Oprichnina on the Chesapeake

 

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AFTER ACTION REPORT: OPERATION OBSIDIAN FLAKES

AGENTS

• IAGO, Department of the Treasury, Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence
• IMOGEN, IRS Criminal Investigator
• INDIGO, Black-Hat Hacker.
• IRENA, FBI Criminal Profiler
• ISAAC, Anthropologist
• HANNIBAL, FBI SWAT, former Army
• HECTOR, CIA Ground team

THE SKOPTSI

• YELENA KALAMATIANO, Elderly sorceress, manager of Families Without Frontiers.
• FEDOR BEREZHKOV, NKVD defector, now an agent of the Skoptsi.
• JERMIJA BOGDASHKAVICH, The Patriarch of the Skoptsi with a penchant of killing sex workers.
• ALEXI ARSENI, Skoptsi cultist, employee with Families Without Frontiers.
• SABINA APOLLONOV, Skoptsi Cultist
• RYAN INNOKENTY, Child abuser, Angel-food
• TERRANCE GAMBLE, Child abuser, Innokenty's replacement.

OTHERS

• "GLININ"
• REUBEN FLYNN

I-Cell received their summons shortly after the new year and were briefed at the Treasury building in Washington D.C by IAGO. Their "cover" was that the five of them had been transferred to a task force led by the Treasury, investigating a potential money laundering racket run out of the Basilica of Our Virgin Mother in the unincorporated community of Moscow-on-the-Chesapeake. The investigation would turn up a smattering of incidents of petty tax fraud, common for the blue-collar trades which the majority of the Skoptsi work in, but that the Basilica uses them more or less for benign uses that couldn't be plausibly construed as embezzlement or money laundering.

The reality of their operation is to probe the Skoptsi once again, and select a target to eliminate. Their prior operations in the Chesapeake mapped out the majority of the Skoptsi operation, namely their Bratva connections and some of their senior leadership, namely the NKVD defector Fedor Berezhkov / "Vasili Karpov", Yelena Kalamatiano, the elderly manager of Families without Frontiers, and Jermija Bogdashkavich. I-Cell was put to the task of identifying a target they believed posed the most vital to the Skoptsi, and who could most feasibly be eliminated, develop a plan to eliminate them, and carry through with it.

Electronic surveillance of the Skoptsi by INDIGO revealed that a clandestine meeting with a third party was taking place in nearby Chesapeake City, at the cab stand for Apollo Taxi, a known Skoptsi front. The meeting was surveilled and the third party was spotted and tailed. A fake "arrest" was arranged and the third party was drugged, kidnapped, and brought to I-Cell's "Green Box", a defunct bomb shelter beneath a car-wash in Wilmington. The cell initially intended to torture the man, but after questioning him, learned he was only a courier. the man, a dock worker by the name of Reuben Flynn, revealed he was delivering things back and forth from the Skoptsi, though he never knew them by that name, to another Russian man in Baltimore he knew as "Glinin". Flynn's testimony led the agents to believe that "Glinin" is in fact a member of the Tadjbegskaya Bratva, and that the Skoptsi had resumed their business arrangement with them. Flynn was brutalized, so that he could believably tell his benefactors he had been in a car accident, and that the materials he was meant to deliver to them, a pair of large binders full of images, were lost in the burning car.

After returning to their safe house in Wilmington, IMOGEN locked herself in a bedroom with a bottle of vodka and reviewed the contents of the binders. They depicted members of the Skoptsi performing a ritual involving men, women, and children. The summoning of a horrific being from the dark woods that would feed on an offering - in the pictured ritual, a bound and gagged man. Other, more hideous things were also pictured. After reviewing the binders, IMOGEN removed the most "important" photos, and stuffed the rest into a wood-burning stove. I-Cell took the photos to their contact, Dr. Jensen Wu, who likened the horror in the photos to a "Greater Spirit of the Wood", a horrific being known to the celtic mythos cult of Sheela-Na-Gig. Close examination of the photos, and Wu's consultation, confirmed that the ritual that summoned this horror would take hours, and required the slaughter of bovine and human sacrifice, and likely would not be deployed in the heat of cobmat against an invading force. Investigation of the photos led the agents to identify the man offered as sacrifice to the horror as Ryan Innokenty, whose name they had run across earlier in their investigations, and who they believed was a purveyor of illegal pornography. IRENA, an FBI agnet in the behavioural analysis unit, determined that the children, who Innokenty had likely abused, were being "offered" him, who they in turn would offer to the Horror from the woods. They were taking revenge on their abuser, and were being taught to affiliate their liberation with the thing from the woods, and the Skoptsi.

I-Cell had decided on their target. Although eliminating the Skoptsi's mafiosos and cutting off their ability to recover the Black Icons would be more effective in the short term, I-Cell agreed that the greatest evils were taking place at the orphanage operated by Families Without Frontiers, where children were being tortured and abused in order to indoctrinate them into the Skoptsi. I-Cell petitioned A-Cell to send back-up, which came in the form of two agents, Agents HANNIBAL and HECTOR of H-Cell, identified through a challenge phrase "Do you have Smokes?" to be answered by calling the challenger the "Son of a Whore". Preparations were drawn up and the agents selected their date, descending on the Orphanage on the night of the 20th of February, 1999.

The agents disguised themselves as representatives of Maryland Power Incorporated, responding to a power outage which they themselves engineered. Once they were close to the Orphanage, a cultist of the Skoptsi approached them and asked their business, to which he was answered with a hail of bullets.

The situation immediately grew chaotic. A cultist bolted from the barn into a tool shed, pursued by IRENA and HANNIBAL, meanwhile, HECTOR swept around the outside of the main house, INDIGO moved to breach and clear the barn, & IMOGEN and ISAAC moved to breach the main house. A brutal gunfight between IRENA, HANNIBAL, and the cultist they had chased into the tool shed ensued, with the cultist using an antique bolt-action rifle to fend himself from the two agents, striking IRENA hard in the chest before being perforated with bullets by HANNIBAL. IMOGEN and ISAAC were immediately greeted by a hysterical, screaming Skoptsi cultist who attacked them with a double-baralleled shotgun. INDIGO found nothing in the barn except for livestock, and some cages with dozens of animals in them.

HECTOR, who had broken off the sweep the outside of the main house, appeared through the rear glass door to the main house and began spraying in the house, very nearly striking his fellow agents. As IMOGEN had withdrawn from the main house and circled the house to meet HECTOR, she saw Yelena Kalamatiano in the distance. The old woman was frantic, waving her arms and screaming. After a brief moment, IMOGEN, INDIGO, and IRENA were able to make out her words.  

"THAT ISN'T ME, SHE'S IN MY BODY, IT ISN'T ME". HECTOR turned to meet IMOGEN, grinning wildly.

A bout of gunfight that nearly missed the IRS investigator before the CIA killer's MP5 clicked, out of bullets. INDIGO took the opportunity to close the distance and tackle the agent. As IMOGEN closed in, ready to eliminate the possessed agent if need be. At once, HECTOR's eyes rolled back in his head before darting to meet his comrades', screaming "DO YOU HAVE SMOKES, DO YOU HAVE SMOKES, IT'S ME, IT'S ME".

After ISAAC was able to kill the last, hysterical Skoptsi cultist, the team regrouped in the main house and determined to move on the cottage where Kalamatiano was hiding. INDIGO snuck through the dark towards the house, while IMOGEN took one of the vans they had commandeered for the raid and attempted to smash it into the cottage. No sooner than she had demolished the south wall of the cottage then she had been dominated by Kalamatiano, ordered to kill her teammates. IMOGEN reversed out of the cottage and began barrelling towards agents ISAAC and IRENA, only regaining control of her faculties in the last moment, swerving wildly and nearly wrapping the van around a tree.

The team closed in on the house. INDIGO was first through the door into the bedroom were Kalamatiano waited and was greeted by the horrifically mutated matron, who told her to "WITNESS HER" before INDIGO's mind was filled with visions of birth, unbirth, death, transformation, metamorphosis, and cannibalism. As INDIGO stood, frozen in awe and horror, the team burst in behind her and began filling Kalamatiano with bullets. By the time INDIGO came to, she was picking herself up out of the linen closet, and Kalamatiano was nothing but a heap of gore sprayed across a bed.

The cottage and the main house was doused in gasoline and set alight, while the children from the orphanage were herded into the barn, given warm water, fruit, and snacks to eat. I-Cell did as much as they could to collect evidence of their activities before leaving, informing the police not long after so that the children would be found before long.

I-Cell withdrew from the burning ruins of the Orphanage, watching the flickering glow disappear into the midnight. As they drove back to Wilmington, questions began to fill their mind. What will the authorities think? What will become of the children? How will the Skoptsi respond? What next? They all individually come to the same conclusion: It doesn't matter. They destroyed a thing they could only describe as "evil" and didn't get caught. That's the only thing that matters now. They withdraw in the midnight, the last year of the millennia.