The sound of the engine was a death knell. It was the sound of the modern world, a growling, mechanical predator that had pursued them into their primitive sanctuary. It rolled through the forest, a wave of alien noise that seemed to mock their pathetic, mud-caked exhaustion. To Pavel and the Chechens, it was a terrifying mystery, a new kind of monster in the dark. But Koba understood it instantly.
Armored cars, Jake's mind supplied, a piece of historical trivia that was suddenly a matter of life and death. Russo-Balt. Early models. Slow, unreliable on rough terrain, but on a road…
The calculation was instant and brutal. Stolypin wasn't just using cavalry and men on foot. He was deploying every advanced, experimental tool at his disposal. He was waging a 20th-century war against four fugitives trapped in the 19th. They could not outrun this. They could not hide from it. A single patrol car could cover more ground in an hour than they could in a full day of grueling marching. Their feet were no longer a viable means of escape.
"We need speed," Koba said, his voice a low, urgent whisper in the darkness, just audible over the fading growl of the distant engine. "We need horses."
The pronouncement hung in the cold, damp air, a statement of both desperate hope and profound impossibility. They were in the middle of a vast, unpopulated wilderness. There were no towns, no stables, no roads where they could hope to buy or steal a mount.
They spent the rest of the night in a state of heightened, terrified wakefulness, starting at every snap of a twig, every rustle of the wind. Sleep was a forgotten luxury. At the first, faint hint of gray in the eastern sky, Pavel, the most sure-footed and silent of the group, slipped away into the pre-dawn gloom, a ghost sent to scout their path north.
An hour later, he returned, his movements urgent, his one eye blazing with a mixture of excitement and trepidation.
"Planner," he breathed, his voice a low rumble. "A farm. Less than three kilometers north of here. I saw the smoke from their chimney." He described the scene: a small, isolated steading, a single, humble log izba with a thatched roof, a dilapidated barn, and a small, fenced-in pasture. It was an island of human existence in an ocean of trees. "A family," Pavel continued, his voice dropping. "A man, a woman, a small boy. Poor folk. But they have horses. Two of them. Sturdy-looking draft animals."
A glimmer of hope. A single, desperate chance. The four men looked at each other, the same thought in all their minds.
Murat, the pragmatic killer, was the first to give it voice. "It is a gift from God," he said, a humorless, predatory smile touching his lips. "We take the horses. If the farmer and his family make a problem, we kill them. Simple." He checked the action on his rifle, the metallic click unnervingly loud in the quiet morning.
Pavel's face hardened. He looked from Murat to Koba, his expression deeply uneasy. "Planner," he said, his voice heavy with a moral weight that had been absent in the heat of battle. "They are just farmers. Poor folk, scratching a life from the dirt. They have done nothing to us. Harming them… it is not honorable." He, a man who had broken heads and cracked skulls without a second thought in the city's underworld, drew a line at violence against innocent civilians.
This was it. The final, terrible crossroads. The last battle for the soul of Jake Vance. Everything in his 21st-century mind—his morality, his empathy, his fundamental belief in the sanctity of human life—screamed in protest. No. Not this. We can buy the horses. We can offer them something. We can tie them up. There has to be another way. We are not monsters who murder children.
He looked at Pavel's earnest, troubled face. He looked at Murat's cold, impatient one. He felt the crushing weight of their desperation, the ticking clock of Sazonov's motorized patrols, the absolute necessity of his own survival to reach Kato, who was herself alone and hunted. He put it all on the scales. The lives of three unknown, innocent peasants on one side. His mission, his survival, and the lives of his own men on the other.
He made the calculation. And the man who made it was not Jake Vance. It was Koba.
He listened to the debate for a moment longer, his face a cold, unreadable mask. Then he spoke, and his voice was the sound of a closing door, the final, definitive snuffing of a candle's flame.
"We cannot buy the horses, Pavel," he said, his tone utterly devoid of emotion. It was the voice of pure, unadulterated logic. "We have no money that isn't stolen. And even if we did, what happens the moment we ride away? The farmer, an honest, law-abiding subject of the Tsar, will walk to the nearest village. He will report the 'sale' of his only two horses to four heavily armed strangers in military uniforms. He will describe our faces. He will tell the police which direction we were heading. He would be a loose end. A signpost pointing our hunters directly to us."
He paused, letting the cold, inescapable truth of his words sink in.
He then looked directly at Pavel, his eyes as empty and hard as river stones. "We cannot leave him alive to do that," he continued, his voice dropping even lower. "And we cannot leave the woman, or the child. Because they are also witnesses. A crying woman, a frightened boy… they can describe a man's face just as well as a farmer can."
His logic was a perfect, terrible, and flawless trap. There were no other options. There was no room for morality. There was only the brutal, binary choice between their survival and the survival of the peasant family. To ensure the success of the mission, to continue his quest to save Kato and the world, three innocent people had to be erased from existence.
Pavel stared at him, his face a mask of dawning horror. He was seeing the true face of the man he had followed, the monster beneath the brilliant strategist. Murat and Ivan, however, simply nodded, their expressions clearing. They understood this kind of math. It was the simple, brutal arithmetic of the wolf pack.
Koba did not flinch from Pavel's horrified gaze. He did not delegate the task. A leader, he had decided in the dark forge of his new soul, does not shrink from the necessary, however monstrous. He must own the sin. He must be the one to wield the knife.
"Come," he said, his voice a flat command. "We are wasting daylight."
They approached the farmhouse through the trees, moving with a silent, predatory grace. The scene was one of rustic, heartbreaking peace. A thin tendril of smoke curled from the chimney of the small log cabin. A child's laughter, bright and clear as a bell, echoed from behind the house.
Koba took the lead. He slung his rifle over his shoulder in a non-threatening manner and walked into the clearing alone, a weary sergeant seeking aid. The farmer, a man in his thirties with a simple, honest face and calloused hands, came out to meet him. He saw Koba's uniform and his expression was one of wary respect, not fear.
"Good morning, Sergeant," the farmer said, wiping his hands on his trousers. "You are a long way from your post. Can I help you?"
"My men and I are on a special patrol," Koba said, his voice calm and even. "Our horses went lame. We saw your smoke. We were hoping we could trouble you for some water, perhaps a little bread."
The farmer's face broke into a simple, welcoming smile. "Of course, of course! Any soldier of the Tsar is welcome at my table. My wife is just taking the bread from the oven. Please, come."
He turned to lead Koba towards the house. It was in that moment, with the man's back turned, that Pavel, Murat, and Ivan emerged from the treeline, their rifles held at the ready.
The farmer stopped, his smile faltering as he saw the other men, as he saw the cold, hard expressions in their eyes. He turned back to Koba, a dawning horror in his own. He understood, too late, that these were not soldiers. They were something else entirely. He opened his mouth to shout, to warn his wife, his son.
The scene did not show the violence. The lens of the story pulled back, rising high above the trees, until the farmhouse was just a small, insignificant clearing in a vast, uncaring wilderness. The sounds of the confrontation, the screams, the pleas, the final, brutal silence—they were all lost to the wind.
An hour later, the four riders emerged from the treeline. Koba and Pavel were mounted on the two sturdy draft horses. Ivan and Murat rode behind them, sharing the second mount. They were grim-faced and silent, four dark figures moving through the snow-dusted landscape. They rode north, away from the farm, not looking back.
The story's eye lingered on the small, peaceful-looking homestead. There was no sign of struggle. There was no sound but the lonely sigh of the wind through the pines and the faint, cheerful crackle of the fire still burning in the hearth. Then, from beneath the ill-fitting front door of the log cabin, a thin, dark line of red began to snake its way out. It was a stark, horrifying stain against the clean, white snow of the dooryard, a single, terrible punctuation mark at the end of a family's life.
Koba had made his choice. He had paid the price. The last, stubborn, flickering ember of Jake Vance's soul had been sacrificed on the cold altar of necessity. He was no longer a man playing the part of a monster. He was the monster. And he was finally, truly, free to do what needed to be done.