The barracks stank of fear.
It was a thick, cloying smell, a mix of unwashed men, wet wool, and the sharp, metallic tang of rifles that had been cleaned one too many times. It was the smell of men waiting to die, or to kill.
Every soldier Jake passed looked at him like he was a ghost. An outsider. A man who did not belong in their private, suffocating hell.
Getting in had been the easy part. A handful of gold coins, pressed into the palm of a shivering guard at a rear gate, had bought his silence and a clear path.
Finding Sergeant-Major Kripichnikov was harder.
Jake found him alone in a cramped supply room, surrounded by crates of ammunition and uniforms. He was a large, bull-necked man, a peasant's son forged into a soldier's frame. He was sharpening a bayonet, his knuckles white around the grip of the blade.
The only sound was the rhythmic, scraping sound of stone on steel. Shh-hick. Shh-hick. It was the sound of a man sharpening his own fate.
"Sergeant-Major," Jake said, his voice quiet.
Kripichnikov didn't look up. The scraping continued, steady and menacing. "I do not know you. You should not be here."
Jake stepped further into the room, letting the door swing shut behind him. "My name is not important. What is important is what is going to happen at dawn."
He didn't use revolutionary slogans. He didn't speak of the proletariat or the chains of oppression. He spoke as one soldier to another, a man assessing a tactical problem.
"Your commander, Captain Lashkevich, is a fool and a coward," Jake said, his voice flat and calm. "He is going to follow his orders. He is going to order you to fire on women and old men in Znamenskaya Square tomorrow. You know this."
He paused, letting the brutal truth of it settle in the small room. "It is a suicide order."
The scraping stopped.
Kripichnikov slowly, deliberately, placed the sharpening stone on the crate beside him. He still didn't look up.
"An order is an order," he growled, his voice a low rumble. "And you are a provocateur. A German spy, perhaps. I should kill you where you stand and be done with it."
"You could," Jake agreed. "But that won't change the order. It won't change the fact that you will be told to slaughter your own people."
Jake changed his tactics. He wasn't talking to a revolutionary. He was talking to a non-commissioned officer, a man whose entire world was the welfare of the soldiers under his command. He decided to appeal to that, not to ideology.
"Forget the Tsar. Forget the revolution," Jake said, his voice dropping. "Think about your men. Killing your countrymen won't make the bread appear in the shops. It will only turn the entire city against you, against them."
He took a step closer. "When this government collapses next week—and it will collapse, Sergeant-Major, that is a certainty—who do you think they will blame? The generals drinking tea in the Winter Palace? Or the sergeants who pulled the triggers and have blood on their hands?"
He could see the man's mind working behind his hard, peasant eyes. He was planting a seed of pure, pragmatic self-preservation. He was reframing mutiny not as treason, but as survival.
Kripichnikov finally looked up. His eyes were filled with a terrible, conflicted weight. "What would you have me do? We are one regiment against an empire."
"You are not one regiment," Jake countered instantly. "You are the first. The spark."
He laid out a simple, practical plan. Not a revolutionary's dream, but a soldier's operational checklist. "You don't just refuse the order. You secure the armory first. You send runners to the Pavlovsky and Preobrazhensky regiments—they are wavering, ready to break. You tell them the Volinsky has joined the people."
He was offering the man a path through the fire, a way to turn a massacre into a liberation. "You do that, and you will not be a traitor. You will be a hero."
The door to the supply room creaked open.
Two of Kripichnikov's trusted men, corporals with hard faces and rifles slung over their shoulders, stepped inside. They saw the strange civilian talking to their Sergeant-Major and their hands immediately went to their weapons.
The air in the room snapped taut, electric with sudden, deadly tension.
"Sergeant-Major?" one of them asked, his eyes narrowed, fixed on Jake. "Who is this?"
Kripichnikov was forced into a corner. He had to make a choice, right now, in this instant. Betray the strange prophet to his men and follow his orders to the grave? Or trust the demon's impossible, terrifying words?
He looked from Jake's calm, steady gaze to the suspicious, loyal faces of his soldiers.
He made his decision.
With a soft, metallic click, he sheathed his newly sharpened bayonet. He stood up to his full, impressive height and turned to face his men.
"This man is with us," Kripichnikov said, his voice a low, iron growl that left no room for argument.
He looked at the two corporals, his eyes burning with a new, terrifying light.
"Go wake the others. Tell them the time has come to stop taking orders."