The train ride to the south was a journey into the heart of a dying country.
For three days, Jake sat by the rattling window of a crowded troop car, watching Russia bleed. He traveled not in the private carriage of a Commissar, but on a hard wooden bench surrounded by Red Army soldiers, sharing their rough black bread and watery, bitter tea. He wanted to feel what they felt, to see the war through their eyes.
He stared out the window as the endless, flat snowscape of the north slowly gave way to the frozen mud of the south. The view was a relentless panorama of devastation. The train passed a burnt-out village, the charred skeletons of houses stark and black against the white snow. A lone, skeletal dog was picking at something in the ruins. A few miles later, they passed a siding where a refugee train had been shelled, its cars blackened and twisted, littered with the frozen, discarded bundles of a panicked flight.
This was the reality of the Civil War. Not the grand speeches in the Smolny, but this. A vast, frozen graveyard.
He felt the crushing weight of his new reality. Lenin had sent him here to die, a convenient solution to a political problem. Kato had given him the tools to win, a desperate gambit to secure her own power. He was a pawn caught between their two wills, and the fate of millions of ordinary people, like the ones who had lived in that burnt village, hung in the balance.
A strange sense of clarity washed over him. The political games of Petrograd, the lies and manipulations, were over. Here, in the blood-soaked mud of the front, there was only survival.
The city of Tsaritsyn was a vision of chaos. The train station was a heaving mass of humanity—wounded soldiers on crude stretchers, terrified refugees clutching their meager belongings, and grim-faced Red Guards trying to maintain a semblance of order. The air smelled of coal smoke, unwashed bodies, and fear.
Jake was met on the platform not by the front commander, but by a young, barrel-chested Political Commissar. The man's uniform was clean, his boots polished. He radiated an aura of arrogant self-importance. Jake recognized him from Party files: Kliment Voroshilov, a man known to be fiercely, almost slavishly, loyal to Trotsky.
"Commissar Koba," Voroshilov said, his greeting lacking any warmth. He barely hid his contempt. "We were not expecting you so soon. Comrade Trotsky's last directive was to maintain the current command structure until further notice."
"My orders are from the Council of People's Commissars and countersigned by Comrade Lenin himself," Jake said, his voice calm and flat. "I am in command of this front now."
A flicker of defiance lit Voroshilov's eyes. "We will, of course, offer you our full cooperation, Comrade. As soon as we receive official confirmation of this change in command from Commissar Trotsky's office in Petrograd."
It was a bureaucratic ambush, clean and precise. They were stonewalling him. Refusing to recognize his authority. He had the title of commander, but no power. He was a general with no army, surrounded by the loyal men of the man he had just politically humiliated.
Jake didn't argue. He knew a brick wall when he saw one. "Fine," he said. "While we wait for your telegrams, you will give me a tour of the front-line defenses."
What he saw was a nightmare.
They drove a few miles out of the city to the so-called defensive lines. The soldiers were ghosts. Hollow-eyed, gaunt men wrapped in rags, their rifles held together with scraps of wire. The trenches were shallow, poorly dug ditches that offered almost no protection from the constant, harassing shellfire of the White artillery. Morale was not just low; it was a memory.
Jake stopped by a young soldier, no older than sixteen, who was trying to warm his hands over a tiny, smoldering fire. The boy had wrapped his feet in thick bundles of newspaper, because his leather boots had long since rotted away in the frozen mud. The boy's eyes were completely empty, devoid of hope or fear or anything but a profound, soul-deep weariness.
Jake walked further down the trench, away from Voroshilov and his polished aides. He approached an old soldier, a man with a grey beard and a face like a roadmap of suffering, who was cleaning his rifle with a dirty rag.
"What is the situation here, old man?" Jake asked, his voice low.
The soldier looked up, his eyes weary but sharp. He spat a wad of brownish saliva onto the frozen ground.
"Situation?" he rasped. "We die. That is the situation. The Whites have heavy artillery; we have rifles from the Tsar's war. They have food convoys; we have lice. Their officers are professionals; ours are commissars who give speeches in the warm city while we starve to death in the mud."
The military situation was a thousand times worse than the official reports in Petrograd suggested. This wasn't a front on the verge of collapse. It had already collapsed. These men were just waiting for the final, merciful push that would end their suffering.
That night, in his requisitioned, freezing office in the city's military headquarters, Jake felt a profound sense of despair. Lenin had not just sent him to die; he had sent him to preside over a massacre. He had been given a command that could not be won.
A floorboard creaked in the corner of the room. A shadow detached itself from the deeper shadows. It was the Finn, looking tired and travel-worn, but alive. He had slipped into the besieged city under the cover of darkness.
Without a word, he handed Jake the sealed oilskin pouch from Kato.
Jake's fingers were stiff with cold as he broke the seal. He read Kato's coded message first, a simple, brutal command: Do not fail. Then, he pulled out the thick file of intelligence reports.
As he began to read, the despair that had been crushing him evaporated, replaced by a cold, predatory excitement. His hunter's instincts, dormant since the street battles of October, roared back to life.
The file was a masterpiece. A gift from a goddess of war. It detailed the exact grid coordinates of the White Army's main artillery depot, their single greatest advantage, located in a lightly guarded ravine miles behind their front line.
But there was more. The file contained a detailed psychological profile of the White commander in this sector, General Mamontov. It described him as a vain, reckless, and glory-seeking cavalryman who, without fail, always led his famous Cossack charges from the very front. A man who valued personal bravery over sound strategy.
It wasn't just intelligence. It was a ready-made battle plan. An instruction manual on how to kill an army and its general.
Jake looked up from the file, a dangerous, feral gleam in his eyes. He now had a path to an impossible, world-shattering victory. But to walk that path, he first needed an army that would obey him, and him alone.
He summoned one of the loyal Kronstadt sailors who had traveled south with him as his personal guard. "Find me the commander of the local Cheka detachment," he ordered, his voice a low growl of command. "Tell him the new Commissar for the Southern Front wants to have a private discussion. About the problem of traitors and Trotskyite sympathizers in the officer corps."
He was done playing by Trotsky's rules. He would bypass the insubordinate army command entirely by seizing control of the secret police. He would forge his own army, in his own image, in a crucible of blood and fear.