Spring, 1915.
The world had been at war for nine months, and the primary business of Europe was the manufacturing of mud and corpses. Here, on the sprawling grounds of a requisitioned Prussian estate just outside Berlin, Koba was in the business of manufacturing something else entirely: a weapon.
The estate, once the proud domain of some minor Junker, was now known by a bland, sterile designation: The Grünewald Institute for Eastern Peoples. To the German General Staff, it was a research facility for subversive warfare. To the men who lived and trained within its high stone walls, it was a world unto itself. To Koba, it was his kingdom.
He stood on a wooden platform overlooking the heart of his domain: a horrifyingly realistic network of trenches carved into the estate's once-manicured back fields. They were not the neat, orderly ditches of a training manual. They were a deliberate nightmare of German design and Russian misery, complete with flooded sections, collapsing dugouts, and a churned, pockmarked no-man's-land tangled with barbed wire.
Below, Pavel, his face a grim mask of duty, drilled a hundred men. They were a motley collection, the raw material for Koba's grand experiment: sullen Russian prisoners of war who had chosen this over starvation, a handful of hard-eyed Bolshevik exiles deemed too radical for the Zurich cafes, and a few street-tough criminals plucked from the Berlin underground who owed fealty to Koba alone.
"Again!" Pavel's voice, a low rumble, carried over the squelching march of boots in the mud. "You move when the firing starts, not after! You fire when you halt, not while you run! Cover your comrade!"
They were practicing a tactic Jake knew from a future of warfare, something he called "fire and maneuver." One squad would lay down a hail of suppressing fire while another dashed forward to new cover, a lethal leapfrog that was a century ahead of the suicidal frontal assaults currently in vogue on the Western Front.
Koba watched them, his arm, now healed but for a deep ache that flared in the damp air, tucked inside his coat. He was no longer just a conspirator. He was a general. A quartermaster. A teacher.
He descended from the platform and walked the trench line, his boots sinking into the duckboards. He stopped before a group of new arrivals, their faces pale with a mixture of fear and defiance.
"Listen to me," he said, his voice quiet but carrying a weight that made every man strain to hear. "The men who sent you to the front—the Tsar, his generals—they do not care if you live or die. The men you are fighting—the Germans—they want you dead. I am the only one in this equation who requires you to be alive."
His eyes, cold and dark, scanned their faces. "Your life is a resource. Nothing more. Do not waste it for pride, or bravery, or God. Your life is useful to me, so I will teach you how to keep it."
He gestured towards the gray, overcast sky. "You will learn to listen. An 88-millimeter field gun makes a sharp, cracking sound. A heavy howitzer sounds like a train derailing in the sky. One you can survive if you are flat against the earth. The other will dig you out of your hole and throw you into the next province. Knowing the difference is life."
He kicked at a small, canvas-wrapped bundle on the ground. "You will be issued two pairs of socks," he continued, the statement so mundane it was jarring. "You will keep one pair dry at all times, wrapped in oilcloth. At the end of every day, you will take off your boots, dry your feet, and put on the dry pair. The man who fails to do this will feel his flesh begin to rot off his bones. He will be of no use to me, and I will leave him behind. Is that clear?"
A murmur of assent rippled through the men. This wasn't ideology. This was survival. In a world that treated them as meat for a grinder, Koba was offering them the science of not dying. His pragmatism was a form of mercy so profound it bordered on love, and it was buying him a loyalty far deeper than any political sermon ever could.
He left them to Pavel's grim instruction and walked back towards the main house, a grand, stone manor that now served as the Institute's command center. The gilded cage had expanded.
He found Kato in the library.
The room was vast, two stories high, lined with dark oak shelves groaning under the weight of expropriated books. Kato sat at a large central table, surrounded by stacks of Russian newspapers, telegraph intercepts, and German intelligence summaries. A single electric lamp cast a pool of warm light on her work, making her seem like a scholar monk in some ancient scriptorium.
She was no longer his lover, not even his comrade. She was a component in his machine. Her official title was Head Archivist. In practice, she was the brain of his intelligence operation. She cross-referenced casualty lists to identify disgruntled units, translated captured letters to gauge enemy morale, and built psychological profiles of Tsarist officers, noting their weaknesses—a fondness for drink, a gambling debt, a political grudge. She was ruthlessly, terrifyingly good at it.
Her cold, perfect compliance was a wall between them, more impenetrable than the stone of the Peter and Paul Fortress.
"Anything from the Dvinsk sector?" Koba asked, his voice businesslike.
"The new conscripts are being sent with only seventy rounds of ammunition each," she replied without looking up, her finger tracing a line in a German report. "And General Plehve is complaining again about the quality of the canned beef. Morale in the Fifth Army is brittle."
"Good," Koba said. "Flag any units with officers from the Baltic German nobility. They are the most likely to resent the Tsar's command."
"I already have," she said, her voice flat.
He stood there for a moment, watching the lamplight catch the fine strands of her dark hair. He was the architect of this strange, quiet world. He had her, she was safe, she was fed, she was warm. He had won. And the victory was a constant, grinding ache in his chest, worse than his broken bone.
He turned and left her to her work.
Had he stayed a moment longer, had he watched from the shadows, he would have seen her pause. He would have seen her glance at the closed door, ensuring she was alone. He would have seen her pull a small, cheap notebook from a hidden pocket in her dress.
With a tiny pencil, she made an entry. Not in Russian or German, but in a coded shorthand based on old Georgian poetry they had once shared. The entry was not about General Plehve.
N. Walter. Oberst. G.S. Met K. 15 April. Subject: agent deployment, Warsaw line. Shipment: 200 Mauser rifles, 20 crates grenades confirmed.
She was building her own archive. Cataloging every German officer she met, every weapon shipment, every sin. She was a prisoner, yes. But a prisoner who was meticulously mapping the architecture of her jail, waiting for the day she could burn it to the ground.
Later that afternoon, a black motorcar crunched up the gravel drive. Oberst Walter Nicolai emerged, his immaculate uniform a slash of feldgrau against the greening lawns. He walked with the brisk, impatient energy of a man for whom time was a strategic commodity.
Koba met him on the steps of the manor.
"Oberst," Koba greeted him with a slight nod.
"Herr Koba," Nicolai replied, his eyes sweeping the grounds, taking in the disciplined activity, the armed guards, the sheer efficiency of the place. "I received your latest report. Impressive."
They walked together, a tour of inspection. Nicolai observed Pavel's training exercises, his expression unreadable as he watched the mock assaults on the trenches. He inspected the barracks, noting their cleanliness. He saw the mess hall, where the men were being served a thick, nutritious stew.
"You have built a fine machine, Herr Koba," Nicolai said as they stood on the veranda, looking out over Koba's small, private army. "High morale. Excellent discipline. A fierce loyalty to you. A very fine machine indeed."
He paused, taking a cigarette from a silver case and lighting it with a steady hand. He exhaled a plume of smoke into the cool spring air.
"But a machine is useless without a purpose," he continued, his voice hardening slightly. "The General Staff has been funding this… 'institute'… for nearly a year. They appreciate your intelligence analyses, but they are growing impatient. They are practical men. They don't want theories about the Tsar's brittle army. They need results. They need a victory."
The demand hung in the air between them, sharp and cold. It was the master reminding the servant of his debt.
Jake felt a familiar, cold calm settle over him. The panic, the doubt, the shrieking ghost of the 21st-century man, was silent. All that was left was Koba, the mechanic of history, the man who saw the world as a series of levers to be pulled. He had been waiting for this. He had been planning for it.
He met Nicolai's gaze, a faint, chilling smile touching his lips.
"Good," Koba replied, his voice low and steady, ringing with the absolute certainty of a prophet. "Because I am ready to give you one."