Frag Out! Magazine
Issue link: https://fragout.uberflip.com/i/1536266
Phase 2: Gray Tactics We spent the night in a previously checked, abandoned brewery. The site is surrounded by a high fence – inside, a few buildings falling apart before our eyes, but with some courage, cunning, and good old Polish improvisation, we manage to get up to the attic of one. From there, we have a pretty good view over more than half the area we're interested in. The night is short and uneventful. We focus on securing the location and identifying emergency escape routes. In the morning, we split into two squads. Marcel and Dave stay at the "base" – Thor is expected to join them soon. He'll be running the whole city op from there, and also use the opportunity to see what the guys learned from us and get hands-on experience with drone operations. Kondor and I head out to a field on the far side of the town. We spotted a grove on the map that, if it works out, will let us fly over more than half the town. So Raven 1 will operate over the northern half, and we—Raven 2—over the southern. Perfect. The grove turns out to be ideal. We conceal the Jeep about sixty meters on the far side—closer than our usual SOP allows—but we push deep into the brush so no one on the ground can spot us. The problem is the potential movement in the field and our lack of an external antenna. Although we'd rather not, we have to fly from the forest's edge to get a signal. Normally our team would set up an external active directional antenna on a mast: we'd hide it at the treeline, we'd sit inside the grove, and only step out to launch or retrieve the drone. Here, though, people on scooters, dogwalkers, and joggers constantly pass by— any of them could see us and call in the local Territorial Defense Force. That disrupts our ops and causes needless delays in takeoffs. Our targets: the Voivodeship hospital, the water treatment plant, the police station, the transformer substation, and the communications tower. At the hospital we look for access routes—back entrances, garages, any breach points where our people could infiltrate to exfil medical supplies. A few flights around it reveal three unobstructed entry points. We record everything, tag it in ATAK, stream live to Discord. Next, the water treatment plant: here we hunt weak spots for sabotage. Piece of cake—a single grenade tossed through a vent shaft could wreck the control room, and the main reservoir is exposed too. But first we map safe fence-crossing spots; our ground team can breach more violently if needed. We finish this OBJ on two battery swaps. The GSM tower is trivial: one grenade from above and half the town is offline. No need to send anyone in. The substation too far—would have to fly across town—but Raven 1 is close by, so after one sortie we drop that target. That leaves the police station. A tough nut: a four-story fortress with a high walled parking lot full of vehicles and full staffing. If the Territorial Forces get an alert, the station's backup for them, so we have to be careful. Agents Downtown Our sabotage team is already in town in disguise—acting like locals. Their tasks mirror our aerial recon: stake out the contact box, watch and follow personnel, possibly eliminate specific targets. We're their eyes in the sky. Comms run only over Signal and Discord—no radios—so our agents drift among bars, guard benches in front of the station, stroll the bus station, or take "romantic" park walks. Agreed visual signals—like a bag of a certain color or a backwards cap—help us pick them out. A black BMW roams too, ready to support any two-man team on the ground. Soon we realize the TDF has ditched uniforms for civvies, making them much harder to identify and evade. We're ordered to watch a bench in one of two city parks.We climb to two hundred meters and circle. Car traffic masks the drone's sound, and 20× zoom lets us pick out faces of park-goers. We spot two guys feeding ducks by the pond; on the opposite bench sits a man in sweats and a blue cap. A third bench sits empty beside a trash can. We feed video to our ground contact, who will enter the park, sit on the bench, ,, www.fragoutmag.com