Artic Salvage

In segment two of episode #603 of Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, they discuss a 1962 CIA operation to salvage an abandoned Soviet drift station and how it would make a great Fall of Delta Green one-shot. I loved the idea so much that I hit pause on my regular Shadowdark campaign and ran it as a one-shot last night. Here are my scenario notes.

September 1962. CIA briefing:
SIGINT suggests Soviet drift station NP-8 has been evacuated by icebreaker Belousov after the airstrip sustained melt damage. Soviet SOP, as confirmed by U-2 flyover, is to abandon station heavy equipment and evacuate only personnel and logbooks.
Your mission is to investigate drift station NP-8 and pack up any equipment likely to yield intelligence insights on Soviet capacity to monitor the US submarine fleet.
Infiltration via parachute from contractor Intermountain Air departing from civil aviation airfield in maritime Canada.
Maintain radio silence lest Soviets identify NP-8 salvage mission via huff-duff. Receive any updated orders via shortwave numbers stations Echo Sierra at 21:15 GMT and decode with one-time pads.
Exfiltration via skyhook as operated by Intermountain Air. Anticipated in 72 hours but subject to weather conditions and operational necessity.

Sealed orders for CIA officer:

Defer to the librarian. Numbers station Echo Sierra traffic following code group “DG” is to be decrypted by him only.

Sealed orders for librarian:

SIGINT suggests possible GRU SV-8 (Soviet Delta Green) deployment several days before Soviet drift station crew exfil. Allow primary mission to proceed and read colleagues in on Delta Green only after confirming presence of the unnatural.


Backstory:
NP-8 crew was drilling a hole for a new microphone and 5 meters down hit a meteor, cracking it open and allowing a “feaster from the stars” to hatch from an egg deep in the meteor.
Over the following week, the feaster ate half of the 16 man crew. The terrified crew pulled microphones from the ice and repurposed them as an early warning system for the camp.

The station commander radioed for support and GRU SV-8 got themselves assigned to the mission. The cleaner team cleared out the bunks of the missing crew to make space for themselves in the barracks. In under 24 hours, GRU SV-8 built two firing positions armed with RP-46 machine guns trained on a bait station with live chickens and warmed pork blood, all brought in for the purpose. In addition, they had dust of ibn-Ghazi to render the seeker visible. They successfully destroyed the feaster using the bait station and guns. However they did not know it had already laid two eggs.
GRU SV-8 still considered it too dangerous to keep the station in operation and so scuttled the runway and called for exfiltration by icebreaker. [Note: when I ran it, I had a more complicated SV-8 veil out but it was just confusing].

The setting:
Iceberg is about 45 km^2 (1/3 the size of San Francisco). Temperatures are consistently below freezing.
Monitoring station huts are scattered around the island. Each contains a hole drilled by augur and wiring back to the center, but currently lacks microphones.
The most recent hut has a hole terminating in an ancient meteor, 5 meters below the surface. It is cracked. If excavated and examined there are fragments in the middle of an invisible rubbery egg the size of a football.

The central village of the station is three quonsets arranged in a U as well as several small huts (generator shed, deisel fuel storage shed, waste shaft, and garages for the tractor and snow tires jeep). Strangely, the village is ringed with microphones that would normally be submerged in the Artic Sea.
The left quonset is a storage area, the center an office/lab/mess, and the right barracks. All are elevated half a meter above the ice, heavily insulated, and the office and barracks have heaters.
The storage area has both a well-stocked pantry and tools/spare parts. Allow preparedness rolls to draw on these Soviet supplies. The odd items are chicken droppings and large glass jars of pork blood (now frozen).
The middle quonset is an office/lab/radio room. It has a map of the iceberg which shows the huts with drilling dates. The most recent date is two weeks ago. There is also a paper tape seismograph equipment connected to the microphones. A data retrieval spend will show a faint noise (the feaster’s tittering) for several minutes and then a minute of a loud noise (automatic gunfire) in the direction of the bait station about four hours before the machine was turned off.
The right quonset is barracks, with two stoves/samovars and 16 beds. All have been slept in. Half of them have footlockers full of changes of clothes and the like. None of them have family photos or letters. There are magazines, novels, and cigarettes.
Outside the barracks, clothes of eight men, along with their letters and family photos, are piled in a heap. If examined, the last of the outgoing letters is dated 9 days ago and describes multiple comrades going missing and a pervasive terror around the station.

100 meters from the village is a bait station and two firing positions. The firing positions are made of quarried ice blocks in lieu of sand bags. Each has a RP-46 machine gun and an empty belt. There is also an empty vial labeled “ibn-Ghazi.” The guns are frozen and require a mechanics or heavy weapons roll of 4 to repair. A preparedness roll of 4 reveals the storage quonset has enough 7.62 ammo for one burst from one gun, a roll of 6 enough for two bursts, a roll of 8 enough for three bursts, etc.
The bait station is a 8′ heavy pole sticking upright from the ice with a leather strap dangling from it and frayed at the loose end. There are scattered feathers and two frozen cooking pots full of pork blood at the base. A survival spend will let the agents discover strange shambling tracks from the bait pole that terminate in the frozen corpse of a feaster. It is invisible except for the pool of frozen pork blood below it and the remaining blood and chicken carcass in its stomach, giving the appearance that a bunch of gore is suspended half a meter above the ground and trickling into a pool on the ground. Careful examination reveals it is perforated with bullet holes. The PCs can autopsy it with a biology or chemistry spend as per the core rules bestiary entry for feaster from the stars.

The runway:
A notice spend will reveal detonator wires from holes in the ice (visible from aerial photos) to a detonator.

The iceberg overall:
Spending enough time searching the iceberg will reveal occasional spots with blood splatter and, a dozen meters away, a mangled dessicated frozen corpse.

Events:
Numbers station Echo Sierra transmits nightly that no icebreakers are in sight, plan on exfil on schedule.
On the morning of the second day, the two eggs hatch and two feasters from the stars begin hunting the PCs.
Noon of the third day, Intermountain Aviation flies over for skyhook exfiltration.