Erevan Square looked peaceful beneath the morning sun.
Vendors shouted over their stalls. Children chased pigeons. The bronze statue of a poet stood watch over a crowd that had no idea it was sitting on a powder keg.
But above, behind, and all around, death was waiting.
Men crouched in shadowed doorways. Others lay prone on rooftops, rifles ready. Every alley leading into the square was manned. The air was too still—too expectant.
Hidden inside a second-floor teahouse, Kamo watched through a pair of cheap binoculars. His pulse was steady, his mind razor-sharp.
Soso's warning echoed in his head. The enemy knows.
At exactly 10:30 a.m., the target appeared.
The bank stagecoach rolled into the square, a black, iron-reinforced monster pulled by two horses. But it wasn't alone. Twelve mounted Cossacks rode with it—rifles gleaming, faces hard and ready.
Bait.
Kamo exhaled slowly. "There it is," he murmured. Then he gave a low whistle.
Across the square, Captain Rostov, crouched behind a rooftop parapet, smiled. The rats had taken the cheese. He raised his hand to signal his men.
And then the world exploded.
The first blasts weren't gunshots but thunder—deep, bone-shaking detonations.
Kamo's bombers had thrown grenades—but not at the coach or the Cossacks. They'd hit the streets themselves.
The charges tore the cobblestones apart, filling the air with dust, nails, and splintered stone. Horses screamed. Entire side streets—the very ones the hidden Cossack units were meant to charge from—erupted in flame and debris.
Rostov froze, disbelief written across his face. His perfect plan was burning in front of him. They knew. Somehow, they had known.
Before he could recover, Kamo's second wave struck.
Smaller grenades sailed through the smoke, slamming into the coach and its escort. The square vanished under a curtain of smoke, screams, and shrapnel.
The explosions rolled into one another, echoing like artillery. The crowd panicked—people running, tripping, crying. Horses reared, flailing and shrieking.
And through it all, the sharp bark of Mauser pistols rang out, disciplined and deadly.
Kamo's men had turned Stolypin's trap inside out.
But the Okhrana's plan wasn't finished.
Rostov, shaken but still a soldier, shouted the order.
From the windows and rooftops, his riflemen opened fire.
The square became hell. Bullets tore through fruit stalls, shattered windows, and punched into bodies—soldiers, revolutionaries, civilians, it didn't matter.
The statue of the poet lost its arm in a burst of gunfire.
A seventeen-year-old Bolshevik was hit square in the chest and dropped instantly.
A woman with a basket of bread spun and fell, blood splattering across her loaves.
The Bolsheviks fought back hard but were pinned, their cover disappearing under the hail of lead. One man screamed, clutching his leg; another slid lifeless behind a broken water trough.
It was no longer a robbery.
It was a war.
Kamo moved through the chaos like a machine. Smoke and screams blurred together, but his focus stayed fixed. The square wasn't his battlefield—it was his smokescreen.
While the others traded fire, he led a small strike team straight toward the ruined coach.
Bullets whined overhead.
He didn't flinch.
They tore open the strongbox, the wood blackened and smoking, and pulled out three heavy sacks. The money—enough to fund the revolution for years.
Rostov saw it from his perch and bellowed orders. "At the coach! Fire on the men at the coach!"
But the square was madness now. The smoke was too thick, the civilians too many. The crossfire no longer obeyed anyone.
Kamo looked up through the chaos. His men were dying by the second. He could feel the old instinct—to stay, to fight, to strike back. But then he heard Soso's words in his mind:
A plan without an escape is not Bolshevism.
He gave a piercing whistle—the retreat signal.
Instantly, his men moved. No hesitation. No panic. They pulled back in pairs, firing as they went, vanishing into the narrow alleys of Tbilisi. Each one followed a different path—routes they had memorized for days.
Within minutes, the square was nearly empty of revolutionaries. Only the dead and dying remained.
Rostov stumbled down from his position, the gunfire fading behind him. He stood in the middle of the devastation.
The cobblestones were slick with blood.
His soldiers lay among the wreckage. Civilians cried over bodies.
He turned in a slow circle, trying to understand.
He had been given perfect intelligence. A flawless trap. He had done everything right.
And he had lost.
The Bolsheviks were gone.
The money was gone.
And the square that was supposed to be his victory was a charnel house.
Rostov felt the weight of it hit him all at once. Stolypin would not forgive this.
He looked around the ruined square—the bodies, the shattered coach, the smoke curling into the bright blue sky—and realized the truth that would haunt him for the rest of his life:
The empire's hunters had just met a new kind of prey.
Someone was moving behind the Bolsheviks now—someone ruthless, calculating, and utterly beyond their reach.
Their prized informant had given them intelligence that led straight to disaster.
And the Russian state had just learned the most dangerous lesson imaginable:
The revolution had a mind of its own.