The world had shrunk to the size of the muddy clearing. The air, thick with the smell of blood and rain-soaked earth, was a tangible weight. In front of Koba lay the mission, the cold, linear path to power and survival. Behind him stood Pavel, a statue of moral defiance, his simple act of kneeling in the mud a judgment more damning than any committee denunciation.
Sergeant Klaus, his hand resting on the grip of his Mauser pistol, took a step forward. "I am not asking, Herr Schmidt. I am giving an order. We are leaving. Now. My men are not Red Cross nurses."
Koba's mind was a maelstrom. Jake screamed at the sight of the dying boy, the sheer, pointless agony of it all. You can't leave them. You can't! The cold, hard pragmatist that was Koba screamed back, a litany of tactical imperatives. Ipatieff. The mission. Every second is a risk. This is weakness. This is sentiment.
Then a third voice, colder and clearer than either, rose above the storm. It was the voice of the Kingdom-Builder. It did not speak of morality or necessity. It spoke of assets and opportunities. It didn't see a tragedy to be averted or an obstacle to be bypassed. It saw a chaotic system waiting to be exploited.
Koba turned, not to Pavel, but to the impatient German sergeant. He moved with a sudden, deliberate calm that was more commanding than any shout.
"You are correct, Sergeant," Koba said, his voice level. "We are wasting time."
Klaus nodded, his expression hardening. "Good. Then we move."
"But you are wrong about what this is," Koba continued, his eyes sweeping over the field of dying men, not with pity, but with the sharp, assessing gaze of a prospector finding an unexpected vein of gold. "This is not a liability. It is an opportunity."
Klaus let out a short, incredulous laugh. "An opportunity? It is a ditch full of half-dead Russians. Their army is broken. They are worth nothing."
"You see broken soldiers," Koba countered, his voice dropping, drawing the skeptical Germans closer. "I see an intelligence goldmine." He pointed a finger at a man with an officer's blood-soaked tunic. "That major knows the exact state of his regiment's morale before the line broke. That signals NCO over there," he gestured to another, "knows their fallback codes. And that man," his finger landed on the exhausted, elderly Russian doctor, "is a trained field surgeon with twenty years of experience. He is an asset worth more than a company of prisoners. We are not leaving him, and we are not leaving them."
He took absolute command. The air crackled with his newfound authority. He was no longer a strange Russian advisor; he was the only point of order in a universe of chaos. He strode to the broken church door and ripped a piece of chalky plaster from the wall. He broke it in two and tossed a piece to Pavel, who caught it out of pure reflex.
"Pavel. Murat. You are on black tags," he commanded. The order was so bizarre, so alien, that everyone, even Pavel, stared at him in confusion. "Listen to me carefully. Any man with a wound to the gut or the head that he cannot recover from. Any man who is clearly dying. Any man who would be a waste of our time and our precious medical supplies. You will mark his forehead with a chalk X. Do not waste a single bandage or a single word on them. They are already dead."
The sheer, brutal logic of the order landed like a physical blow. Pavel stared at the piece of chalk in his hand, his face a mask of horror. This was not the mercy he had demanded. This was a death sentence delivered with the indifferent efficiency of a factory foreman. The German soldiers looked at Koba with a new, unsettling respect. This was a language they understood.
"Ivan!" Koba barked, turning to the other side of his team. "You and the rest of the Germans. You are on green tags. Any man with a minor wound, any man who can walk. Get him on his feet. Give him a sip of water from your canteen and herd them over there, by the wall. They are now our labor force."
He turned to the stunned Russian doctor. "And you, Doctor, will assist me. We are handling the red and yellow tags. The critical and the serious. Show me the men you thought you could save if you had the supplies and the time. We will save them."
He had turned a humanitarian crisis into a ruthlessly efficient processing system. He had invented battlefield triage on the spot. He moved into the sea of wounded, not as a savior, but as a manager. His 21st-century knowledge, stripped of all its accompanying morality, was a terrifyingly effective tool.
He knelt beside a man whose leg was a mangled ruin, blood pulsing from a severed artery. The Russian doctor was trying to apply pressure with a filthy rag. "No, no," Koba said dismissively. "You are killing him." He pulled a leather belt from a dead soldier, wrapped it high on the man's thigh and twisted it tight with the barrel of a discarded pistol. "Tourniquet. Simple mechanics, Doctor. Stop the flow at the source."
The doctor watched, his eyes wide. He had just seen a technique that would have saved hundreds of men he had watched bleed to death.
Pavel moved as if in a trance. He knelt by the first soldier, a boy with a terrible gut wound, his insides spilling into the mud. The boy was conscious, his eyes pleading. Pavel's hand trembled as he raised the chalk. This was what his moral stand had wrought. Not a moment of shared humanity, but a new, colder calculus of who was worthy of life. He looked at Koba, who was now directing two German soldiers to fashion a stretcher, his commands sharp and precise. He had wanted to remind his commander of his soul, but instead he had just witnessed the birth of a new, more efficient monster.
In thirty minutes of controlled, frantic activity, the clearing was transformed. The dead and dying were separated from the salvageable. The walking wounded were corralled into a sullen, controllable group. The critically injured were stabilized under Koba's direct, expert supervision. He had imposed his will on chaos and extracted value from despair.
When it was done, he stood, wiping blood and mud from his hands onto his trousers. He faced Pavel, who stood beside the small, growing group of "assets"—the surgeon, two wounded officers, and a communications NCO.
Koba's face was unreadable. "Pavel. You have done well. You will stay here. You are in command of this post."
The words stunned Pavel into silence.
"Secure these assets," Koba continued, his voice leaving no room for argument. "Sergeant Klaus will leave four of his men with you. Consolidate your position. Interrogate the officers. Bring everyone back to the regimental command post we captured. That is your new rendezvous. My mission is not complete."
He had done it all. He had resolved Pavel's mutiny, not by crushing it, but by subsuming it into his own, grander, more terrifying logic. He had saved dozens of lives, captured valuable intelligence, reinforced his authority with both his own men and the Germans, and now, he had cleared the board to continue his primary objective. It was a total victory, born from an act of compassion he had twisted into a weapon.
He turned to his remaining men and the German sergeant. "We are going for our prize."
He strode out of the clearing without a backward glance, leaving Pavel standing alone in the middle of his small, strange, and terrible new command.