The plan was unfolding with perfect, terrifying precision. Everything Koba had predicted had come true — every weakness, every failure, every death. The German advance moved like a tide over the ruins of the Russian army, a dark wave rolling across the broken plains. Around them, victory had the sound of shouting men and the quiet moans of the dying.
They reached the Russian artillery command post exactly where Koba said it would be — half-buried in a grove of splintered birch trees. The officers had fled, leaving behind overturned tables, spilled ink, and a chaos of papers. A German sergeant rummaging through the mess found the logbook and handed it to Koba.
The final entries were scrawled in a shaking hand:
Ammunition status: 6 shells per gun. Firing forbidden without direct authorization from General Dimitriev. God help us.
It was proof. Cold, undeniable proof. Koba's impossible foresight had been right in every detail. The Germans who had doubted him now looked at him as if he were something beyond human — a man who spoke to death and told it where to walk. They no longer called him comrade or foreigner. They called him Herr Schmidt with the wary reverence one gave a sorcerer.
Their target, the prisoner-of-war camp Oflag 17, was five kilometers ahead. Koba's inner clock said they were on schedule. Ipatieff — the chemist, the prize, the key — was almost within reach.
They pushed forward, leaving the main German line behind. The landscape was a ruin of craters, smoke, and broken men. Along the road, hundreds of Russian prisoners shuffled west in silence, their faces gray and hollow. Koba felt no pity, only the cold satisfaction of a plan executed with mathematical precision.
Then came the sound.
Not gunfire. Not machinery. A human sound — thin, pleading, almost swallowed by the wind.
Pavel lifted a hand, signaling the squad to halt. They listened. The cries came again, faint and fragmented: for water, for mercy, for mothers.
Koba's jaw tightened. A delay. An unplanned variable.
They followed the sound into a small clearing where the ruins of a country church stood half-collapsed. Inside and around it lay the remnants of a field hospital — or what had been one. Dozens of wounded Russians sprawled on blood-soaked straw, their bodies twisted and mangled, their uniforms stiff with dirt and dried blood. Some still breathed; most didn't. An old doctor moved among them, his face gray with exhaustion, two terrified orderlies following him like ghosts.
The stench hit them first — blood, rot, antiseptic, smoke.
A German sergeant spat. "Verwundete," he muttered. Wounded. Then to Koba: "We leave them. Not our problem. The camp is our target."
He was right. Every second here was a second lost. Every heartbeat risked the mission — risked losing Ipatieff, the tool that could change the course of the war and secure Koba's future.
The logic was simple. These men were finished. Nothing to gain, everything to lose.
And yet—
The Jake inside him, buried deep beneath the layers of calculation, suddenly screamed. He saw not soldiers or enemies, but human wreckage — pain without meaning, life bleeding out in the mud. A boy, no older than sixteen, lay gasping in the dirt, one hand clutching his chest, whispering for his mother.
Koba froze. For the first time all day, he didn't know what to do.
Pavel moved before he did.
He slipped the rifle from his shoulder and leaned it against a tree. Without a word, he unbuckled the medical kit Koba had made them all carry. He knelt beside the boy and opened the pouch. Bandages. Morphine. A trembling hand.
The German sergeant's voice snapped across the clearing. "Was tust du? What are you doing? We are leaving!" His hand hovered near his holster.
Pavel ignored him. He looked up at Koba instead — not as a subordinate, not as a soldier, but as a man who had finally reached the limit of obedience.
"Koba," he said quietly, the name sharp as a blade. "We are not animals."
He nodded toward the wounded around them. "You taught me to fight for something better than this. For a cause. This—" he gestured to the dying men "—isn't it."
The words hit like a strike to the chest. For a heartbeat, everything stopped.
In front of him, Pavel knelt in the mud, hands steady as he worked over the dying boy. Behind him, the Germans stood watching, suspicion flaring again in their eyes. Around them, the forest was full of soft, broken cries.
Koba stood between two paths — the cold, mechanical precision of the monster he had become, and the fragile, flickering conscience of the man he used to be.
Every second he hesitated, the mission slipped further from his grasp. Every second, the rebellion in Pavel's eyes grew stronger.
And for the first time in years, Koba felt something unfamiliar crawl through the walls of his armor: doubt.