated, Gleb and the rest of Foxtrot Platoon began their trek towards the same destination as Echo Platoon so that the entire force would be consolidated at one location, all 215 men in one spot, digging in, holding down a target with as many human shields as possible. Foxtrot Platoon's job now was to get more. They loaded up their trucks with some hostages from the immediate area and began the trek, it being five kilometers instead of three. They would cause more mayhem than Echo Platoon, shoot through more cars, into more apartments, and take 142 hostages of their own, treating them much in the same way. When the vehicles were full, they were marched alongside and anyone who tried to flee was shot and left to die. The men made sure not to kill these escapees but rather to led them fall to the ground and bleed out, screaming in agony as a warning to the rest. When they reached their destination, their hostages were added to a rapidly growing total.

In the wake of both Echo and Foxtrot Platoon's march, they would leave 149 civilians dead or dying and another 232 injured. The morning was shaping up to be the bloodiest day in Pojački history, including during the six-year Chernarussian Conflict. Casualties mounted, chaos reigned, and the city's services were utterly paralyzed. Cars blocked access for ambulance and fire crews, people cowered everyone, the echoes of gunshots sent everyone for cover, and most of all, no one could reach the city's senior police or political staff. Phones rang and rang and rang or didn't ring at all. People asked, "Where is everyone? Why are they not responding?"

Social media was absolutely on fire with thousands of messages coming in every second from the city's population. From there it spread throughout the internet. News stations would pick up the story faster than the Pojački government. Birogarsk was home to 67,239 people and on that morning, every single one of them with a social media account who wasn't dead, dying, or injured, was posting in all caps to hide, to take cover, to survive, begging and pleading for rescue, praying to their gods of choice, and wondering where everyone was.

• • • • ‡ ‡ • • • •

Wednesday, 5 June 2024 | 07:50 hrs [UTC-3]
Chernarus, Birogarsk | Birogarsk General Hospital

The first bursts of gunfire almost startled Ilya. There's no turning back, he thought to himself, not that there would be any turning back once they crossed the border. The organization couldn't swing another bribe like it had, couldn't keep up the secrecy for too much longer, couldn't hold back the rage that it felt much longer. The first few pops that rolled through the city streets undoubtedly came from city hall. The crescendo of chaos grew over the next few minutes as the gunfire from police headquarters joined. All of these targets were within five kilometers of where Ilya and the main force was going, which was the Birogarsk General Hospital, the city's main hospital, where they hoped to capture at least 300 or 400 hostages. Combined with whatever Echo and Foxtrot Platoons grabbed, they would have enough human shields to grind the Chernarussian and the Pojački governments to a halt.

Moving on the hospital, they struck it five minutes after the first gunshots and three minutes after the city's police force came under siege. Twenty-two vehicles came to a halt around the hospital and out poured 137 men, Ilya included. They had four, thirty-nine-man platoons that swept through the front doors of the hospital. Ilya watched as the lead platoon, with the man in charge, went first and then another and another until three had entered the hospital. Ilya wasn't in charge of seizing the hospital, the commander was. Instead, he was in charge of ensuring that all of their supplies and ammunition made it into the hospital. With thirty-nine men under his control, he quickly assigned eighteen of them to unload the trucks and the rest to hold the perimeter. People poured out of the hospital's many entrances, some running for cover, others running towards the trucks. Anyone who fled away from them was ignored, no sense wasting bullets but those who fled to them were gunned down as they approached.

Ilya never fired a shot, didn't ever pull his rifle from his shoulder. His job was supervisory and he was fine with it. He wasn't uncomfortable with slaughtering civilians; in fact, he'd been one of the early proponents of this operation but he felt no particular bloodlust to take part. He was more focused on the success of the operation as a whole and so he focused on ensuring the trucks were offloaded quickly. Crate after crate after crate was brought through the front doors of the hospital. All twenty-two vehicles would be offloaded. Radios were taken out of them and each one was swept over quickly to ensure there was nothing left behind before Ilya strode through the doors of the hospital. By that point, the building was largely secure. For sure, the ground floor was secure and no one else would be escaping. He didn't know it then but they had just seized a significant number of hostages, 748 in all between 442 patients and 306 employees. When Echo and Foxtrot Platoons joined them, they would have 1,055 hostages, far more than they could have expected. They were looking at 300 to 400 with an upper limit of 500. Now they had a little more than double, which would certainly complicate matters but, to Ilya, that was a problem to solve in the future.

The men went to work quickly barricading themselves into the hospital and corralling the hostages into a few areas so that they could be more easily watched over by the soldiers. They were also doing another sweep of the hospital, moving through it again, checking every room and closet, every office and lab, ensuring that no one was hiding and could either escape or attack them when they weren't looking. "There will be no John McClane's here today," Ilya said, referring to a famous Christmas movie that was popular not only throughout Chernodrinsk and Poja but the entire wurld. There was truth though, a single man could derail their entire operation if allowed to move through the area unchecked, communicating with law enforcement, causing absolute havoc. Ilya wouldn't have it, no one would, and so a thorough search was made. They would continue to search throughout the entire ordeal, manpower not being much of an issue for them.

Twenty-five minutes after they first arrived at the hospital, when all of their men were present and accounted for and the first group of hostages rounded up, Ilya walked over to the nearest station and looked around at the mess that had been left behind. It was one of the many nurses station throughout the building but this one in particular was of special value to Ilya and his group for this was the maternity ward. Dozens of new mothers and their infant babies were now hostages and when it came to hostage negotiations, no one was more valuable than new mothers and infant babies.

The man smirked as his eyes drifted over blood-spattered paperwork as he tried not to trip over a dead nurse at his feet, her eyes wide open, shock and horror written on her face to characterize her last moments on Eurth. "Pity," his voice emotionless and uncaring. These people weren't people to him, couldn't be people to him. They were traitors, traitors to the very genetics that made up their bodies, traitors to historical magnificence of Chernarus. "Pity," he said again, mocking the dead nurse as he picked up a phone and dialed a memorized number. It rang five times before finally being picked up, "Is this the Pojački Broadcasting Network?"

"It is," a young girl said, probably an intern, her voice youthful.

"Do you have a pen?"

"No."

"Please get one."

"Okay," Ilya could hear rustling in the background, rolled his eyes at this, and yet listened in silence. "Okay I have it. Who is this message for?"

"This message is for the traitors of Chernarus, the filthy swine that inhabit the government," he talked quickly, could hear the girl writing as fast as possible. "In Birogarsk this morning, thousands of traitors have been executed and ridden from this wurld!"

"Can you repeat that? 'Biro'?" The young girl was obviously not thinking, not understanding Ilya's words. She was just trying to get the message down.

"I will not repeat myself!" Ilya roared and then did, "Birogarsk, write it down! Faster! Thousands, do you have this?"

"I do."

"Thousands more will die if the Pojački government does not grant independence for Chernarus and hand over the illegal Chernarussian government to the people for trial and judgement for their treason!"

She scribbled as fast as possible and Ilya waited. "Okay and who is this?"

"This is the Chernorusskaya brigada Krasnoy Zvezdy!" The Chernarussian Red Star Brigade, a group designated by the Pojački government as a terrorist group, had just laid siege to Birogarsk, killed hundreds, taken over a thousand hostage, and were now proclaimed to the wurld that they'd done it, that no one was safe anymore, that the entire wurld as everyone knew it had changed in the blink of an eye. Slamming the phone down, he looked around the empty corridor, at the dead nurse, and then he saw it in her eyes, saw precisely what she had seen in her last moments, as he last breaths came from her body, just before her mind shut down and she passed, disbelief.

• • • † • • •

Poja · June 23

• • • † • • •

Chapter II
A Shattered Peace

• • • • ‡ ‡ • • • •

Wednesday, 5 June 2024 | 08:23 hrs [UTC-3]
Konfederacija Poja, Rugi, Central District | House of Magnates

"It's all over the news already and we're just stepping into a briefing now," Chancellor Jelena Jurić said into her phone, "yes I'll keep you updated. Thank you for your time." She ended the call and put the phone back into her pocket for the short walk down the corridor towards the secret conference room, otherwise known as the "SCIF." In the basement of the House of Magnates, the room itself was a secure place for the briefing of the most sensitive of classified information, being protected against electronic and other methods of eavesdropping, accessible only by people with special clearance. As Chancellor of the Konfederacija Poja, Jurić certainly had clearance but she had no special privileges, which meant that before she passed through the entryway, she had to deposit her phone and her smart watch into a signal-blocking bin outside. A sentry standing guard ran over her with a special wand, looking for any transmitters or electronic devices and then permitted her entry. Inside was already a dozen people and many more joined into a virtual meeting, their faces on the screens before everyone.

"All right, my apologies at being late, I was just fielding a call. Are we all here?" Chancellor Jurić asked and to her right, a man nodded. "Okay let's begin with the situation in Birogarsk. We're clearly late to this event since it's already all over social media and the news. Who's got information?"

"That would be me ma'am," answered Dragiša Zorić, the Minister of State Security. "Early this morning, a force of approximately two hundred individuals, believed to be from the CbKZ, laid siege to the city of Birogarsk. Now please everyone understand that all information right now is preliminary and thus subject to change. The attacks began at 07:45 at the city hall where several dozen of these terrorists attacked the city hall and lit it on fire. Simultaneously, they attacked the city police station with similar results, and one of the city's hospitals. Terrorists from the city hall and the police station then moved through the streets towards the hospital shooting at civilians, killing and wounding many, taking many others hostage. They are now holed up in the hospital with hundreds of hostages.

"Based on this information, we could be looking at up to a thousand killed or wounded between the attacks. We have been unable to reach the mayor or deputy mayor and they are presumed killed or grievously injured. The same goes for the senior staff of the city's police force. Contact was made with one officer who has given us an estimate of just ten on duty, unhurt police officers in the entire city of over sixty thousand. Rescue personnel are combing through the area around city hall and the police station but so far have been unable to make significant progress due to the sheer number of casualties. Fire services are on scene at both the city hall and the police station but are unable to work the fire at the police station due to detonating ammunition posing a severe safety hazard.

"As we can see from the news and from social media, this attack was highly coordinated and planned and the footage out there shows just how devastating it has been."

"How can we limit the dissemination of this media? It's heinous and should not be circulating, victims' families will be seeing what no one wants them to have to see." All eyes shifted to Chancellor Jurić for what was a very peculiar and unorthodox question.

"Ma'am, what you ask is not possible. We would have to shut down the entire internet, television, and radio for this entire country. Beyond breaking dozens of laws, the task itself is impossible. We must simply live with the information as it is being shared." Minister Zorić certainly had the ability to shut down the internet in the entire country but it was not something that could be done easily or without significant consequence, plus it required an executive order from the President, the Chancellor, and the House of Magnates all working in collusion unanimously.

Premier Iosif Tarasov, visibly uncomfortable with the request, pushed forward slightly in his chair and unmuted himself. As Premier of Chernarus, he was the governing authority in the region and until a national emergency had been declared, the one responsible for issuing orders and directives. "Ma'am, our focus right now ought to be on isolating the terrorists at the hospital so that we can limit further attacks around the city as well as providing on-site governing leadership. I have already put in an emergency order to police forces of nearby towns and cities to send aid to the city and have requested the mayor of Chelyamovsk to be our on-site, acting executive in the city. Chelyamovsk may only be thirty thousand people but it is the closest large city and time is of the essence."

"Thank you Premier," Chancellor Jurić answered. "Are we positive this is CbKZ?"

"Not yet but I would say we are ninety-nine percent sure given the reporting of the PBN, which stated that an individual claiming to represent the CbKZ called the station to take credit for the attack. We're working on tracing that call as we speak," Minister Zorić was definitely in the hot seat and could feel the questions starting to come; after all, as Minister of State Security, he and his departments had failed to keep the state secure.

"How did we not see this coming?" The questions began and each one that came in rapid succession from both the President and the Chancellor kept him in the hot seat yet he had the same answer each time. There had been no warnings, no indications, and nothing to suggest that the CbKZ could pull off such a brazen attack.

"Whoever within the CbKZ, if they are the culprits, planned this attack, they did so in a compartmentalized manner using only their most trusted associates. It is unlikely that the individuals who carried out today's attack ever communicated with anyone else or even knew what the plan was until they were either en route or in Birogarsk. The level of planning and sophistication suggests to us that, if this is the CbKZ, they are not only aware of our level of penetration in the organization but also aware that we may have individuals in high places."

"What's our plan then? We can worry about this later in the inquiry."

"Ma'am," Tarasov spoke, "I have directed police forces in the area to conduct reconnaissance on the hospital area and to report back what the situation is. In the meantime, as city services work on treating casualties, we have called upon all off-duty personnel to provide support to those services. Reconnaissance on the hospital does not need a large force and would not benefit from a large force. Manpower is needed at the crime scenes to ensure evidence is collected properly and that civilians do not impede upon the ability of rescuers to treat casualties. Police from mutual aid will be directed to provide support for both taskings throughout this morning." Tarasov himself had been a police officer for fifteen years before he'd been injured on the job chasing a suspect. The injury was all his own versus being attacked but it still garnered him an early retirement, after which he'd gone into politics, swiftly moving throughout the Chernarussian legislature to become Premier. This was now his second term in that office.

"We're facing a nightmare scenario here," President Petrović said from his own office in the Predsjednički Dvori not but a few hundred meters away. "Birogarsk is under siege by a well-armed, well-trained, and capable terrorist force. They have hostages and will be releasing demands. We have to limit the ability of these terrorists to control the situation, harder said than done. As per our laws, the Chancellor remains the ultimate executive authority at the federal level and the Premier at the region level. We must ensure that party politics does not hinder this situation. I am requesting that a state of emergency be issued to the military forces of both the Chernarussian Territorial Forces and the Pojački National Forces. Birogarsk will not be able to handle this situation with just police forces."

"I will authorize this Mister President," Tarasov swiftly answered, he'd already done so in fact. The Chancellor, on the other hand, was a little slower to respond but relented ultimately when the Minister of National Defense explained it would take several hours to put the level of military forces needed and that time could not be wasted with any delay to that decision.

• • • • ‡ ‡ • • • •

Wednesday, 5 June 2024 | 08:45 hrs [UTC-3]
Chernarus, Birogarsk | Birogarsk General Hospital

Ten officers were all that Birogarsk had for a police force that, as a whole, numbered almost two hundred. With off-duty officers being called in and a mutual aid request sent to the entire region, there was help coming but it would take some time to get there, which meant that the most senior officer on duty in the entire city was Vodnik Kirill Shubkin who went by the nickname Sasha and who only had six years on the job. Sasha had been on his way back to police headquarters for the end of his shift when someone foolishly blew through a red light in front of him. He might not have chased the suspected otherwise except it was the morning rush hour and pedestrians were beginning to the enter the crosswalk. Stopping this twenty-nine-year-old who was running late to work had saved his life.

With little to go off of except their own radios, he gathered his nine officers about five hundred meters away from the hospital, well out of its line of sight, and against the backdrop of screaming and crying civilians - both injured and hysterical - and the sirens of ambulances and other rescue services, he took stock of what he had to work with, which wasn't much. Of the nine officers, three were just one rank below him with four to eight years of service, four were a level under with between three and five years of service, and the remaining two were rookies, with barely six months on the job and they had eight vehicles between themselves, the rookies riding shotgun with the more senior officers. Luckily, they all knew the area well enough but unlucky for them, they didn't have much in terms of weaponry.

"Two shotguns and our pistols, that's all we got," Sasha said as everyone gathered around the hood of his car. They'd turned off the lights to remove the annoyance. "We're going to split into two teams, three and three, I want the rookies and you two," he pointed to two of the three seniormost officers, "to hang back in case we get engaged and cannot retreat. This is a reconnaissance job, we're not looking to get into a firefight, which means no one shoots first I don't even care if one of them is sitting in front of the door picking his nose naked." Everyone nodded, "We go weapons drawn, no sense getting caught off-guard. Shotguns stay back, one per rescue team. We're going to roll up closer and then go on foot. I'm leading the first team, we'll advance down Fontan to the front while the second team advances down Zhemchug. We're not getting too close, just need to get sight on the hospital and see the situation. No one needs to be a hero; we've lost too many men as it is and we're all we got right now. Questions."

A few minutes later they were off with their vehicles advancing separately towards the hospital. They moved without lights and sirens to a point just before the hospital but still well out of its line of sight. The two rescue teams moved up as well but kept just out of view, engines running, cars in drive, with only the driver holding the brake to keep them from rolling further. Each rescue team was in a rough spot. The rookies took the passenger seat, shotgun in hand while the senior officers sat in the driver's seat. "Your only job if we get called in is to just pour lead towards the shooters, you got it," went the conversation in one car. Terrified, because everyone was, the rookie only nodded. "We'll be fine just do what I say," another nod.

The two teams moved on foot now, weapons drawn. They watched every direction, kept low, and moved quickly using the buildings for cover until they finally reached a corner. "Once we pass here, we're in their view and they're in ours. You got it? Fingers off the trigger but get ready." He leaned around the corner with just one eye and looked around. "I've got multiple trucks, all parked, view is blocked. We'll use the trucks for cover. On me." He moved out, keeping low and moved up to the nearest truck barely ten meters away. With the trucks between them and the hospital, they moved alongside, checking each one quickly for anyone sleeping but the trucks were empty, which was something of a relief. They needed to do reconnaissance, not get caught up before they even got there. Moving up to the frontmost truck, they were roughly fifty meters from the hospital now but still covered by the vehicles.

Using just hand signals now, Sasha indicated he was going to take a look and he did, peeking out from around the front of the truck. "I've got the front entrance, multiple terrorists inside no one outside, windows I see plenty of armed sentries, roof nothing yet. Looks like they have the front door barricaded." He popped back around into cover. Behind him, someone was relaying that all over the radio. A similar report came from the other team. Keeping in cover, he indicated he was going to look again but this time things were different.

The gunfire began almost the moment he peeked around the corner of the truck and it came from several open windows higher up on the hospital floors. "Get back!" He shouted as he popped back into cover and shielded himself against the hundreds of ricocheting bullets pinging off the trucks and the ground. "Get back! Retreat!" He yelled as the men pulled back, keeping the trucks for cover. Whoever was shooting at them continued the fire and walked the fire backwards, likely tracking their shadows or their feet underneath the trucks though they did not have a clear shot. "Rescue teams hold! Hold!" Sasha and his men were okay, they weren't pinned down, no one had been hit, and they had good cover, there was no sense introducing another element that would not have the same benefit.

The rear team did the same, pulling back amidst their own engagement though it was unlikely they were seen with the same level of clarity as Sasha's team as the gunfire did not track them the same way. Pulling back around the corner, Sasha and his men quickly rested and looked over one another. By some spate of miracle, no one had been hit, not even by a ricochet. "I think that's enough," he said as he caught his breath, "back to the staging area, they are probably listening to our comms," no way they were ready for me like that, I doubt anyone saw me that first look." Back they went, returning to their staging area just a few hundred meters from the hospital, all ten men and their vehicles intact and everyone asking, even if they didn't say it, "Now what do we do?" Sasha didn't have answers.

• • • • ‡ ‡ • • • •

Wednesday, 5 June 2024 | 09:30 hrs [UTC-3]
Chernodrinsk | Ozyorsk District

Sergei groaned as he reached out to his end table and silenced his ringing phone, his eyes never opening, his body moving only enough to do this one task. He let his arm go limp, hanging off the edge of the bed and was able to go back to sleep quickly but that lasted all of two minutes before his phone was ringing again. This time he opened his eyes to see the time, barely 09:30, which meant he'd only been asleep maybe three to three and a half hours. He rolled onto his side and grabbed his phone, looked at the caller ID, and answered it, "Hello?" His voice sounded like he was communicating from the afterlife and not the afterlife with harps and angel wings.

"Sergei Usatov," a woman's voice on the other end said. It wasn't his name.

"Sorry you have the wrong number."

"Am I calling three-two-seven, two-two, four-eight?"

"Yes."

"Then I have the right number Sergei Usatov. I am calling in response to a survey you filled out…" Sergei's brain suddenly clicked and in that fraction of a moment, the hazy drunkenness that he still felt suddenly washed out as his body filled with chemicals. He was listening now, "Concerning your interest in television monitoring has been pulled. I'm sorry to inform you that based on our responses, you would not make an ideal candidate. Thank you very much for your participation."

"Bummer," Sergei said as he tried to decode the message in his head. "I'll try again next year."

"I'm afraid that we are ending this program early. Thank you." The call ended and Sergei looked down at his phone before swinging his feet over the edge of the bed and onto the floor. Of all of the messages to receive, this was the direst. He'd long since been told that if he were to receive any message from a "television survey" that it would constitute a major emergency of a nature so significant that nothing could stop him from uncovering the details, even if it meant his own discovery, which was indeed what the last part meant. The "ending the program early" meant just that, his days were numbered.

With significant pain and effort, he leaned forward and grabbed his pants, fishing out the pack of cigarettes before lighting one. He didn't have to look too far to see what was happening as it was all over the news, all over social media, and thus all over his phone. "Jesus," he said as he smoked the cigarette and willed himself to stand up and head into the bathroom. Covered in sweat that had a scent of alcohol to it as his body worked to expel the toxins of several drinks too many, he ran himself a cold shower if just to rinse off more than anything else. He didn't need to look pretty he just needed to be functional and right now he was barely that, thus of little use to the Konfederacija Poja.

Sergei was a double agent, a Liari by birth but a Chernarussian by genetics. His family had moved from Chernarus to Liaria during the Chernarussian Conflict and Sergei, whose real name was Anatoly Rychenkov, had been picked by the Ministry of State Security for this type of work. He excelled at it but to do so meant that he had to take the bad with the undesirable and last night he'd gone toe-to-toe with a "good friend" in the CbKZ just to earn another level of trust with the man. Nothing indicated that the group was going to do anything and Sergei, as he rinsed off, tried to replay the previous night, looking for any indication or hint in the conversation that could allude to Birogarsk. Nothing was his final conclusion but in truth, he barely remembered much, so potent was the moonshine liquor they were drinking. He'd stayed in the shower for a little longer if just in some vain hope that his body would stop expelling perspiration and start soaking up the water to rehydrate him and kill the hangover that was already a massive marching band inside of his skull. His stomach was raw and he felt like he was on the edge of vomiting, knew that he wouldn't be able to eat for some time but thought he might try a cup of coffee, if just to try to take away the rawness that ached within him.

He knew what he needed to do, without even being told. He had to get with his contacts within the CbKZ and find out not only what was happening but how the hell it had been pulled off without so much as a peep. Sergei hadn't been apprised of the attack beforehand, he'd never even heard so much as a whisper about it or seen anything to indicate that it was coming. Had he, he certainly would have alerted his handlers to it.

• • • • ‡ ‡ • • • •

Wednesday, 5 June 2024 | 10:10 hrs [UTC-3]
Chernarus, Birogarsk | Birogarsk General Hospital

The scenes in Birogarsk remained chaotic. There simply weren't enough rescue personnel to deal with the catastrophe and even with the addition of fifty-two off-duty officers, it wasn't enough. Officers were on the way from other cities and they'd been trickling in but there was still significant coordination to be done. The ten-man group led by Sasha was still holding near the hospital while the fifty-two were being dispersed around to support the rescue efforts around city hall and the police station as well as en route to the hospital but they could only get so close themselves. By 10:10, Sasha's force was now bolstered by an eleven-man SWAT team from Chelyamovsk as well as fifteen other officers from Birogarsk, Chelyamovsk, and three nearby towns. With thirty-six, Sasha's force was essentially the largest concentration of police within the entire city. It also meant that Sasha wasn't in charge anymore, that fell to Poručnik Stepan Gusarov, a man Sasha knew well and respected enough.

Gusarov was now the third highest-ranking cop in the city, propelling him way up the list and essentially giving him the role of a kapetan. He was also now under tremendous pressure to make a move on the hospital, one that Sasha himself did not agree with given his own experience there just over an hour earlier. Still, he was outranked and Gusarov had the ear of everyone around him, even the rookies.

"We have a sizeable force now," he said looking at the men around him. "Reports of almost two hundred in the hospital mean we're not going to break the siege with just us but we cannot let these terrorists dictate the terms. They need to know that we're not afraid of them and we're not going to let them sit in the hospital with their hostages. If we can create enough chaos outside that might help those inside. SWAT is going to lead the way on this and I'll let Štab Vodnik Zhutov tell you what our plan will be."

Zhutov, the head of the SWAT team, was no stranger to these situations. "The front of the hospital on Fontan is inaccessible so our point of entry will be the ambulance entrance on Zhemchug. We'll advance fast down the road and then reverse through those doors with our armored vehicle, we do it all the time with drug raids. Once we break through the doors, flash bangs go out, and we move to engage the terrorists inside and free as many hostages as possible before exfil. Your job will be to cover us for exfil and make sure the hostages aren't shot in the back. Understood?" The officers, blinded by their helplessness and desire to do something, largely agreed. Sasha didn't nor would he and as Zhutov and Gusarov broke up the briefing, he took the lieutenant aside.

"Sir, this isn't a good plan," he said plainly but in a low enough voice that no one heard him.

"No shit but it's all we got. If we don't act now and keep them on their toes, they'll likely believe they are in a fortress and hole up here for days and possibly even longer. They're trapped in there so we have to treat them like they are."

"What if they execute the hostages? They've left hundreds of bodies in their wake coming here."

"They need them as bargaining chips, especially if we're able to get a few dozen away and get them to doubt their own ability to protect the hospital. Once we knock through that wall, they now have to guard that point and move everyone off the first floor. That gives us an advantage to trap them inside and work this before they can get too comfortable. Now are you onboard vodnik?"

"Sir." Sasha said and nothing more, knowing full well how poor of a plan this was. Minutes later, SWAT was leading a column of police vehicles, lights and sirens off, heading towards the hospital. Their vehicle was an armored truck, capable of withstanding small arms fire up to and exceeding assault rifles and general-purpose machine guns thanks to its one-and-a-quarter to four-centimeter-thick armor plating. Used typically in bank robberies and drug busts, one such vehicle had taken hundreds of rounds from three heavily-armed bank robbers with not one round penetrating the hull. It was the closest thing to a tank that civilian law enforcement had and it had proven invaluable countless times.

This SWAT team, in particular, was well experienced with bank robberies and drug busts, almost all of which involved heavily-armed criminals but heavily-armed criminals weren't the kind of shooters that were in the hospital. To say they were outmatched was an understatement that rapidly became apparent. The vehicle closed on the hospital rapidly, screaming down Zhemchug at nearly one hundred kilometers per hour. From the hospital, small arms fire lit up the vehicle but, true to its performance in the past, those rounds ricocheted off causing only cosmetic damage to the truck. Inside, the SWAT members held cool but some had a laugh at the pinging of the rounds, feeling invulnerable in it and their heavy body armor.

Behind them, the unarmored police cars were a different story. While the fire was concentrated on the SWAT vehicle, some was coming their way and the officers were largely ducking as rounds poured into their vehicles. Almost all of them stopped short and were relieved to see the SWAT vehicle close to its point where it would reverse into the doors. What came next could only be described as pure terror. From an upper floor, two men leaned out of separate windows and aimed what could only be described as tubes down at the armored truck. As it came to a halt and the driver threw it into reverse, those two tubes belched fire. Rockets streaked away from them and smashed into the roof of the vehicle just as it began to reverse. The armor plating, which was good against small arms fire, was useless against the high-explosive, anti-tank warheads of the RPG-22 rocket launchers. Each rocket was capable of penetrating forty centimeters of steel armor, never mind just four centimeters. The vehicle and its occupants stood no chance as it exploded into a massive fireball that blew the doors off and windows out from the sheer pressure of the explosion.

Two SWAT members tumbled out of the back, both completely engulfed in flames, getting less than a meter before they collapsed over, dead. The police vehicles, now getting chewed up, were quickly trapped as two more RPGs streaked down and nailed the last two vehicles in the convoy, killing the two occupants in each car. Sasha and his men poured out of their vehicles and quickly used them for cover while they attempted to retreat. A twenty-nine-minute gun battle would ensue leaving the entire eleven-man SWAT team and nine additional officers dead. Two more would be injured, one of whom was alive only because Sasha dragged him out of the line of fire and covered his body while an RPG detonated nearby. Bullets came from everywhere and even a response force, sent in to provide rescue, found themselves driven back by the gunfire. The CbKZ terrorists had trapped the cops and hoped to kill all of them in a funnel of fire and would have succeeded had they not had the forethought to break through the front doors of two buildings on Zhemchug and hide inside for cover while their vehicles burned outside on the street. It was a disaster, an unmitigated disaster, worse even than Sasha expected. Until now, no one knew that the CbKZ terrorists had RPGs let alone the ammunition to fire as much as they had. They didn't know just how much ammunition they'd brought with them but if the engagements of this morning were any indication, they certainly had more ammo than their opponents.

• • • • ‡ ‡ • • • •

OOC: By this point, the entire wurld would probably know some inkling of what was happening here since it'll be all over social media and basically the only thing being covered on Pojački television, especially the Pojački Broadcasting Network. If people want to post in any government reactions it might be about a week before I get to the next post so please have at it.

• • • † • • •

Edited June 23 by Poja (see edit history)

Poja · July 20

• • • † • • •

Chapter III
Demands

Wednesday, 5 June 2024 | 10:55 hrs [UTC-3]
Konfederacija Poja, Rugi, Central District | House of Magnates

Chancellor Jurić stared at the television screen on the wall, something of a blank expression on her face as she struggled to process everything she was being told by the President's senior advisor on security, Ružica Rak, who the President had personally designated to be his liaison in the unfolding crisis. A rising star within the party, the President had brought her into his administration shortly after his victory. Whispered rumors throughout party offices and the hallways of the Predsjednički Dvori attributed her success to a sordid affair between herself and the President but that couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, the real truth of why she was in that position had everything to do with her background, a background that only a handful of people knew. Shortly after her graduation from college, she applied to join the Ministry of State Security (MDS) and she was accepted but not into just any program but rather a very hush hush program for undercover agents.

It was in this capacity that she helped bring down one of the largest sex trafficking networks in the KP and she did it all from the inside. Having never been on the official books of the MDS, she took her leave of the organization after eight years undercover and found a significantly more stable and less threatening way of life in corporate security. It was from there that she had come to the attention of the party, chiefly because Dragiša Zorić knew her name. The rumors could swirl all they wanted but if anyone knew the truth, they would be terrified of just what she was capable of and even more terrified to cross her. No one survives eight years undercover in such an organization without doing any number of unsavory and despicable acts.

Ružica had only just started to explain the scope of the casualties between city hall and the hospital when she was quickly interrupted, "One moment," she turned away from the camera and towards someone else in the room, someone off camera, "Madam Chancellor, you're going to want to turn on PBN right now." Someone in the room with the Chancellor did it automatically, which snapped the Chancellor's attention right out of whatever endless hole she was falling into listening to the sheer scope of terror rampaging Birogarsk.

PBN was running around-the-clock footage from the hotel with a camera positioned on a rooftop a kilometer away from the hospital. The elevated position showed the carnage outside of and around the front of the hospital as well as the convoy of trucks that were now blocking the roadway. That footage was now minimized to the small graphic over the anchor's shoulder, otherwise known as the over the shoulder graphic or OTS. The stern faces of Rajko Popadić and Natalija Zebić were overshadowed by the voice that was coming through the audio. It was the first time that the wurld was hearing the voice of Ilya Salnikov, the same voice that had called the station hours earlier to proclaim that the CbKZ had orchestrated the largest terrorist attack in Pojački history.

"…We are in control of the hospital and all of the surrounding areas. Any further attempts to assault the hospital will be met with a wall of rockets and bullets! We have just demonstrated our capabilities to the police who foolishly attempted to storm this fortress! Now their bodies shall be burned beyond recognition, a just punishment for their betrayals against the people of Chernarus.

"We have two thousand hostages in this hospital including hundreds of women, children, and newborn infants. Do not test our resolve! They are mere human shields to us and we will throw them all in front of the bullets before you get to any of us. Do not call our bluff.

"In order for this situation to end," the two reporters were just letting the terrorist speak, afraid to interrupt him but also afraid to allow his message to be broadcast unchallenged. It was a no-win scenario for them. "The Pojački government is illegally detaining the following people…" Salnikov rattled off several dozen names, continuing to do so uninterrupted, "Next, the government in Chernarus must resign for 'treason against the Chernarussian people,' thirdly, there is to be an independence referendum in Chernarus that is to be held free and fair without meddling from Rugi or the traitors to the Chernarussian people, and lastly, the Pojački government in Rugi that oppresses the Chernarussian people must forgo any and all military objectives against the independent nation of Chernodrinsk.

"Our demands are non-negotiable. We have wired this hospital with two hundred kilograms of Semtex and we will destroy it and this entire block if we have to! Do not test us!"

"May I ask who we are speaking with?" Natalija asked, her voice almost trembling.

"I will only speak with Chancellor Jurić directly!" With that, the call abruptly ended.

"Did we lose them? Did the connection…" Natalija said to someone off camera, "It appears that the call was disconnected by the other end. There you have it folks, the demands of the CbKZ, the release of dozens of prisoners, the resignation of the Chernarussian government, an independence referendum in Chernarus, the cancellation of any future military plans against Chernodrinsk, and lastly, they will only speak with Chancellor Jurić directly. I implore the Pojački people to stay safe and let us hope that this situation can be resolved without further bloodshed. Continuing our coverage…"

The television was turned off and for a few moments there was total silence and then the room erupted with conversation. The same was happening with the President's office as well. "How could they air this shit; they're just playing into the hands of the terrorist letting their air their demands" were commonly spoken themes in both offices. The rooms were mixed between rage at PBN for airing the terrorist's phone call and acknowledging that they were in a no-win situation.

Then everyone's eyes fell back on the Chancellor and an uncomfortable silence lingered. "Madam Chancellor," Ružica spoke up, shattering that silence, "it would be unwise for you to negotiate directly with the terrorists. We have trained individuals for this."

"Thank you," she said, a rush of relief flowing through her. She'd looked ghostly pale until that moment and now color began to flush back into her skin, "Yes I would think that is the best. What are our real options right now?"

"Right now? None," Ružica said plainly, "we're not in a position to do anything at the moment but allow this situation to unfold further. Police and military units are en route to Birogarsk but we must take this terrorist's threats seriously. We have no way to independently verify the number of hostages or if they've wired the building with explosives, which means we have to assume that these claims are true, even if these claims are almost always an exaggeration solely meant to deter further action. We know there are hostages, we know they are well-armed, and we know they have no problem killing anyone who threatens them. We don't have much choice but to wait this out for now."

"We need to stand firm," Premier Tarasov answered from his own office, "the people of Chernarus must know that the government is not only on their side but that they have a solution for this crisis. They must understand that, in a time like this, it does not matter what political party anyone is or whether they are right or left of center. They need only know that there is complete and total unification against these terrorists. That we will protect every Chernarussian city and civilian from this madness."

"Mister Premier, we're working on that, I have an emergency session of the House of Magnates meeting shortly. We will stand firm against this threat and grant the necessary powers needed to resolve this situation effectively and quickly. We should have an announcement in the next two hours." Everyone looked at their watches. It was a little after 11:00 in the morning. "In the meantime, Mister Premier, what is the current situation on the ground?"

"Police are trickling into Birogarsk from other cities to reestablish law and order in the city though, truth be told, the emergency services line has been quiet. Not even the city's criminals want to take advantage of a situation like this, which goes to show they have more class and respect than these terrorists, imagine that," he shook his head in disbelief. "Right now, we have a cordon set up around the hospital for several blocks, no one in and no one out, though we are going door-to-door ensuring that people are aware of the situation and recommending they stay inside and keep their doors and windows locked. Anyone who doesn't feel safe we're transporting to a central point where we can offer resources and support. Schools are in lockdown. Once we have enough personnel, we're going to coordinate with office workers and other city workers to return to their homes in phases to ensure that the streets do not become gridlock, which would be an enticing target for further terrorist attacks."

The meeting was ended and the Chancellor found her way to the floor of the House of Magnates where the magnates were gathered, waiting on her arrival. She'd call the emergency session to order and put to task a major piece of legislation that granted emergency powers to the Chernarussian Premier as well as any military and law enforcement personnel on scene. The purpose would be not only to end the crisis but also to ensure that the terrorists didn't manage to get their hands on even more hostages as well as deter any vigilantism that might arise from the population of Birogarsk, including the family members of those trapped inside the hospital.

• • • • ‡ ‡ • • • •

Wednesday, 5 June 2024 | 13:18 hrs [UTC-3]
Konfederacija Poja, Rugi, Central District | House of Magnates

For the past several hours, the House of Magnates had been abuzz with activity, all related to the unfolding crisis in Chernodrinsk. The Chancellor had taken the floor shortly before 11:30, looked at the magnates before her and thought momentarily about the hostages, "Today marks a dark chapter in our nation's history. I think I speak for all of us when I say that such acts of terrorism have no place in this or any society nor would anyone look upon the cause of these terrorists and sympathize." Heads nodded around the room. "It befalls upon us to fight this scourge today not in a faraway land but rather within our own borders where thousands of men, women, and children lay dead, dying, wounded, hostage, or forever scared by these heinous and cowardly acts. In order to do that, I stand before you with a request that is simple to ask but grave to comprehend.

"As Chancellor of the Konfederacija Poja and the representative head of government, the domestic policy of this nation is my ultimate responsibility, as it is yours as this nation's legislative body. Together, we guide this nation through our bills and our debates. We act within the confines of our laws, the guidance of our predecessors, and always in the best interest of our people. Therefore, I come before you this morning to ask that we open for debate and subsequent vote a bill that will grant myself and members I designate with certain emergency powers to end this crisis, protect the Pojački people, and rectify the crimes of today.

"I request these powers not lightly but out of necessity. As Chancellor, I am bound by limitations that you are all aware of, limitations that hinder the rapidly progressing situation in Chernodrinsk. I request that these powers be granted for the duration of this crisis and not one minute sooner or longer than is necessary to resolve this situation, free the Pojački people, and punish the cowardly terrorists holding them hostage, thank you." She stepped back from the podium and looked out at the magnates before her. From the start of this crisis, each and every one of them expected this moment to come before them and now that it was here, there was still some sort of disbelief amongst them. Is this really happening? They asked themselves over and over and over again.

Chancellor Jurić knew what she was asking and knew precisely how the press would play it but she had no choice. The situation was unfolding rapidly and even though she was the head of government, there were certain actions she could not take without consulting with the House of Magnates, without getting buy-in from the President, and so on and so forth. Overall, about two dozen such limitations hindered her ability to respond, which included her deployment of military assets. Even though warning orders had been sent out and military units were being moved into place, they could not physically act without getting authorization from the House of Magnates. With emergency powers granted, she wouldn't have to consult them on these decisions. It was a big ask, the kind of ask that many opportunists used to cement power that they would never give back. The Chancellor was not of that type of personality but it was a crisis that truly showed a people what someone was really like. Granting her emergency powers might be something that was never rescinded and could easily be abused to keep Poja in a perpetual state of crisis. It had, to a point, happened once already with the Pojački Emergency and the subsequent Chernarussian Conflict. When the Pojački Emergency was finally lifted in 1976, the country had forever changed because of it.

Still at the podium, the Chancellor waited for her first response, which came from one of the five Chernarussian magnates, a man in his late-forties who was something of a Chernarussian nationalist himself being the child of a militia leader. If anyone could see eye-to-eye with the CbKZ it was him but in truth he loathed them because he didn't see them as Chernarussian nationalists, he saw them as criminals looking to harm the Chernarussian people for their own gain. It was thus fitting that he should click on his microphone and with his loud, booming voice proclaim quite simply and quite succinctly, "I am in favor and I motion we skip the debate." One-by-one, the magnates voted and one-by-one, the vote was in favor to the point where the last vote came down to one of the few female magnates, the Dosniman Elmedina Besic who was in her third term as a magnate.

"It would appear we stand on the edge of unanimity," she looked around the room, "I feel a necessity to vote 'nay' to represent the Pojački people who would oppose this motion, as small a minority as they are but I trust they will understand my vote of 'yea' because even though they would not agree with emergency powers, they perhaps do not understand the necessity for them. A vote of 'nay' would have no impact upon the passing of this motion but it would represent them. I can only hope they will forgive me. I am in favor."

"Thank you," the Chancellor looked upon the magnates before her, "together we will end this crisis peacefully, with as few lives lost as possible, and we will punish those who did this. Our criminal justice system shall treat them fairer than they have treated their victims but such is the sacrifices we must make for legitimacy."

The session broke up while the paperwork was formalized, each of the magnates personally speaking with the Chancellor during the recess. When all was said and done, each affixed his or her signature with the Chancellor signing last. From there, they had only one more thing to do, which was to proclaim to the country and the terrorists that the Pojački government would not raise the white flag of surrender. At 13:10, they gathered, in totality, on the steps of the House of Magnates with cameras pointing towards them and journalists itching to ask questions, none of which would be answered. This was not a press conference; this was a statement.

Holding the signed legislation in her hand, Chancellor Jurić spoke to the cameras at precisely 13:18, the magnates flanking on either side of her. "This afternoon, the Pojački government stands unified against the threat of terrorism. In my hand is a signed bill granting emergency powers to my office for the duration of this crisis. I assure you, the people of the Konfederacija Poja, that I will use these powers solely to resolve this crisis and upon its resolution, I shall introduce a bill rescinding these powers and call for a vote. Each and every member of the House of Magnates has affixed his or her assent to this piece of legislation with unanimous approval. Let this be a message to the terrorists in Chernodrinsk.

"You will find no quarter; you will find no sympathy. Release the hostages and surrender immediately. You will be treated to a fair trial and a just punishment commensurate with your crimes. You will be treated better than those you have killed, maimed, and permanently scared today because the Pojački government is not the government of your propaganda but the government of a legitimate nation-state. We believe in fairness, equality, liberty, and justice. Release the hostages now." Her statement was significant if just because of the conditions it was made but truth be told, it lacked the kind of authority she wanted it to have. The CbKZ had all of the leverage and she had none. Surrendering to face justice was hardly a desired outcome, especially considering that many of the CbKZ terrorists had killed people, which carried the death penalty as a sentence. There was no incentive for them to surrender and as they planned this operation to be a bold and crushing statement against the Pojački government, they were hardly going to be swayed by the Chancellor's theatrics.

• • • • ‡ ‡ • • • •

Wednesday, 5 June 2024 | 13:25 hrs [UTC-3]
Chernarus, Birogarsk | Birogarsk General Hospital

Ilya Salnikov fished into his pockets for a lighter, a cigarette already smack between his lips but he was coming up empty, checking each pocket and then checking them again, patting himself down as if he were entering a high security area. "Who's got my lighter?" He finally asked and looked around to the men near him. He was one of five people, which included the man in charge of it all, standing in front of a television watching the speech from Chancellor Jurić. Faces hidden behind their balaclavas, their eyes focused on the screen and the words of the Chancellor save for Salnikov, who was more concerned with finding his lighter. It was distracting enough that the man immediately to his right, without removing his eyes from the screen, reached into his pocket, removed his own lighter, and held it out for Salnikov. "Much appreciated," Salnikov said as he took it and lit his cigarette. "That's better." He handed the lighter back.

"They take us for a joke," their leader said, his voice calm yet full of rage. "This Chancellor thinks that she is in charge, that we will listen to her, that our cause is but that of a petulant child throwing a tantrum on the floor. What must it take to get through to the leaders of this country? Is this not enough?" He finally turned away from the screen as the image cut back to the PBN studio.

"This 'condemnation' is just paperwork. It's so the government can provide something to its people, say it's doing something about this. It means nothing, of course they were going to do this. We've broken a number of their laws after all," Salnikov added, somewhat comedically, "I guess we'll just go surrender then. I'm sure they'll treat us fairly." The men around him shared a light chuckle only, their leader wasn't laughing, he wasn't feeling the same level of levity that they were.

"If the Pojački government cannot see the seriousness of this situation or of the validity of our demands, we're just going to have to make them see it. I would have thought this was enough but clearly they are thicker than I would have imagined," he turned to the men beside him, "I hardly expected them to just cave to our demands but to take this seriously, yes. These theatrics are nothing more than a pathetic attempt to tell their people that 'they are in charge.' We'll have to bring them back to reality." The man was fuming underneath his balaclava and it was plainly evident. "We must prove to the government that our demands are serious, that this situation is serious, and that we have the strength to do what is necessary to achieve our goals."

Salnikov swallowed as he knew precisely what was coming up next. "There is only one way we have envisioned that scenario."

"Only one way," the leader repeated. "Perminov, Krupin," he said to two of the men standing on the other side of Salnikov, "gather some support and see two of our guests to the roof. We must do what we've planned for in order to make it apparent to this government that we are not to be trifled with and treated like an act of teenage rebellion."

"Yes sir," the man named Perminov said as he straightened his back and, in a way, came to attention, the lighter still in his left hand. "Let's go," he said to Krupin and they left the room, their assault rifles in their hands as they excited into the hallway. He stuffed the lighter back into his pocket to free his hand. That left just Salnikov, their leader, and the third man who volunteered to assist, leaving only the other two remaining.

"Do you disagree with what we are about to do?" The leader asked, sensing the moment of hesitation that Salnikov had exhibited only seconds earlier.

"I do not, if I expressed any hesitation before it was only because I expected the government to take us more seriously. I remain committed to our cause."

"Good Ilya, very good," the leader patted him on the shoulder, "we must become the barbarians that we never intended to be in order to achieve victory. There is no other choice but you can sleep easily knowing that this decision wasn't ours to make. We are simply carrying out the only course of action available to us." Whatever justification their leader had didn't quite make it easier for Salnikov but they'd resolved to this when they signed onto the operation so many months earlier. "Come, let's keep our eyes on the television."

In the hospital, Perminov and Krupin had gathered three other men with them and found the nearest collection of hostages, who just so happened to be on the floor below. They had taken a total of 1,055 hostages since the start of their action and those hostages were scattered all around the hospital, grouped together to make them easier to watch over and to control. The group on the floor below was situated in an empty conference room, the table having been used to block the windows as makeshift armor while the hostages sat restrained on the floor. Perminov hadn't stepped into this room yet and, as he did, the first thing he noticed was the pungent smell of urine and sweat. Some of the hostages had soiled themselves and it was uncomfortably warm with all of those bodies in the room. Combined with fear, stress, anxiety, and every other emotion that the hostages were feeling, the pungent odor was hardly a surprise.

Two men stood guard in the room, each armed with a submachine gun and orders to kill everyone in the room if any one of the hostages tried to launch a revolt. Extra magazines and grenades hung from their bodies and two blocks of Semtex plastic explosive sat affixed high up on the walls of the room, a remote detonator plugged into each. Each block weighed 500 grams, which was enough to kill and maim not only everyone in the room but also to cause its collapse as well, which would surely kill everyone who happened to survive the initial blast. The detonator was in the pocket of one of the two men but the hostages wouldn't know which one or even if either of them had it.

When Perminov entered, the two guards straightened up and looked his way. "I need two volunteers," he said, looking over the hostages. They were a mix of men and women, adults all of them, ranging in age from their twenties to their seventies. "You," he pointed down to a man in his mid-forties who had been a patient though clearly not hurt enough to need to be in a room, "and you," he turned now to a woman on the other side. She was in her twenties, perhaps early thirties, it was hard to tell. "Both of you, stand up." They hesitated and Perminov, who lacked patience on a good day, pointed to his men who stepped through the crowd of hostages to get to them, kicking anyone who didn't get out of their way. Forcing the two hostages to their feet, the men swore and spat at them as they dragged them out of the room, following Perminov and Krupin to the stairwell.

Perminov led the way with Krupin just beside him and the rest of the group of men following, the hostages nestled between them, mostly walking under their own accord but certainly not moving at the pace that the terrorists wanted. There was thus a lot of pushing, shoving, and dragging as they went up towards the roof. "Let's go!" Perminov would shout at them as they ascended flight-after-flight, finally bursting through the door at the top and holding it open for everyone. It was there that the hostages, perhaps individually, perhaps through some telepathic connection, realized what was happening. Both immediately broke down, collapsing to the ground, becoming dead weight to the soldiers. Perminov cursed at them in his mother tongue, cursed their existence and their weakness as they were dragged, truly kicking and screaming, towards the edge where there was no ceremony, no fanfare, and no grandstanding.

The man was thrown first, his restrained body simply dragged to the low wall and lifted over by his feet, his body tumbling through the air as he tried to free his hands and grab onto something, anything on the way down. The woman followed seconds later. To the top of the roof it was about twenty-three meters, enough of a height that there was no chance either hostage survived impact and the dull thud that both of their bodies made onto the pavement echoed all the way up to the rooftop where the soldiers now looked down, completely expressionless through their balaclavas.

Inside of the hospital, Salnikov and their leader watched as the cameras had quickly cut from the studio to the roof, zooming in on the soldiers as they walked towards the edge. It was plainly evident that they were dragging people but because of the one-meter wall height, whomever they were dragging wasn't visible until they appeared over the edge and fell. The execution was caught on live television, images that would go out around the wurld, igniting a firestorm on social media and throughout the Pojački government yet, at that moment, their leader turned to Salnikov, his facial expression not unlike those who'd just killed the two hostages and said, emotionlessly, "Now they will know we are serious."

• • • • ‡ ‡ • • • •

Wednesday, 5 June 2024 | 18:28 hrs [UTC-3]
Chernarus, Birogarsk | Tactical Command Center

The afternoon had been rough, not just inside of the hospital for the hostages but outside of it for the entirety of Poja also. Government leaders scrambled, newscasters aired and reaired the footage over and over and over again, blurring out the bodies as they fell, as if that would somehow reduce the vileness of the act. "What you're about to see is disturbing," they would say and then air it again, "Truly horrifying images," they might add afterwards. From their studios all around the country - and the wurld - the journalists played up the attention in front of the camera while online it was a very different wurld. Rage and anger filled chatrooms, social media posts, and message board forums. Interactive gaming communities and chatrooms exploded with rage and emotion. Mods banned people in real-time by the gross, struggling to pull water out of a leaking boat with nothing more than a drinking cup.

On the ground in Birogarsk, the futility of the situation had become even more apparent. Attempts to retrieve the bodies were met with gunfire, a final act of cruelty that the CbKZ terrorists showed to the Chernarussian people, their government, and the Konfederacija as a whole. Police and paramedics would ultimately give up on their attempts, which had even included makeshift white flags of surrender, leaving the two bodies on the street in front of the hospital. The woman's eyes remained open, looking in blank and unnerving horror outwards as her corpse lay only three meters in front of the hospital's front door, blood pooled around her from where it left her body. The man was a meter away, hardly recognizable as who he had been before being thrown off of the roof.

A makeshift command post had been established two blocks away from the hospital inside of an electronics store, the owner graciously allowing the police to do so. He had a sizeable stock room that had allowed the police a good place to rest and recuperate from their multiple attempts to get to the hospital. Civilians and journalists crowded outside where police had established a cordon to keep them from interfering. To the civilians, the officers would say, "Go home, why are you here? Do you not have anything better to do?" To the journalists they would just shake their heads, "Why do you spread their messages?" Emotions ran high.

It had been that way all afternoon and now it was evening with the sun beginning to set on the western horizon. Streetlights would be coming on soon but the crowds surely wouldn't disperse, especially when a growing thunder and rumble echoed in the distance, growing into a crescendo until finally a military column of armored personnel carriers turned the corner, revealing themselves. Painted in dark green, forest camouflage, the eight-wheeled, steel-hulled vehicles with their heavy machine gun turrets and military markings moved in a neat column up the street towards the command center. There were fourteen armored vehicles in all, neatly arranged in a line with one light armored utility truck and two six-wheeled cargo trucks taking up the rear. The group halted just in front of the command headquarters and idled, the diesel engines rumbling and drowning out any regular-volume conversations. Journalists swung their cameras and yelled over the noise from the opposite side of the street to give their on-air narrations of what was just behind them and what had appeared.

From the lead vehicle emerged a tall officer with a slight potbelly bulging underneath his uniform. It was the uniform of the Chernarussian Territorial Defense Force and from the patches on his arm and his insignia, plus the obvious arrival of armored vehicles, he was with the land component of the TDF-CH, as it was known. The man walked into the command center where most of the police had gathered to see the spectacle and found the man in charge, introducing himself, "Major Pavel Kurochkin, Alpha Company, Fourth Battalion, 242nd Infantry Brigade, Motor, reporting." It was a lot to say but he was a man who'd said it many, many times.

"Major, I'm Jaromir Lytkin, mayor of Chelyamovsk, here on authority of Premier Tarasov. We've been expecting you for a while now, please come in the back and I will bring you up to speed." The two men, along with a handful of others, retreated into the stockroom of the store over to the makeshift command center. "Major, situation is really rough. City hall and the police station have been secured since you were last briefed by my team. The police station burned itself out and all casualties have been removed from the streets and treated. We've restored law and order to this city and crime reports are non-existent. Even the city's criminals don't want to take resources away from this."

"How kind of them," the major said matter-of-factly, "how many men do you have?"

"Two hundred in all from fifteen or sixteen different forces around Chernarus of varying ranks and places. We're using at least half to hold the cordons here, around city hall and the police station, and around the hospital. The other half are operating in two shifts around the city. We're expecting another hundred men by dawn to assist with the cordons. Everyone's pretty tired major but they're holding up."

"And what of the hospital? Give me the SITREP there."

"Are you aware of the executions?" The major nodded. "Well, they won't let us retrieve the bodies and we know they have rocket-propelled grenades so even your armored vehicles are probably vulnerable."

"They are," the major answered, having been apprised to the destruction of the SWAT team earlier, "and we can't bang away with our weapons without killing hostages. We have a potential solution though."

"I'm all ears major."

"Smoke grenades during the night and then we'll move up to get the bodies. They're likely to think it's an attack so it will be hazardous but we're willing to give it a go."

The mayor thought for a second but shook his head. "Let's table that for now. As much as I want those bodies off of the street, I don't think it's worth the risk. They're too well armed and fortified."

"Yes sir but we're here when needed. What do you need us to do?"

"How many men again?"

"Including myself, 131 sir. I have three platoons with thirty-seven men each and my twenty-man headquarters element, who will be setting up next door I believe?"

"Yes, that's got enough room for your men. Rotate your platoons around the hospital cordon, that's where they'll be needed the most. The men there are the most taxed."

"Will do, now do we have a direct line to the hospital?"

"We do but they only want to talk to the Chancellor."

"We'll see about that," the major turned around and issued orders to his men and then walked over to the phone. "Get me the hospital then." The phone rang and connected, Salnikov picking up on the other end. "Who am I speaking with?" The major asked.

"Who do you want to talk to," Salnikov toyed with him. "I want to talk to the Chancellor."

"This is Major…" The line went dead. Kurochkin fumed, "Dial it again." He did this eight times in a row, never getting past "Major" until finally on the ninth attempt, Salnikov let him introduce himself before hanging up and so the major continued and continued. He'd try all night long and Salnikov would keep hanging up, sometimes not even answering, toying with and trolling the man and the entire country.

"When the Chancellor calls, I will answer…"

• • • • ‡ ‡ • • • •

OOC: As with the last post, there is no hiding this from the wurld. The events witnessed here would have been broadcast on the Pojački Broadcasting Network television channel, which I am sure is carried throughout the wurld. In addition, other news agencies inside of Poja would be in a frenzy with such an event. Please feel free to post reactions from your government, a random citizen watching television, a news agency, et cetera. Whatever your heart desires.

• • • † • • •

Edited August 13 by Poja (see edit history)

Poja · August 16

• • • † • • •

Chapter IV
Our Nightmare

Wednesday, 5 June 2024 | 22:10 hrs [UTC-3]
Chernarus, Birogarsk | Tactical Command Center

"We have to get the bodies off the street," Lytkin said in a rushed and panicked voice to Major Kurochkin. The major happened to be in the midst of an important phone call with a colonel in military intelligence and had been for the better part of the last ten minutes, the phone's handset wedged into the crook of his neck. He held up a finger to Lytkin, directing him to pause for a moment while he focused on the colonel.

"So far none sir but they're clearly watching the full sphere around the hospital," Kurochkin responded when asked about if they had any perimeter sentries posted. "One second colonel, I'm being handed something important," he pulled the phone away and immediately felt the stiffness and soreness from having been stuck in that position for the better part of the past ten minutes, "what did you say?"

"Major, we need to get the bodies out of the street."

"Just a few hours ago you squashed that idea. What's changed?"

"Just got a call from Tarasov," Lytkin had clearly been put under immense pressure by the premier, that much was evident on his face. "The Premier would like the bodies removed from the street so that we can begin the process of notifying the families."

"Bullshit," the major said, still holding his hand over the handset's receiver, "why wasn't that said before?"

"I don't know major but that's what he said."

"It looks bad on television that's why. Give me five minutes," he turned back to the phone call, "my apologies colonel. I've just been informed that Premier Tarasov would like the bodies of the dead removed from the street. What can you tell me about this? Anything? Yes, I know it's not recommended right now but are we able to do anything? Jam radios perhaps?" The major was looking as annoyed with the request as well as with the responses he was getting from the colonel. "No sir I don't think we can push back ourselves." Lytkin took to pacing around the room, nervously fidgeting. Clearly, Tarasov had impressed upon him that he could not fail in this task but just a few hours earlier, when Kurochkin brought up the idea, Lytkin tabled it. Kurochkin wondered if the mayor hadn't told Tarasov that minor detail and now didn't want to have egg on his face. "All right Colonel, give me whatever you got, thank you." Kurochkin hung up the phone and stretched out his neck, trying to work through the stiffness and soreness.

Lytkin was over in a heartbeat and his voice still panicked but his volume hushed, "What are our options major?"

"Come outside with me," Kurochkin grabbed a pack of cigarettes off of the table, plucked one out, and put it in his mouth. He lit it from his own lighter and returned the pack to the table before motioning for Lytkin to follow him. "We need more cigarettes, there's only two left," he mentioned to someone on his way out, which was the courteous thing to do and done throughout the military when it came to "community cigarettes," which was as much of a fixture in Pojački military TOCs as were headsets, keyboards, television monitors, et cetera. Jokingly, they were often referred to as the "T00 Cigarette," a play on the infamous "Mark I Eyeball."

Outside, Kurochkin walked over to a quiet corner with Lytkin so that they could speak in more hushed tones. "Level with me, why the panic? Not what, four hours ago? Three? We discussed this…"

"I hadn't consulted Tarasov. The bodies are being flashed on television and CbKZ propaganda all over social media."

"Ah ha," Kurochkin pulled the cigarette from his mouth and waved it at Lytkin, "now we get to the root of it. It is 'bad PR then'? Well, it is bad PR, I agree. Those bodies will start to decompose and rot, which will look even worse for PR. God forbid someone's child or mother or wife or husband or whomever catches a glimpse of their loved one's corpse. Listen, I agree we need to get the bodies but we cannot simply rush in gung-ho otherwise we'll be adding more to the pile."

"What can we do?"

"There's no moon tonight," he looked up at the cloud cover overhead and felt the damp crispness in the air. It was a cool night for early June and rain was on the horizon, he could feel it in his ankles and his knees. "That gives us the cover of darkness. We can kill the power to the area for starters. They might have night vision; we have to assume they do. That's why we'll need to use considerable amounts of smoke in the front and the back. They might take it for an assault and begin to fire wildly into the smoke. We'll need to make sure that we keep the smoke up for several minutes so that we can give them time to fire, reload, and consider whether to keep wasting ammunition. It's not a good plan by any stretch of the imagination but…" And at just that moment, someone appeared frantically in the doorway and looked towards both Kurochkin and Lytkin.

"Sir, they threw another one off the roof," the young non-com said loudly, his face ashen white even in the yellow glow of the door's overhead light.

"Dammit," Kurochkin cursed, standing up and tossing the cigarette on the ground. "C'mon let's get these f*cking bodies."

• • • • ‡ ‡ • • • •

Wednesday, 5 June 2024 | 23:18 hrs [UTC-3]
Chernarus, Birogarsk | Birogarsk General Hospital

"Cease fire! Cease fire!" The calls went throughout the hospital as the smoke outside began to thin and clear. "They've pulled back," someone else shouted.

"I want an ammo check, that was a lot of shooting," the leader said as he stood amidst a group of men who had all been brought together by the fusillade of outgoing gunfire. "And a SITREP, I want a SITREP, what the heck just happened?" Salnikov nodded and disappeared while the leader left the area with a few men in tow and went to what had become their own, makeshift command center inside of one of the hospital's numerous operating rooms. "I'm getting sick of this waiting!" He fumed. "They continue not to take us seriously. I am not sure we'll ever get through to these politicians in Rugi. How many of these mongrels must we throw from the rooftop?" Looking around the room at the half dozen men around him, Salnikov noticeably absent, their leader was starting to run into a wall. "Men, I think I am clearly running out of ideas. I suppose we can all hit our limits. Tell me, what do you think?"

A few ideas floated around but none were too significant or noteworthy. Outside of mass executions to get the attention of the Pojački government they had nothing to contribute. He dismissed them with some frustration and then took a seat in his chair and lit himself a cigarette. He was alone a few more minutes before Salnikov was knocking on the door. "SITREP."

"All right what happened?"

"Some sort of operation, perhaps diversionary, perhaps an assault, no one is sure. Power went out, smoke charges went off front and rear and kept going off while heavy vehicles moved forward. Sentries engaged with several clips each, one to four on average, the most was six, a particularly trigger-happy junior. Ammunition count isn't too poorly impacted but we'll have a speaking to with everyone. They just started firing blindly, no signs of any breaching attempts."

"They panicked. We lost power? I hadn't noticed." He had been resting with his eyes closed when the assault happened, awoken by the gunfire.

"Generators kicked in quickly, less than five seconds. We certainly didn't expect that when we planned out assault defense. We won't need the night vision."

"Let's not get too hasty, they could still knock out our power and those generators run out of fuel eventually. No, I doubt it was an assault," the leader said, "maybe body retrieval?"

"One possibility and a theory but it's all we have. Could have just been a probe to test our response."

"Could have been," he mused, "tell me something. I asked the captains but they came up empty handed. We're clearly not getting through to the government as well as we'd like. How to grab their attention?"

Salnikov thought for a moment, "We're confined here. The time to get their attention was when we were moving to the hospital this morning, before we stated our demands. Now we're hunkered down and they know we're not going anywhere."

"I'm working on that actually," the leader said, "our initial plan needs changing but go on."

"It's about pain compliance, we just haven't been dealing enough pain, believe it or not. They expect us to do this because we've already signaled that this is what we're willing to do. It's time to up the ante."

"I'm all ears."

"Beyond this brief moment of spark, I can't offer many details," Salnikov retreated. "I guess I'm better at the ideas than the execution."

"You certainly leant a considerable bit of thought to this operation. If only we could…" The leader stopped mid-sentence, "I know! I need our best RPG gunner."

"Shikhov, not a doubt in my mind."

"Bring him here. I have an idea." Salnikov left quickly to find where the young Grisha Shikhov was. Barely twenty-three, he'd joined the CbKZ as a teenager to make extra money for his family and he soon found that he had a love of violence. He grew within the organization and he was famous for being a crack shot with an RPG, so much so that Salnikov recruited him for the operation personally. It took Salnikov the better part of the next ten minutes to find him but when Salnikov succeeded and brought him up to the leader, he finally laid out the plan. Without any haste, the three of them moved up to the roof, the leader and Salnikov carrying their assault rifles, Shikhov carrying his submachine gun and around his back, a single-shot, disposable RPG tube, which weighed almost fourteen kilograms.

The leader and Salnikov moved onto the roof first in a low crawl, keeping down, scanning the buildings for snipers, knowing that they had to be out there. By keeping low, they used the roof's low wall for cover and, in doing so, were able to advance to the opposite side without giving any sniper a target. "Grisha, come," Salnikov ordered, "stay very low." The young grenadier complied and moved over to them, carrying the RPG instead of slinging it on his back where it would stick above the roof's low wall.

Once there, he prepared the rocket tube by flipping up the sights, arming the weapon, and removing the covers. While he did that, the leader stuck his eyes over the wall and spotted their target. "All right, this tall building there," he pointed, "right side there's a light on about halfway up the building, put it through the window."

"Yes sir," Shikhov answered, putting the rocket launcher over his shoulder. He got himself ready and then quickly popped up, sighted the target, and called out, "backblast clear!"

"Clear!" Salnikov yelled as he put his head down and stuck his fingers in his ears. The leader did the same and Shikhov pressed the firing button on the tube, immediately filling the still, crisp night air with the thunderous roar of a 125-millimeter rocket igniting and flying across the street into the apartment building. The round itself tore through the lit window less than two seconds later, exploding at virtually the same time, or so it seemed. In reality, there were a few microseconds between the penetration of the window and the rocket impacting something hard enough to trigger its fuse. The result was more than the men bargained for as a massive fireball erupted out of the now shattered window and every other window for that apartment unit followed by billowing, thick, black smoke.

"Holy shit!" Shikhov said as he dropped the tube onto the roof and got down, "the whole thing blew up."

"Hit a gas line I bet," the leader said, "good shooting. C'mon let's get out of here fast before they start shooting at us." In a hurried low crawl, they moved quickly to the door and then into the protection of the stairwell. For Shikhov, moving quickly without hefting the near fourteen-kilogram tube had been made a lot easier. The leader turned to Salnikov in the stairwell as soon as the door was shut, "When the fire trucks show up, I want a dozen guys and only a dozen guys to shoot at them. No more than ten rounds a piece, make them count and spread out the rounds, force the fire trucks around the other side. They won't be able to fight the fire."

"Genius," Salnikov answered with a smile.

At the command center, the inferno that had been unleashed was clearly visible over the rooftops of the surrounding buildings. Kurochkin was lamenting the failed attempt to retrieve the bodies, mostly angered that they couldn't even get one body for all of the trouble. The volume of incoming fire had simply been too great. Lytkin, who'd seen enough, grew a backbone and let Tarasov know that they wouldn't be attempting again, they simply couldn't guarantee a successful operation with how much firepower the CbKZ terrorists had. No one wanted a suicide mission to retrieve a dead body. For Premier Tarasov, the attack on the apartment building had been his final breaking point and he promptly called Chancellor Jurić and President Petrović to make the formal request for the deployment of special operations forces. That call was 23:40 and at 23:48, after mulling it over with the President, Chancellor Jurić saw she had no choice and authorized the immediate deployment of a special operations team to Birogarsk. Already on standby, the moment they'd get the order, they'd be on the move within minutes, having already prepped a light transport with all of their gear. It would simply be a matter of them flying to Birogarsk and getting transport to the tactical command center.

• • • • ‡ ‡ • • • •

Thursday, 6 June 2024 | 02:19 hrs [UTC-3]
Chernarus, Birogarsk | Birogarsk General Hospital

It had been a long and trying day for the CbKZ terrorists and an even longer one for their captives. Most of the men had been up over twenty-four hours, some even closing in on thirty-six and forty hours. They'd all been instructed to sleep well prior to their departure from Chernodrinsk but many of the men found that their nerves had supercharged them with unwanted energy and thus didn't sleep. Since they'd stabilized the situation in the hospital and secured both the building and the hostages, the terrorists had been rotating sleeping cycles with men sitting down in quiet areas to try to get two or three hours of sleep but almost every attempt was interrupted by gunfire, hostages screaming somewhere, or the need for more men. To combat their utter exhaustion, not just from their lack of sleep but also from their many adrenaline crashes, they had one of Chernodrinsk most notable exports on their side, amphetamines.

The CbKZ made a considerable amount of money selling illegal drugs, chiefly those that they could manufacture in laboratories or in confined spaces. Amphetamines were their highest earners, which they produced very cheaply and sold for considerable sums to the criminal syndicates distributing illegal drugs throughout the Konfederacija Poja and elsewhere in the wurld. Five amphetamine tablets had been included in every man's basic kit for this operation. Salnikov had lobbied for more but he'd been overruled by the more cautious planners who worried that the men, many of whom were already frequent users of amphetamines, would abuse them and become difficult to control. It was noted that psychosis was a side effect of taking too much and any episodes during the operation could endanger its success. The men had been thusly told to use their pills sparingly. Most did but some were already down to just two or three pills, quietly inquiring with others as to whether or not "they'd need all five pills."

Yet, at this late hour, just over twenty-four hours since the operation kicked off, most of the men were exhausted beyond measure, pills or not. Those that were racking out in hallways and patient rooms, sleeping on the floor or against the wall, fighting for space on a bed, were in incredibly deep slumbers, their bodies craving for rest. Salnikov and the captains knew that times like these were the worst, it was when the men were at their weakest and when mistakes could easily happen. They made sure to keep themselves awake, taking shifts, patrolling amongst the men to make sure no one was catching any unauthorized naps when they should have been watching hostages or the perimeter.

Perminov had only just completed one of his rounds when the sound of a scuffle and of a fellow terrorist yelling caught his attention. Submachine gun in hand, he rushed down the hallway and around to another wing where he found one of his men and a hostage engaged in a fistfight. Perminov quickly shouldered his submachine gun and waded into the fray, kicking down into the hostage's leg and sending him crumpling to the ground in tremendous pain. "Thanks," the terrorist said, "son of a b*tch caught me in the nuts and got away."

"Because you're careless," Perminov dressed him down, "this wouldn't happen if you followed protocol. Where were you taking him?"

"The bathroom."

"Sir," Perminov corrected him again.

"The bathroom sir," the man straightened up, "to the bathroom."

"Let him piss his pants next time."

"It wasn't that sir and it smells god awful in there already," Perminov nodded at this. "I'll be sure to be more vigilant next time sir."

"See to it. Come, let's bring him to see the boss." Perminov lifted the hostage up but he just collapsed right back to the ground. "Stand up!" He yelled.

"I think you broke my knee," the hostage cried, gritting his teeth through agonizing pain.

"Yeah? Good! Stand up!" They hefted the hostage up and dragged him, screaming in pain, to see the leader who happened to be catching another nap. Perminov explained the situation and the leader walked over to the hostage, who had been leant against the wall, one leg off of the ground since he couldn't put any weight on it.

"Hurt badly?" He asked, a voice that was comforting and disarming, not at all what the hostage expected.

"I think he broke my knee."

"Well then let's get you treated. I'd take a look but I'm sure you'll just kick me in the face. Come," he led the three of them into a room and sat the hostage down in a chair, his hands still restrained around his back but now on the opposite side of the chair back. Escape would be impossible without getting caught up on the chair. The leader looked over to Perminov and to the other terrorist who'd needed rescuing. "You have to do better than this," the leader said to the man who was standing ramrod straight at full attention. "You've let this man become seriously injured because you needed help."

"It won't happen again sir."

"It certainly won't," the leader moved around behind the hostage, "come closer. I want you to apologize to this man, to his face. Of course he is going to try to break free, he is our hostage, it is his duty as it would be ours as POWs. You must respect it but not give them a chance. Come closer." The man obeyed and as he knelt down, the leader quickly pulled his knife from his belt, grabbed the hostage's hair, yanked his head up, and dragged the knife clean through his neck. Blood shot out of the wound like a burst pipe, covering the terrorist's face and clothes while the hostage, mortally wounded, struggled in the throes of death. The leader let go of the man's head and stood behind him. "You caused this." Perminov wasn't expecting that and stood, watching, understanding the lesson that the leader was teaching. "Now get rid of the body and I don't want to see your face for something like this again otherwise you'll be in this chair, understand me?"

The terrorist righted himself, wiped his eyes as he held back the feeling of vomiting, "Yes sir," his voice was fragile, shaky, filled with fear.

"Good and see to it that this mess is cleaned up too." The leader left, leaving Perminov and the terrorist to deal with the mess. The lifeless body would be tossed out of a window a few minutes later and the exhausted soldier would find himself cleaning the bloody floor and walls for the next few hours.

• • • • ‡ ‡ • • • •

Thursday, 6 June 2024 | 05:48 hrs [UTC-3]
Chernarus, Birogarsk | Birogarsk General Hospital

Morning was coming to Birogarsk as the hostage crisis bore on with no end in sight. On the ground, soldiers, policemen, and government employees were growing weary with exhaustion as they kept constant with the situation. They'd split amongst themselves into varying shifts so that men could sleep while others kept the command center staffed and running but no one was sleeping well, especially not Lytkin who had spent the dark, morning hours drafting an emergency order for the city. With Tarasov's blessing, he'd long since enacted a state of emergency over the city and now he was expanding on it to force businesses within one kilometer of the hospital to remain closed for the duration of the crisis as well as force businesses to allow employees work from home if they had the capabilities to do so. He also added an extra measure to the order that would levy severe penalties on any businesses preventing this. The goal was two-fold. Firstly, they needed to keep the roads around the hospital clear so that official vehicles could move to and from without impediment; and secondly, they wanted people to stay in their homes, where they were safe.

The order came on the heels of a report that the cordon around the hospital had been breached at least nine times. Even with all of the soldiers and policemen guarding it, there was no way they could watch every meter of it at once. The reason the statistic was "at least" was because they'd caught nine people, there was no telling if more had breached the cordon and not been caught, which worried Lytkin and the senior decision makers, lest someone act too rashly or too stupidly and get themselves or others killed needlessly. It was one of two reasons that a pair of sniper-spotter teams had been deployed into the cordon. One was watching the street behind the hospital, focused more on the street than the hospital while the other overlooked the hospital itself.

That team consisted of the sniper, Mlađi Vodnik Yefim Dudin, and his spotter and team leader, Vodnik Leonid Sochinsky. They'd chosen a building across the street from the hospital, which had been evacuated of residents already and, entering from the protected side, made their way up several floors to the attic. They had a minor height advantage over the hospital, enough that they could see over the roof's low wall and cover most of it but not enough that they could negate the low wall's cover. They set up an elevated platform with a pair of tables that they reappropriated from a downstairs apartment and gave themselves a good, setback, prone position. Hidden in the darkness of both the night and the attic, they had a good view of the hospital roof while being extremely difficult to spot. Dudin extended out his bipod and set his sights onto the rooftop while Sochinsky worked the spotting scope.

Before they'd set out, Lytkin and Kurochkin had personally briefed the two men on their rules of engagement. First and foremost, they were there to observe the hospital and report back any changes. Secondly, if they saw a hostage being prepared for execution, they were to call it in and get permission to fire before they took the shot. That would fall to Sochinsky, who would operate the radio while Dudin concentrated on the target. In full agreement, the two men set off with salutes and handshakes. Now, with the morning sun rising, everyone could only wonder what was in store for the next day. The government was, in Lytkin and Kurochkin's private thoughts, dragging their feet, hoping for a solution to present itself rather than to come up with one. Many others wondered too what the plan was and the more removed they were from the top, the more they felt the same way that Lytkin and Kurochkin did, without knowing everyone agreed with one another.

Dudin and Sochinsky, whose position was identified as "Foxtrot One," had certainly felt tired by the time the sun was rising. A little over an hour later, they were jolted to attention when the roof access door swung open and three terrorists emerged dragging a visibly wounded and bleeding hostage. "Shit! Execution squad," Dudin remarked as he flipped the safety off of his rifle.

"Calling it in," Sochinsky pushed the transmit button for his radio, "Foxtrot One, we've got movement on the roof, three tangos, one victor, looks like an execution. Request permission to engage."

"Wait one Foxtrot One, need to confirm," came the response from the radio operator after a few seconds of delay, enough to tell Sochinsky that he hadn't been sitting in front of the radio.

"They're fifteen meters from the edge. Estimate ten seconds," Sochinsky didn't bother to tell them that the hostage was fighting, dragging his feet, and doing everything to prevent what was only seconds away from happening. The blood that came down his face showed that he'd had a head wound, perhaps he'd fought and caught a rifle butt to his head to take the fight out of him, or perhaps he'd fallen or been thrown into a wall, there was no way for the two soldiers to know for sure sitting in their perch. "Ten meters." In the command center, Lytkin was pacing while Kurochkin had been summoned. For his part, he rushed in quickly and the radio operator relayed the situation.

"Get me set up while they talk about it."

"Range one-two-five, wind quarter value left-to-right. Target is the one in front."

"On target," Dudin put the chevron of his scope right on the man's face. At this distance, his rifle was firing near point blank. The sight picture was large enough that a headshot wouldn't be a problem and, since all of the terrorists were wearing body armor, a necessity if they wanted to achieve a single-shot kill.

"Five meters, need a decision," Sochinsky said into the radio.

"Foxtrot One, clear to engage."

"Roger that Foxtrot One engaging," Sochinsky let go of the transmit button, "clear to fire." Dudin didn't wait and he squeezed the trigger, having kept the chevron right on target. The long suppressor on the end of his rifle suppressed the otherwise blinding muzzle flash from his P.60A2 Sniper Rifle and, more importantly, it kept the terrorists from finding sighting it. Because of the way the layout of the buildings was, the sound of the shot echoed off of every surface and structure, making it almost impossible to pin them down from sound alone. The combination meant that they could get off more shots before being located. "Hit, target down, stand by for next…" Sochinsky didn't get much else out before the two surviving terrorists, immediately realizing what happened, opened fire wildly spraying rounds forward and to the sides of their position. Rounds ricocheted against the exterior of the building and Dudin and Sochinsky immediately rolled off of their tables and onto the floor for cover. The snap of a round passing overhead told them that one bullet had likely embedded itself in the ceiling above them.

In the first few seconds after the lead terrorist collapsed to the ground with a split-open head, the other two terrorists did the same, using the wall for cover while they sprayed rounds around the area. In the brief few seconds afterwards, while one terrorist continued to fire suppressively, the other managed to wrestle the hostage to the ground and shoot him in the torso to prevent his further escape. Wounded, the hostage could do little more to save himself and, without further fight, wound up being thrown over the edge to his death on the ground below. The thump echoed into the attic where Dudin and Sochinsky looked at one another and cursed. Amidst more covering fire the two terrorists, leaving their dead comrade, retreated back into the safety of the stairwell.

Realizing that the firing had stopped, Sochinsky and Dudin popped back up to find an empty rooftop, the corpse of the third terrorist hidden by the low wall where they couldn't get a good angle. In that moment, all Dudin could say was, "We need a better position. That fire out yet?"

Sochinsky shook his head in both disappointment and agreement. He hit the transmit button again, "Foxtrot One, report failure, victor executed. One tango down, two escaped. What's the status of the fire? We need to reposition to a better overwatch."

"Roger that Foxtrot One, will get back to you," the radioman said, his voice not hiding the crushing feeling of defeat. One terrorist for one hostage wasn't great. Three terrorists and no hostage would have been ideal and Dudin could have done it except the terrorists had been significantly more prepared, capable, and ready than he expected. Their otherwise nonchalant demeanor clearly hid a significant wealth of muscle memory and training for combat scenarios.

"Next time we'll get them," Sochinsky offered. Dudin barely mustered a slight nod of agreement.

• • • • ‡ ‡ • • • •

Thursday, 6 June 2024 | 05:52 hrs [UTC-3]
Chernarus, Birogarsk | Birogarsk General Hospital

"What the f*ck is going on!" The leader shot out of his subtle slumber as he heard the hammering of gunfire coming from the roof above him. All around the hospital, everyone who'd been asleep was coming to and the CbKZ terrorists were running around trying to figure out what was going on when, all of a sudden, the gunfire stopped and the stomping of men running down the stairwell filled the uppermost floors until finally, they burst out of the stairwell and only a few meters in front of Salnikov and the leader. Salnikov, who was about to start running towards the roof when the two survivors emerged, stood still and waited in quiet. The two terrorists, completely out of breath, their assault rifles smoking from having just been used to dump two magazines a piece into the air around the hospital, stood in front of the leader and Salnikov, hands on their knees, panting, "Sniper!" They said, practically in unison.

"You weren't careful," Salnikov yelled at them! "What were you doing up there anyway!"

"Perminov ordered another execution," one of them said, still catching his breath but no longer bent over like before.

"Stand at attention!" Salnikov ordered and they snapped to or rather tried to do so. "Why are you out of breath? You ran down the stairs! Have you cheated on your physical fitness requirements?"

"No sir!" Came their response, the leader now within mere centimeters of their faces. They could smell his breath and it was hardly pleasant, not that theirs was any better.

"Compose yourselves! Where's Perminov?" His voice was the opposite of Salnikov, calmer but hiding a churning rage.

"I'll go get him," Salnikov answered but he got only a few steps before Perminov appeared out of the same stairwell, assault rifle in hand. "Perminov present sir," Salnikov said, half in jest, half because there he was. He gave a nod to Perminov.

"Sir!" Perminov answered as he came to attention behind the two men, "reading the room."

"It seems we have a sniper problem."

"That would explain why there's only two of them," Perminov answered, "where is the body?"

"Still up there, we couldn't get it."

"You're undisciplined," the leader shouted at them. "Never leave a fallen comrade. Get your asses up there and get that body and bring it back here on the double!"

"Sir." They saluted and left into the stairwell leaving just the leader, Salnikov, and Perminov, the former of whom ushered them into his "office."

"Odds of their survival?" The leader asked as he shut the door behind the three of them.

"Fifty-fifty," answered Perminov, "depends how good the sniper is and how scared they are. My odds go in their favor. They survived the encounter already."

"The government is getting bolder," the leader leaned against the door. "It would appear that our caution earlier wasn't a bad idea." Salnikov nodded at this, unaware that the snipers hadn't been there at that time. "I want six hostages. Two go off of the roof, have those two morons do it. Bring the other four to me. Make them young and get the film crew. We're going to send the Chancellor a special message." Salnikov and Perminov smartened up and agreed, departing to relay the orders, Perminov to the roof team and Salnikov to the film crew.

All-in-all, it took about ten minutes before all six hostages, all in their late teens or early twenties were selected, four men and two women, and then brought to the upper floor where the leader was waiting with several other terrorists, Perminov and Salnikov absent though, everyone's faces hidden behind balaclavas including the film crew. On cue, the recording began. "It is time to show the Chernarussian traitors and their Pojački masters what the price for the death of one of my men is. Chancellor Jurić, I trust you will understand my message. You have killed one; I shall kill six!" The hostages all began to weep, two lost control over their bladders. The leader walked in front of them, sizing them up, "These two, bring them to the roof," he said of two of the men, a nineteen and a twenty-three-year-old. They were dragged away by their hair, kicking and screaming, soon to be cast off of the roof by the two survivors, who'd painstakingly and daringly recovered the body of their comrade already.

The leader then came behind the four remaining hostages and unholstered a revolver, emptying the cylinder and inserting one round before giving it a spin. He stood behind the first hostage, one of the men, and squeezed the trigger. The chamber was empty and there was nothing but the click of the hammer. "You are not so lucky," he said as he moved to the next hostage, one of the women. He squeezed the trigger and the blast of the hand cannon filled the room. Everyone's ears instantly began to ring. The round went clean through the eighteen-year-old girl's skull, blowing out the front of her face before burrowing into the floor in front of her as her lifeless corpse fell forward and onto the ground amidst a splatter of blood, skull, and brain matter. "She was lucky," the leader said as he repeating the reload. "Shall we try again?" He moved to the next woman and fired, a click, then the last man, a click, then back to the first man, and a third click. "One in three chance," he said, taunting them and the Chancellor as well. "How about we change it up?" He walked back to the man and fired, a click. "One in two, a click means the next person dies." He positioned behind the woman and squeezed the trigger but there was no click. The gun boomed again and her body fell forward, her face unrecognizable, all caught on camera. "Two remain, the unlucky ones," he reloaded his revolver and put it back into its holster. "Bring them and clean up this mess."

The two remaining men were carried away and into a hospital room, the same one that the leader had used to slit the throat of the hostage several hours earlier. Having been cleaned to his liking, it would soon be a mess again. "Put them there," the leader pointed to the wall, "you, film from over there," he pointed to the opposite end and the cameraman did as he was told. In the room was the leader, the two hostages, three terrorists standing guard, and the cameraman. On the roof, the two-man execution team was struggling to throw the first hostage off while not becoming a target for the sniper and as the leader finished positioning everyone, the first hostage fell, screaming the whole way down. "That's one," he let out a light laugh. "Gravity and traitors do not mix. The second one should be coming soon." In another part of the hospital, the two dead women were being thrown out of a window onto the pavement below where corpses continued to pile up, putting the government's weakness on full display.

"Who should we pick first?" The leader asked aloud, looking at the two hostages. "Someone behind me pick."

"The one on the left," someone answered.

"Fantastic. Roll the camera." The leader rushed forward and grabbed the hostage by the hair, dragging him down onto the floor, putting his knee into the man's back to immobilize him. The leader carried great strength, more than the hostage could counter. "Hold his legs and give me the machete." The three guards did as they were instructed, two grabbing onto the man's legs, further immobilizing him while the third unsheathed and handed the leader a razor-sharp machete. The leader positioned the blade, pushing his knee hard into the hostage's back before swinging down with such force that one blow was all it took to behead the hostage.

With that, he stood up while the body twitched as its nerves died, blood pooling out onto the floor. To the last hostage, he had something different in mind. Rather than behead him, the leader grabbed a large, orange pipe wrench and commenced to bludgeon the man to death, narrating to the camera how the government would pay. He did this for several minutes, delivering a final coup de grâce when the man was barely alive anymore. The camera was cut off and the leader, catching his breath from the exertion of the beating, rose to the cameraman and removed his balaclava. "We'll upload that in a few hours. Let's make it look good. I trust you to do a good job."

The cameraman struggled to find his voice, answering in a barely audible, "Yes sir." These men might have been "hardened terrorists" but few understood just how ruthless their leader could be. He hadn't shown it in training, not in the way that they saw it here and now.

"You three, clean this mess up and get rid of the bodies." They nodded and the leader walked out of the door, fishing in his pockets for a cigarette, nonchalant in his demeanor, as if he didn't just execute two people, behead a third, and beat a fourth to death with a wrench. No one in the Pojački government could prepare themselves for fighting this man.

• • • † • • •

Edited September 3 by Poja (see edit history)

Poja · September 5

• • • † • • •

Chapter V
A New Dawn

Thursday, 6 June 2024 | 08:00 hrs [UTC-3]
Konfederacija Poja, Rugi, Central District | House of Magnates

Dawn had come to the Konfederacija Poja and the nation was in a somber mood with the situation in Birogarsk hanging over their collective heads like a thick blanket of smog. The dedicated news stations were showing wall-to-wall coverage with few breaks while the local channels cut away from scheduled programming at every possible development, no matter how minor or insignificant. If the CbKZ terrorists had wanted media coverage to spread their cause, they certainly got much more than they'd bargained for, partly thanks to the internet, partly thanks to just how audacious their actions were. The media was completely saturated with the situation. The same clips of the morning attacks, of bodies going off of the roof - censored of course, of the remnants of police assaults were shown on a near continuously loop both online and by the news stations. If someone had seen the events once, they'd seen them a hundred times by now. It all boiled down to the audacity and the surprise. Something like this had never happened in Poja before and the Pojački media apparatus was simply too inexperienced in these matters not to dedicate every minute of programming to the event.

The amount of attention that the media had been dedicating to the crisis had been drawing the ire of Chancellor Jurić and other members of the Pojački government on a near continuous loop since the start of the crisis. On each and every phone call concerning the situation, the topic had come up and someone wasn't pleased with it but such was the product of a free society. The Pojački government had, on plenty of occasions, reached out to newspapers or other media agencies and squashed stories under the banner of national security or other various reasons but those stories were small in comparison and hardly as visually unfriendly as what was happening in Birogarsk. The government simply had no power to stop the news from reporting, on the news, despite some individuals' desires otherwise.

Thursday morning came with the tragic news of the events of the night before. It had not been a kind night and the Pojački government was losing at every turn. The CbKZ terrorists were always one and two steps ahead, or so that was how it seemed and how it had been playing out throughout the course of the siege. In the House of Magnates, Chancellor Jurić, her staff, and the rest of what had become known as the "Executive Decision Group" or IGO (Izvršna Grupa za Odlučivanje) were preparing to face the reality of the night. Gathering in various conference rooms across the Pojački capital, Novigrad, and Birogarsk, the various principles of the IGO one-by-one took their seats, muted their microphones, and waited for the meeting to start. President Petrović joined and did the same, which might have been considered "odd behavior" but in the Konfederacija Poja, this was a domestic matter and thus a matter for the government. The President was head of state; thus, it was and remained the Chancellor's show.

So, it would not be until Chancellor Jurić joined that the meeting officially began and it did so without delay. Already prebriefed on how the Chancellor wanted the meeting to start, Jaromir Lytkin unmuted his microphone. He and Major Kurochkin had retreated to an unused room in their commandeered building for the call, affording themselves privacy at a time when the IGO needed it the most. "Madam Chancellor, we have full casualty figures from yesterday's initial attack and throughout the night as of 06:00 this morning. They are sobering to say the least Madam.

"There are 593 total casualties of all kinds. Killed are 276 people, of which there are 167 civilians, 29 government officials, 11 hostages, and 69 policemen. Injured are 317 people, of which there are 264 civilians, 21 government officials, and 32 policemen. There were an initial total of 1,055 hostages taken, of which 1,044 remain insofar as we are aware. Throughout this entire ordeal only one terrorist has been killed Madam."

Everyone was silent for a few moments while the gravity of the figures sunk in around the various laptops and video screens. It was worse than the worst day of the Chernarussian Conflict so many years ago. "Thank you mayor," the Chancellor answered, her voice weak and hoarse. "It won't be long before these leak to the press so I urge everyone present to do their due diligence to ensure that, if asked, you do not provide any names or speculate on the condition of the hostages. Insofar as everyone is concerned, all are alive and that is it. We cannot give into these monsters. They're getting all of the free attention as it stands. They don't need more. Minister Tanacković, is there any update for military forces deployed?"

"Madam Chancellor yes we do. Shortly after 06:00 hours, a sixteen-man team from our special forces arrived on scene and has been liaising with Major Kurochkin and his men on site. Additional teams are en route, also from special forces. Right now, the situation is contained to the hospital. Cordons are currently being enforced by the major's men and I believe, Premier correct me if I am wrong, a second unit will be arriving today?"

"Yes that is right Minister," Premier Tarasov was nodding his head, "the major leads an infantry company and a second will be joining today. We shall have a third by tomorrow morning, sooner if everything goes perfectly."

"Very well, what does the MDS have to say about this situation Minister Zorić?"

"Madam Chancellor, the MDS is currently engaged in a number of missions. First and foremost, every registered operative working in Chernodrinsk has been activated to find out as much as possible about this operation, whether the shots are being called from Chernodrinsk or if it is being led independently. We're also looking to find out who is in charge of the operation, how long it was planned for, and what the end goal is. I'm afraid to say that so far, our operatives have been coming up empty handed. It is thus our assessment, based merely on what little we know right now, and I warn that this will change, that the operation was kept compartmentalized to a level we've never witnessed before. What that means is only those involved knew anything and even those people likely only knew pieces of the information. To do this successfully, you cannot have more than ten people planning an operation and outside of the core planners, anyone taking part in it wouldn't have known what the mission was, where they were going, or if it was even a mission and not just a training exercise until their departure from Chernodrinsk, perhaps not even until they arrived on scene. That much we do not know.

"What we can assess with certainty is that the CbKZ has been planning for this operation for some time. Analysis on the terrorists and their vehicles reveals that they were very heavily armed and well-stocked with rations. They've established a perimeter around the hospital that protects them from all four sides and even provides protection from our snipers. They rehearsed this mission multiple times, even if they did not know what they were rehearsing, and on top of it, they are coordinating effectively. No part of this operation, thus far, has been anything other than 'Plan A.' The CbKZ clearly knew how and where to strike us and that is what they've done."

The Chancellor felt the cloud of smog personally encircle her and pure dread ensconced her. "Explain to me how this was missed. What are our intelligence services doing?"

"Madam Chancellor," Zorić always had a defusing and disarming tone to his voice. It was uncanny that the man who was Minister of State Security, carrying a reputation that would make anyone terrified to be in an interrogation room with him could have a voice that was anything but hostile or threatening. "You must appreciate the measures which the CbKZ took. Each and every man they chose for this mission was likely vetted and vetted again. Not one of our operatives 'got lucky' enough to join this mission. Furthermore, up until this very moment, no one in this room, let alone in this government would have believed such an attack was even possible. What is transpiring now isn't as much a 'failure of intelligence' as it is our enemy evolving before our very eyes.

"For years upon years, our government, and I do not mean to single out this administration alone, allow me to make that clear; for years, our government has treated the CbKZ as a nuisance, not as a threat. Directives and policies towards the CbKZ tasked the MDS with a very limited scope on what we could do in Chernodrinsk and with the CbKZ. This government has allowed the MDS to do more than most but not enough. It takes years upon years upon years to build up operatives capable of penetrating the inner sanctums of these groups. If we started on day one of this government, it still wouldn't have been long enough. Years, decades were lost because prior governments did not think the CbKZ was threatening enough. Birogarsk isn't a 'failure of intelligence' Madam Chancellor, it is a 'failure of policy.'" The words went around the room several times like a shockwave around the planet. A "failure of policy" was putting it lightly. The Pojački government had flat out ignored the CbKZ except when they acted, treating them like a street gang at worst and a criminal mafia organization at best, not as a full-blown terrorist outfit. Years of neglect led to this day.

As the various individuals went around the room one-by-one, giving little tidbits of information that were necessary to the situation or answered questions that were asked, Minister Zorić sat in his place, quiet, his eyes following each and every speaker one-by-one. It was his manner, whether he was under assault - in this case from the Chancellor - or casually seated in a restaurant. It came from years upon years of tradecraft, of sitting across from spies and interrogating them, from all of the unsavory things he'd done in his long career as an employee of the Ministry of State Security.

When the topics had returned back to further military deployments, Chancellor Jurić was almost ready to adjourn the meeting when someone commented that the Pojački Broadcasting Network was, yet again, showing the censored corpses on the streets around the hospital. It immediately set off the Chancellor who knew that the inability to recover the dead was more than just an embarrassment, it was a spotlight shining directly on her helplessness as a leader. "We have to get those bodies. We have to identify them and inform the next of kin."

Major Kurochkin, who hardly desired another shootout, quickly unmuted his microphone, "Madam Chancellor, I cannot guarantee any success. The terrorists are fully aware of our intention and they are hellbent on preventing it. Unless we are prepared to fire an incredible volume of bullets into the building to suppress the CbKZ for however long it takes, this cannot be achieved, never mind that to do so would endanger every single hostage inside. We were lucky that we had no casualties in our last attempt. The only feasible solution would be a negotiated agreement with the terrorists to allow us to do this. We are at their mercy Madam."

The Chancellor was hardly in the mood for dissent. She was a firm believer in peace, an anti-violence and an anti-war stalwart who somehow worked her way up through the party ranks against all odds. Yet now she was fighting her own beliefs and facing a situation that she was hardly equipped to handle, which only brought out the worst in her. "Major, I want those bodies off that street."

• • • • ‡ ‡ • • • •

Thursday, 6 June 2024 | 09:17 hrs [UTC-3]
Chernarus, Zelenogorsk | Café Artyom

During the Chernarussian Conflict, Zelenogorsk was a stalwart of the insurgency. Throughout the entire conflict and even in the post-conflict years, the town remained a hotbed for Chernarussian nationalism. The original founders of the CbKZ had all hailed from the city, had spent their post-conflict years griping about what they saw as treason from the militia leaders who'd signed the peace deal. Even in this modern day and age, Zelenogorsk was still considered a hub for anti-Pojački sentiment though outside of leaflets and other nationalist literature, artists singing or reciting poetry in cafés, and old men griping about "the days of yore," there was little for Rugi to fear from the city. Of course, the Pojački government didn't quite see it that way and the Uprava Državne Bezbednosti (UDB) continued to keep tabs people it deemed as "local agitators."

Officially, the State Security Directorate, the UDB had an incredibly controversial history. Formed in the 1950s as a way to monitor communist infiltration of the Konfederacija Poja, they'd gotten heavily involved in fighting Chernarussian nationalism in the Pre-Emergency and the Emergency periods from 1963 to the start of the conflict in 1968. During the conflict, they worked counterintelligence against insurgent leaders but their successes were limited. They largely kept tabs on the Premier's political foes. Since the end of the conflict, they'd mostly returned to their old nemesis, far left infiltrators but they'd never truly let go of the foe that was "the Chernarussian nationalist." In essence, the UDB was Poja's secret police and they focused almost purely within the domestic borders of Poja so it was only natural that the CbKZ's terrorist attack would ignite their passions and, thanks to the Chancellor's new emergency powers, they had the carte blanche to do so how they pleased.

That morning, three dozen agents with the UDB descended upon Zelenogorsk with lists of places to visit and names to interrogate though, truth be told, the names were people who were going to get arrested, no matter what. Some names were for people who may have expressed sympathy with the CbKZ cause, others were hardened supporters. It didn't matter to the UDB, they had plenty of places to bring them, plenty of interrogation rooms, and plenty of patience to interrogate each and every one of them. Working mostly in pairs, they began their raids on the city shortly after 09:00, having moved inconspicuously into the city, blending in with relative ease. Amongst the first targets hit was the infamous Café Artyom.

Named after a legendary militia leader who'd been killed during the 1972 - 1973 Christmas Offensive, the café was a favored hangout spot for old insurgent leaders who reminisced about "the glory days" and often attracted the younger, more rebellious crowds. It was an interesting blend of past and present. Whatever that spoke for the future remained to be seen but at 09:17, when four agents of the UDB walked through the front door of Café Artyom, everything was about to change.

The lead agent walked in and up to the counter, passing tables full of patrons while his partner followed. Moments later, the next two men entered, the last of whom shut and locked the door behind him. With the click of the door lock and the subtle changing of the sign from "open" to "closed," the café fell silent. Two agents, unseen by the café's patrons were waiting outside the back door, making sure no one bolted, for if they did, they were surely hiding something.

The lead agent, who'd taken his place at the counter quickly turned around and held his badge up in the air for all to see. "Good morning everyone," he said, a malicious smile on his face, "no doubt you're wondering what this is all about. You'll know soon enough. Let's just ensure no one does anything particularly rash or stupid and, if you think you're going to exit that door, well I assure you that man," he pointed to the last of the four agents to enter, "will see to it that you do not. So, with that out of the way, we have some questions to ask of some people, some very specific people, so the rest of you aren't really our concern, as long as you don't make yourselves our concern, got it?" Some phones had come out to record what was happening and the UDB agents didn't even bother to stop them like they usually did. They wanted this to get recorded, to find its way throughout the internet, to send as much of a message to the CbKZ as to their supporters.

The lead agent walked over to a single table and loomed over the three men sitting at the table. All three, knowing precisely who these men where the moment they entered, had stopped eating and had put their palms onto the tabletop, showing no signs of aggression. "Gentlemen, funny seeing all three of you here," the lead agent said. "It's interesting that three terrorists would find the gall to be out in public while their buddies, well allegedly their 'former buddies,' right? While their 'former buddies' were murdering men, women, and children a few hundred kilometers away. You'd think they'd be in hiding, afraid to show their faces."

"We have nothing to hide," one of them said through gritted teeth. All three were in their mid-to-late forties and fifties, former CbKZ terrorists who'd been caught, tried, and sent to jail for their crimes. They'd been cleared back into society having been "rehabilitated" but that didn't mean the UDB didn't have to stop keeping tabs on them.

"Oh, I should think you would Oleg, or you Maxim, especially you Vadim," the lead agent looked back around the room. "Do you know Vadim here planned a series of bombings against school busses? Nice guy. Tell me Vadim, what makes you think you're ready to be back in society."

"I've renounced the cause," Vadim said angrily, "leave us alone. We've nothing to do with that."

"You probably don't that is true but I bet you know who is. Your networks, they talk a lot don't they. So tell me Vadim, what do you know?"

Vadim looked up and cursed at him, "Go to f*cking Hell!" He knew precisely what was going to happen even before it had and he knew he had no choice in the matter, no matter how he acted.

"That's the right answer," the lead agent reached out and grabbed Vadim by the collar, hefting him right out of the chair. As he did, the other two men started to rise but they got but a few centimeters up before two of the other agents were on them. "Right f*cking answer," the lead agent quickly threw Vadim to the ground, making sure he slammed through the chair on the way down. Almost instantly, a commotion filled the café as patrons dove out of their chairs and away from the now six-person melee that had begun as the UDB agents physically beat the three former CbKZ terrorists, slamming them into walls and tables, breaking chairs over their backs, kicking and punching them, doing as much damage to the café as they did to the three men. It wasn't even a fair fight, the UDB agents absolutely pummeled the three men and, in the same process, absolutely trashed the café. When all was said and done, the three men, swollen and bleeding but clearly not too seriously injured that they'd need urgent medical care, were thrown into handcuffs and escorted out while the lead agent, hanging back, looked around at the mess, the same malicious smile on his face.

"Being a terrorist is one thing. Playing nice with terrorists is another thing. I hope you were paying attention." He turned and left, turning the sign on the door back from "closed" to "open." By that point, a van had pulled up and all three of the former CbKZ terrorists were being roughly thrown inside. Within minutes, videos would get uploaded to the internet and by the end of the hour, they would be spreading far and wide. It gave the bots and trolls plenty of ammunition for their ongoing crusade for Chernarussian nationalism and anti-Pojački tirades.

• • • • ‡ ‡ • • • •

Thursday, 6 June 2024 | 10:35 hrs [UTC-3]
Konfederacija Poja, Rugi, Central District | House of Magnates

If the day had been going poorly for Chancellor Jurić it was about to get worse as she was ushered from her office and into a secure conference room where the video screen was showing both Major Kurochkin and Mayor Lytkin on one side of the screen and Minister Zorić on the other. She didn't bother taking a seat though her aide did as the door was shut behind them. No one wasted any time and Lytkin cleared his throat as he began to speak, delivering the news. "Madam Chancellor, at 10:01, police forces executed an attempt to retrieve some of the bodies around the hospital. Using smoke grenades to hide their movements, they aimed to get at least a few of the bodies. Once again, the terrorists prevented any attempts to retrieve those bodies with high volumes of accurate fire. Police further withdrew from the scene with five injured and two dead."

The Chancellor shook her head, "We need those bodies…"

"Madam, there is more," Lytkin interrupted, "in response, three additional hostages were executed and their bodies added to the many collecting on the pavement. They have cut off all contact with our negotiators believing that this was an assault on the hospital despite our assurances otherwise. Once again, they've reiterated their call to speak to you and only you directly Madam."

She looked down at her aide who subtly closed his eyes and almost imperceptibly shook his head. "I won't be doing that," she looked back up at the screen and also the camera. "We will need a new plan that does not involve them believing this is an assault." As the major was about to say something, Lytkin very visibly reached out with his hand and put it on the man's arm, restraining him.

"We'll get back to you Madam Chancellor."

"Good," she turned now to Zorić who had sat quietly, listening like always, "Minister?"

"Madam Chancellor, I'd like to speak with you in private. Gentlemen, I am afraid I have to ask you to leave if you have nothing further."

"We're done Minister," Lytkin responded, "thank you Madam."

They dropped, leaving just the Minister, the Chancellor, and her aide. "Privately Madam Chancellor, I apologize but your aide must not be present."

"He has clearance…"

"Madam Chancellor, please, I do not believe he has clearance for what I am about to tell you." As she was about to interject again, the aide stood up and motioned that he was leaving which he did. When the door was shut, and only when the door was shut, Minister Zorić unmuted his microphone, having muted it while the aide was departing. "What I am about to tell you is for your ears only. I'll be informing the President as well but that is the limit of who shall know outside of a small working group within the MDS.

"At 07:50 this morning, we intercepted a phone call from the hospital to an individual we've been surveilling in Chernodrinsk. That individual is a high-ranking commander in the CbKZ and he has been on our radar for quite some time. We've largely been pinning down his movements and cataloguing his activities. We believe the phone call was made from the leader of this group. The substance of the call itself was deeply laced in code, which suggests to us that the CbKZ may know we're listening to their phone calls, or perhaps it is to confuse anyone within earshot, we aren't sure. Regardless, we are currently working to identify that individual. We're running it through our voice analysis systems presently."

"Why was this not brought up earlier Minister?"

"I was only made aware of it twenty-seven minutes ago Madam Chancellor. The discovery was made by a compartmentalized group. They did not pass along the information as they were still in the process of verification. Forgive us Madam Chancellor but our goal is to be certain of what we have before we pass it along."

"I want to know the moment you get a match. How long will it take?"

"They could have it in the next thirty seconds, it could take ten hours. The system works through a supercomputer but there are a lot of voices to check and recheck. The moment we have both a match and an independent verification I will advise."

"Good," she ended the call and went back to her office. The failure to retrieve the bodies had cost the lives of five more people and five others were in a hospital receiving treatment for their wounds. All would make it but they would carry those wounds for the rest of their lives.

• • • • ‡ ‡ • • • •

Thursday, 6 June 2024 | 11:50 hrs [UTC-3]
Konfederacija Poja, Rugi, Projevo District | Ministry of State Security

The soundproof booth was a relic of decades past but for Ankica Vučković, it was her home away from home. The forty-nine-year-old audio technician spent more hours of her day inside of the booth, blocked from the sounds of the outside wurld, headphones pressed up against her ears, just listening. She had at her disposal a small sound mixer that enabled her to play with the audio any way she wanted. Sometimes she was listening for background noise to identify where a phone call was taking place. Sometimes she listened for something very specific such as a church's bells or a station announcement to place the time of an audio track. Other times, such as now, she listened to voices. Ankica was extremely gifted in this regard and as she sat in the booth, her eyes shut so that her brain only had to process the sound coming through her eardrums, she felt more at home and more at ease than anywhere else.

Ankica had worked with the MDS all of her adult life and so she knew no other profession. Of course, it helped that she was especially good at it. In her left ear she heard one voice and then, in her right ear, another. They were the same voice, of that much she was convinced, the two samples taken at different times and by different methods so there were subtle differences and so she listened over and over and over again. Men in suits were waiting outside of her office, waiting for her to confirm what the supercomputer had told them but if this gave you the impression that they were impatiently rushing her, they weren't. Ankica was well respected for her abilities and if she needed five hours, she'd get it. It was how voice print analysis worked in the MDS. The supercomputer matched the voice to a name and a profile but it was Ankica who gave the final nod. She was given three separate voices, always three, to match against the sample and she had to pick which one matched. To her they were just voices since she never got names or details but her work was absolutely essential.

Convinced now, she listened a final time. The first voice was close but too low, the way the man pronounced certain words simply didn't match up at all. The second voice was it, the voice that she was convinced was the match and so she listened again. Yes that is it, she thought to herself as she cycled to the last. It too was close, very close indeed, almost as if she'd received two samples of the same person but she knew that was not how it was done. There were subtle differences in certain words, certain inflections but beyond that there were little other differences. It's number two, she listened again, positive in her assertion. She'd been wrong before; after all, she was human but it wasn't very common.

Taking off her headphones, she unlocked the door to the booth, stepped out, and straightened her dress before opening her office door to the trio of men waiting outside. "Number two," she told them, "number three is very close, very close indeed but I am convinced it is number two." They thanked her and watched as she deleted the audio track files she'd been given, a common practice, and went on their way to inform the Minister directly.

"Name's Leonid Strelkov," the Minister listened, "fifty-eight, a senior commander with the CbKZ. We believe he led a volunteer unit in the Garindinan Civil War with the Communist Front so he has combat experience. He's definitely up there in the organization's hierarchy but we didn't believe he was as serious a player as this."

"It's a match?"

"Supercomputer pegged it at 95% and Ankica gave us the rest. We threw a curveball at her this time, only two voices with one of them intentionally altered. She picked out that one and recognized that it was very close. We're confident in her selection."

"What else do we know about this Strelkov?"

"Not a lot, a few known aliases, limited information about what he's done with the CbKZ. Certainly nothing about this. No psyche profile."

"Leonid Strelkov," the Minister repeated, "I'll inform the President and the Chancellor. Let's dig up whatever we can. This is the highest priority right now." The Minister dismissed them and turned around in his chair, picking up a phone in the process. "Mister President…"

• • • † • • •

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