The alley was a wound in the city—narrow, dark, and reeking of coal smoke and the Neva River. Between the two dead buildings, Jake and his crew waited. The air was thick with the kind of silence that lives right before violence.
Pavel's men fidgeted, their bravado gone. They checked their pistols again and again, movements stiff with nerves. Street brawls were one thing. This was a real operation—organized, timed, led by a man who scared them more than the police. Their eyes kept darting to Jake, searching for comfort he didn't intend to give.
Kamo was the opposite. Still, composed, and coiled like a loaded spring. The heavy revolver hung loose in his hand, his breathing slow and steady. He wasn't nervous. He was waiting.
Jake was something else entirely. Calm. Detached. The chaos around him didn't touch him. He felt none of the rush that gripped the others. This was the same cold focus he'd felt planning the payroll robbery—only deeper. He wasn't a man hiding in an alley. He was a conductor before an orchestra, waiting for the first note.
He checked his pocket watch. The ticking was the only sound. Three minutes past midnight.
He looked up. Time.
He moved among the men, his voice low and steady.
"Pavel," he said, touching the big man's arm. "The back door. You and Dmitri. No noise until you're inside. You're the anvil."
He turned to the others. "Viktor, Misha—you're with them. Don't fight. Paper only. Every ledger, every list, every pamphlet. Strip the place clean."
Then to Kamo. "You and I are the hammer. We go through the front. No hesitation. When the door goes down, we move."
Kamo's jaw tightened. He nodded once.
Jake pulled his collar up and faced the dark building ahead. Inside were idealists—men who thought they were printing freedom. He felt a faint echo of pity. It passed.
He raised his hand. Held it. Dropped it.
The back door cracked open with a sharp snap of splintering wood. At the same instant, Kamo moved. He didn't bother with subtlety. One brutal kick, and the front door exploded inward.
"Bolshevik Expropriation!" Kamo roared. "Hands up! On the floor!"
They stormed in.
The print shop was one big room—the air heavy with ink and chemicals, the iron press hulking in the center. Three young men froze where they stood. Two guards turned at the noise.
One was barely more than a boy, a student revolutionary. He went rigid, hands in the air.
The other was older, with the hard, scarred face of an ex-soldier. He didn't freeze. His hand went straight for his gun.
Kamo was faster. He crossed the distance in three long strides and swung the butt of his revolver in a tight, vicious arc. The steel cracked bone with a wet sound. The guard dropped, out cold before he hit the floor. No gunfire, no alarm. Perfect.
Jake hadn't moved. He stood in the doorway, Browning pistol loose at his side, eyes sweeping the room. He didn't feel the rush of the fight—only a cold, clinical clarity. Every motion, every sound registered in perfect detail: the printers' terror, Kamo's precision, the rough efficiency of Pavel's men as they poured in through the back.
This wasn't chaos. It was choreography.
He wasn't Jake Vance, the man who studied history. He was Joseph Dzhugashvili, the man who made it.
"Viktor, the lists!" Jake barked. "Everything on that desk! Misha, the back office—strip it bare!"
The men jumped to obey.
"Dmitri!" Jake said. "The crate. Find it."
Dmitri nodded and started searching, kicking over piles of pamphlets. The printers were tied with their own belts, huddled in a corner. One of them sobbed quietly.
"Found it!" Dmitri shouted. "Under some canvas!"
Jake stepped into the back room. The crate was there—heavy, two feet long, locked tight with iron. Just as reported.
"Open it," Jake said.
Dmitri jammed a crowbar under the lid. Wood groaned, splintered. With a final wrench, the lock snapped. He threw the lid open and stepped back.
The men crowded around. Their breath misted in the cold air. They expected gold, papers, weapons.
What they saw stopped them cold.
Inside, packed in straw, were rows of small, wax-paper tubes. Coiled fuses. Beside them, a smaller box of polished brass caps.
Dynamite.
High-grade, military dynamite.
And blasting caps.
Pavel's one good eye went wide. The others stepped back instinctively, as if the crate itself might detonate.
This wasn't funding. It wasn't propaganda. It was a bomb.
The Okhrana wasn't just manipulating a rival faction. They were building a massacre.
Jake stared down at the crate, the cold clarity in his mind narrowing to a single point. His perfect operation, his careful plan, had just landed him in the center of something far worse than a trap.
He wasn't raiding a print shop anymore.
He was standing in the middle of an empire's powder keg—with the fuse in his hand.