The rhythm was different now.
It was no longer the frantic, crashing flight of terrified prey. The wild-eyed panic, the desperate lung-searing sprints, the clumsy stumbling through the undergrowth—all of it had been burned away in the crucible of the farmhouse and reforged in the cold philosophy of their leader. They moved now with the quiet, deadly purpose of a wolf pack on its own hunting trail.
Pavel, the great bear of a man, was their point. He moved with a surprising, fluid silence, his massive frame weaving through the dense stands of pine and birch, his single eye scanning every shadow, every flicker of movement. The simple soldier was gone, replaced by a vigilant outrider who had accepted the grim necessities of this new world. On the flanks, Murat and Ivan moved with a feral alertness, their city-bred instincts sharpened to a razor's edge by the wilderness. The forest was no longer a terrifying, alien landscape; it was their territory, and they moved through it as if they owned it.
And in the center, the brain of their small, lethal organism, rode Koba. He was the anchor, the compass, the strategic mind that gave their movement purpose. His gaze was a constant, sweeping assessment, flicking from the worn military map spread across his saddle to the subtle shifts in the terrain, to the posture of his men, to the position of the weak, watery sun. They were not running. They were stalking their prize.
On the second day of their long, looping journey north, Pavel held up a clenched fist, the silent command to halt. He pointed to the ground near a shallow, half-frozen stream. The mud was churned into a chaotic mess of hoof prints, dozens of them, cutting deep into the earth.
Ivan swore under his breath, his hand instinctively going to the rifle slung across his back. "Cavalry," he hissed, the word a spray of venom. "A full squadron, by the look of it."
Koba rode forward, his expression unconcerned. He glanced at the tracks for a moment before turning his attention back to his map. "Old cavalry," he corrected him, his voice calm and final.
Murat dismounted, squinting at the tracks with a skeptical eye. "How can you know that, planner? Mud is mud."
"Is it?" Koba swung down from his horse, his movements economical. He knelt by the most distinct of the prints, a perfect crescent stamped into the earth. "Look," he commanded, and the others gathered around him. He pointed with a gloved finger. "The edges of the track are crumbling. They are rounded from the wind and the frost. A fresh track in mud this wet would have sharp, clean edges, like it was cut with a knife. This one is more than two days old."
He then gestured with his chin towards a scattering of horse droppings a few meters away. "And look there. The droppings are dry, leached of all their color. If they were fresh, they would still be dark and steaming in this cold. No, these soldiers passed this way days ago, riding hard and heading west." He stood up, brushing the dirt from his knee. "They are chasing echoes. We are behind their lines."
He spoke with such absolute certainty, deriving a wealth of strategic intelligence from a patch of mud and dung, that his men could only stare. It was not magic, they were beginning to understand, but it was a kind of knowledge so far beyond their own that it might as well have been. His confidence was a contagion, and for the first time, the sheer scale of the manhunt they had escaped felt less like an omnipresent threat and more like a clumsy, blundering giant they could now outwit.
The ghosts of that giant were everywhere. Later that day, they found the first true artifact of the modern war being waged against them. Lying half-buried in a bed of pine needles was a small, brightly colored tin for expensive St. Petersburg cigarettes. The elegant Cyrillic script and the image of a smiling, aristocratic lady seemed like a dispatch from another planet. It was a stark reminder of the well-supplied, state-sponsored hunters who had passed this way, men who could afford such casual luxuries.
The next discovery was more sobering. They crested a small hill and found a hastily abandoned campsite. It had been a large force. The ground was trampled flat by dozens of heavy military boots. Empty ration tins lay scattered about, their metal lids glinting dully. The ashes in the large fire pit were stone cold. Pavel walked the perimeter, his eye scanning the ground. He bent down and picked something up, holding it in his palm. It was a single brass cartridge casing, stamped with the mark of the Tula Arms Plant. It gleamed, pristine and deadly, against his worn leather glove.
"They were here," Pavel rumbled, his voice a low vibration of awe and menace. "And they were armed for a war."
Koba surveyed the scene with a chilling detachment, his face betraying nothing. "Good," he said, and the single word made his men turn to look at him. "It means they are no longer here. Sazonov is a methodical man. A good field officer. He sweeps a sector, finds nothing, and moves his forces forward to the next grid on his map. He believes this area is clear."
[Jake]: Clear? This is insane. We're walking back into the lion's den. Sazonov is methodical, not stupid. What if he left a rearguard? A sniper team? A listening post?
[Koba]: The probability of a stationary guard post being allocated to a sector deemed 'clear' is less than four percent. It is an inefficient allocation of resources. Sazonov is hunting for a dynamic target—four men on foot. He is not anticipating a counter-incursion to retrieve a static asset. The risk is calculated and acceptable.
[Jake]: You're gambling with their lives! With my life! Look at them, they trust you completely!
[Koba]: I am investing their loyalty in a tangible return. Fear is a poor and fleeting motivator. Power is a permanent one. We are going to get our power.
After two more days of hard, silent riding through the endless forest, they finally arrived. The landscape began to feel unnervingly familiar. They tethered the horses in a deep, hidden ravine a full kilometer from their objective and proceeded on foot, moving not like soldiers, but like ghosts.
They crawled the final hundred meters up a shallow, pine-covered ridge, the frozen needles digging into their hands and knees. Koba parted the last few branches and looked down.
The scene was exactly as it was burned into his memory. The twin steel tracks of the railway, cutting a straight, unnatural scar through the ancient wilderness. The gravel siding, still disturbed from where the train had screeched to a halt. And there, a hundred meters away, was the dense, thorny thicket where they had stashed their future. Everything was still. Silent. The air was heavy with a profound and unnerving peace. It was too perfect.
Koba held out a hand. "The binoculars," he whispered.
Pavel passed them over. The military-grade field glasses, a small but vital spoil of war from the dead Captain Morozov, felt cold and heavy in Koba's hands. He raised them to his eyes, the powerful lenses bringing the distant thicket into sharp, clear focus.
It looked completely undisturbed. The branches were just as they had left them, a chaotic, natural-looking tangle. But Koba wasn't looking at the branches. His 21st-century mind, conditioned by a lifetime of thrillers and tactical video games, was looking for patterns that didn't belong. He scanned the ground around the thicket, the carpet of fallen pine needles and dark earth.
And then he saw it.
It was not the wire itself. It was the subtle wrongness of the landscape. A line of disturbed pine needles that was just a little too straight. A patch of moss that seemed to have been lifted and replaced. He followed the invisible line with the binoculars, and then, a faint, metallic glint, no bigger than a needle's eye, as a sliver of moonlight caught the edge of a thin, taut wire stretched six inches from the ground. He swept the binoculars left and saw another. And then another, further back. It was a web.
"Pavel," Koba said, his voice a low, dangerous whisper that cut through the silence. He passed the binoculars back without lowering his gaze. "Look at the ground. To the left of the large birch tree."
Pavel raised the glasses to his eye, his brow furrowed in concentration. He was silent for a long moment. Then he let out a short, sharp breath, a sound of dawning comprehension and horror. "Mother of God," he breathed. "What is that?"
Koba finally lowered his gaze from the thicket, a look of cold, predatory respect in his eyes. He was not looking at his men, but at the unseen hand of his adversary, Colonel Sazonov.
"That," he said, his voice utterly calm, "is Sazonov's garden. And he's booby-trapped the prize."