The silence that followed the train's violent, shuddering halt was a physical thing, a crushing weight that slammed down on the four men in the guard car. The rhythmic, hopeful clatter of the wheels was gone, replaced by the ringing in their ears and the ragged, panicked sound of their own breathing. Outside, the vast, indifferent forest was utterly still.
Murat, the wiry Chechen, was the first to break. His eyes, wide and terrified, darted towards the windows, then to the limp body of Captain Morozov on the floor. "We are dead," he hissed, the words a venomous spray of despair. "He pulled the brake. They will know where we are. They will send the army. They will surround us in minutes!"
His panic was a contagion, threatening to shatter their fragile discipline. Ivan, the hulking brute, shifted his weight, his knuckles white where he gripped his rifle, his expression that of a cornered bear. Even Pavel, the stoic mountain of a man, had a haunted look in his single eye.
It was Koba who pulled them back from the brink. His head throbbed, a sharp, pulsing agony where it had connected with the steel wall of the carriage. For a horrifying instant, the terrified mind of Jake Vance had screamed, a silent, primal shriek of utter certainty that this was the end. But the searing pain acted like a cauterizing iron, burning away the panic and leaving behind the cold, hard diamond of the Koba persona.
He forced himself to his feet, his movements steady despite the dizziness that threatened to buckle his knees. He projected an aura of absolute, inhuman calm, a chilling stillness that acted as an anchor in the swirling vortex of their fear.
"Panic is a luxury we cannot afford," he snapped, his voice not loud, but sharp and brittle as breaking ice. It cut through Murat's rising hysteria and shocked the men back to a semblance of order. "Murat, your fear is a liability. Strangle it, or I will. Pavel, you and Murat, get the crates onto the tracks. Now. Ivan, you will help me with the body."
His decisiveness, the sheer, unwavering certainty in his voice, was a form of magic. He was not suggesting a course of action; he was stating an established fact. They were not defeated. They were merely facing a new tactical problem. His calm was so profound, so unnatural, that it shamed them into action.
"We have less than ten minutes," Koba continued, his mind already working, calculating, seeing the next three moves on the board. "Ten minutes before the first patrols arrive from the nearest station. Everything we do in these ten minutes will determine whether we live or die."
He was not just giving them orders; he was giving them a clock, a tangible deadline that focused their fear into a desperate, frantic energy.
His plan was not simply to run. To run was to behave like predictable, frightened prey. His plan was to deceive.
"They will send cavalry," he explained as he and Ivan dragged the heavy, limp body of Morozov towards the door. "They will expect us to run west, away from St. Petersburg, towards the Finnish border. It is the logical escape route." He grunted with the effort of lifting the dead man. "So, we will run east. Back towards the city. We will use the railway line itself, stepping only on the wooden ties to hide our tracks in the gravel. For the first two kilometers, we will move in the direction they least expect."
It was a piece of basic, 21st-century knowledge about tracking and evasion, a simple misdirection that would be profoundly counter-intuitive to a 20th-century military mind. He was not just thinking about escaping; he was thinking about shaping the battlefield of the coming manhunt.
"The body," he said, looking down at the dead Okhrana captain. "They will use it to identify the threat. We need to slow them down." He began methodically stripping the uniform of its rank insignia and any identifying papers. It was a cold, ghoulish task, but he performed it with the detached efficiency of a butcher.
The next ten minutes were a frenzy of desperate, lung-searing, muscle-burning labor. Pavel and Murat wrestled the four heavy wooden crates, each laden with rifles and ammunition, from the freight car, their grunts and curses loud in the unnerving silence. The crates were monstrously heavy, their corners digging into their shoulders as they half-lifted, half-dragged them onto the gravel siding.
Meanwhile, Koba and Ivan dealt with the corpse. They carried it fifty meters from the tracks, to a spot where the ground turned marshy and sucking. With a final, coordinated heave, they dumped Morozov's body into a deep, stagnant ditch filled with black, foul-smelling water. It sank with a grotesque, bubbling sigh. They spent another precious minute covering the spot with fallen branches and loose turf, doing their best to make it look like an undisturbed patch of wilderness. The work was grueling, and every second was a torment, their senses stretched to the breaking point as they listened for the first, faint sound of an approaching train, the distant shouts of soldiers, the baying of hounds.
In a small, dusty railway telegraph office ten kilometers down the line, a flustered operator named Sasha was frantically tapping out a message, his hand trembling. The repeater machine had fallen silent. The rhythmic click-clack of the line had been replaced by an unnerving, dead quiet.
TRAIN 77B, MILITARY SPECIAL, UNSCHEDULED STOP AT KILOMETER 117 MARKER, he tapped, his sweat dripping onto the brass key. EMERGENCY BRAKE CORD ACTIVATED. NO RESPONSE FROM GUARD CAR. REPEAT, NO RESPONSE. POTENTIAL DERAILMENT OR HOSTILE ACTION. URGENT ASSISTANCE REQUIRED.
The message flew through the wires, an invisible nerve impulse in the body of the state, arriving moments later in the bustling, organized chaos of Colonel Sazonov's temporary headquarters in St. Petersburg.
Sazonov read the flimsy telegraph slip, and his face, already grim from a sleepless night, hardened into a mask of cold, absolute fury. He crushed the paper in his fist.
"He's off the rails," he said, the words a low, dangerous growl. The ghost had slipped through his fingers again. But this time, he had left a trail. He had defined the battlefield.
Sazonov was no longer reacting; he was launching a full-scale military operation. His commands were a rapid-fire volley of orders, each one designed to weave a net of steel and speed around his quarry.
"Deploy the cavalry patrols from both the Vyborg and St. Petersburg garrisons! I want them riding the line, converging on kilometer 117. Establish a one-hundred-kilometer cordon. No one, not a farmer, not a woodsman, crosses that line without being questioned."
"Get me the local Forestry Service maps! I want every road, every track, every river in this sector identified and marked."
"And get a message to the Petergof barracks. I want the experimental motorized infantry platoon ready to deploy at dawn. I want their engines running. Tell them they are no longer on standby. They are live."
He was unleashing the hounds. But they were not just men on horseback. He was bringing the full, terrifying power of the 20th-century state to bear on four men on foot: telegraphs, trains, cavalry, and the new, alien technology of the internal combustion engine.
Back at the railway line, the work was done. The four heavy crates were stashed in a thick, thorny thicket a hundred meters from the track, a location Koba had seared into his memory. The body was hidden. They were armed only with the rifles on their backs, a few spare clips of ammunition, and the clothes they stood in. They were exhausted, off-balance, and hopelessly outmatched.
Koba gave the final order. "Into the woods. East. Move."
He led them away from the railway line, plunging into the vast, dark, and utterly unforgiving Russian forest. The dense canopy of pine and birch swallowed them instantly, the sounds of the modern world—the steel rails, the telegraph wires—fading behind them, replaced by the rustle of leaves and the snap of twigs under their boots.
They had been moving for less than five minutes, putting as much distance as they could between themselves and the train, when they heard it.
It was a faint sound at first, a distant, mournful cry carried on the wind. But it was growing louder, closer. It was the whistle of a steam engine.
The hounds were coming.