The Siberian night was an entity of pure, absolute cold. It was a cold that did not just bite at the flesh, but seemed to leech the very warmth from a man's soul. A blinding blizzard, a true buran, howled across the Trans-Baikal, a white wall of churning snow and ice that reduced visibility to zero and erased the world.
For the ninety thousand soldiers of the Russian Second, Third, and Fifth Siberian Armies, wintering in their sprawling, semi-permanent barracks in a sheltered valley, the storm was a welcome thing. It was a guarantee of their safety. It reinforced the hundreds of miles of impassable terrain, the frozen rivers, and the trackless forests that separated them from the stalled Chinese army on the Ussuri front. They were the Tsar's strategic reserve, safe and secure in the heart of their motherland, waiting for the spring thaw and the resumption of a predictable war. They slept, dreaming of home, of hot borscht, of the coming victory.
They did not know that the storm was not their shield. It was a shroud.
Outside their perimeter, in the teeth of the blizzard that was supposed to protect them, an army of ghosts was completing its final, silent maneuvers. For a month, Meng Tian's Ten Thousand Ghosts had journeyed through this frozen hell, a feat of endurance and logistics that defied all known principles of winter warfare. They had traveled on light, horse-drawn sledges over the frozen highways of the great rivers, their movements perfectly masked by the constant winter storms. They had eaten their iron rations of dried meat and lard cold, for to light a fire was to reveal their position and invite death. They had endured frostbite, exhaustion, and the soul-crushing monotony of the endless white landscape. And now, they had arrived.
Meng Tian stood on a windswept ridge overlooking the valley, the blizzard a physical blow against him. He was a wraith in his white winter camouflage, his face numb, the only warmth in his body the cold, clear fire of his purpose. Through his binoculars, he could just make out the faint, scattered lights of the Russian barracks below, cozy and unsuspecting. His two columns, having advanced on parallel river routes, had converged with the silent, flawless precision of a master surgeon's tools.
He gave a single, hand-chopped signal. There was no bugle call, no grand pronouncement. The final phase of the operation began with a series of quiet, brutal whispers.
Small teams of his White Foxes, men who could move like smoke through the storm, glided on skis toward the Russian perimeter. They found the telegraph wires that connected the valley to the outside world and, with a single snip of their cutters, rendered the ninety thousand men below deaf and dumb. They found the scattered sentry posts, the shivering Russian soldiers dreaming of their warm bunks, and overwhelmed them with the silent, efficient brutality of knife and garrote.
Simultaneously, at opposite ends of the long valley, two larger operations were underway. To the west, a team of his best sappers, led by a grizzled veteran of the Boxer Rebellion, packed hundreds of pounds of dynamite onto the stone pylons of the single Trans-Siberian Railway bridge that served as the valley's only escape route to the west. To the east, another team placed charges high up on the snow-laden cliffs that overlooked the main pass, the army's sole supply route.
Meng Tian watched the hands of his pocket watch, the only sound the howling of the wind and the frantic beating of his own heart. At precisely 0300 hours, he gave a second signal.
Two massive, near-simultaneous explosions ripped through the night, their deep, concussive booms momentarily overwhelming the roar of the wind. To the west, the railway bridge erupted in a flash of orange fire, its steel trusses twisting like licorice before plunging into the icy river below. To the east, the charges triggered a controlled avalanche of unimaginable scale. A tidal wave of snow, ice, and rock, a million tons of the mountain itself, roared down into the pass, burying it, sealing it, erasing it from the landscape.
The trap was sealed. The ninety thousand Russian soldiers in the valley were now inmates in a vast, open-air prison. They were completely and utterly cut off from the world.
The Russian commanders awoke to a nightmare of confusion and silence. Their telegraphs were dead. Their patrols had vanished into the storm. Then, as the blizzard finally began to break with the coming of the grey, merciless dawn, they saw the impossible.
The ridges and hills that encircled their valley, the very terrain they had considered their impenetrable shield, which had been empty and white the night before, were now a dark, menacing grey. They were swarming with thousands of Chinese soldiers, dug into hastily prepared but well-sited defensive positions. Light artillery pieces and heavy Maxim machine guns, which had been painstakingly dragged on sledges for hundreds of miles, now commanded every approach. The Russians stared up from the valley floor, their hearts turning to ice. They were not just cut off. They were surrounded. They were in a coffin.
Meng Tian, however, did not order the costly, glorious frontal assault the Russians half-expected. He had not come all this way to trade lives with his enemy. His plan was far more cruel, and far more patient. He began a methodical, scientific, and utterly inhuman siege. His objective was not to kill the Russians in glorious battle, but to let the Siberian winter kill them for him.
His artillery, firing with calm, deliberate accuracy, ignored the main barracks. Instead, they targeted the Russian supply dumps. Great plumes of fire and smoke erupted as mountains of wooden crates filled with food, ammunition, and medical supplies were set ablaze. He turned their winter stockpiles into a series of magnificent, demoralizing bonfires.
His sharpshooters, positioned with his own inhuman prescience, began their grim work. They picked off any man who ventured out of the barracks for firewood. They picked off the water details sent to the river. He laid a siege not just on the army, but on the very elements of survival. He turned their secure winter haven into a frozen, resource-less deathtrap.
For a week, the silent, one-sided battle continued. The temperature plummeted. Inside the valley, hope gave way to despair, then to starvation. The Russian soldiers, huddled in their freezing barracks, began to slaughter their own horses for food. Frostbite and disease began to ravage the ranks.
The Russian commander, General Kuropatkin, a proud and stubborn veteran, finally realized his situation was not just desperate; it was hopeless. He gathered his last ten thousand able-bodied troops, the best and most loyal of his men, for a single, suicidal breakout attempt. They would storm the eastern pass, the one now blocked by the avalanche, and try to punch a hole through the Chinese lines, a desperate, final charge for the honor of the Tsar.
This was the moment Meng Tian had been waiting for. He watched from his command post as the dark column of Russian soldiers began their advance across the snow-covered floor of the valley. He allowed them to come on, to struggle through the deep snowdrifts, to advance into the perfectly prepared kill zone he had designed for them.
When they were halfway up the slope, their lines compressed and tangled by the difficult terrain, he gave the final order.
He did not shout. He simply said, "Now."
Along the entire ridge line, hundreds of Maxim machine guns and light field guns, which had been silent for a week, opened fire simultaneously. The effect was not of a battle, but of an industrial slaughter. The Russian charge, so full of desperate courage just moments before, was simply erased. The machine guns, firing from interlocking positions of enfilade, scythed them down in swathes. The artillery shells, bursting in the air above them, rained down a storm of shrapnel. It was a horrific, one-sided massacre, a perfect, clinical execution. The breakout was not repulsed; it was annihilated.
The brief, furious battle was over. A terrible silence once again descended on the valley, broken only by the cries of the wounded and the whisper of the wind over the snow, which was now stained a deep, terrible red.
The remaining eighty thousand Russians in the valley, leaderless, starving, frozen, and having just witnessed the complete destruction of their last hope, surrendered. An entire strategic reserve, the backbone of the Tsar's power in the Far East, had ceased to exist.
The victory was absolute, a feat of arms that would send shockwaves through every military headquarters in the world, from St. Petersburg to London to Washington. It was a victory bought not with superior numbers, but with superior vision, audacity, and a complete and utter disregard for the established rules of war.
Meng Tian stood on the ridge, looking down at the endless black columns of surrendered Russian soldiers, a river of defeated men snaking their way down from the barracks to lay down their arms. He felt no pride. He felt no elation. He felt no pity. He felt only the cold, empty satisfaction of a complex equation that had been solved. The Shinigami had delivered his first victory for his Emperor. And the price had been the complete and total annihilation of his enemy.