The German general's voice was a silken blade in Jake's ear, calm and amused. The voice of a man who had just declared checkmate.
"Shall we discuss the terms of your surrender, Koba?"
Shliapnikov and the handful of surviving sailors stared at Jake. Their faces, smeared with soot and blood, were pale masks of shock and dawning horror. They were trapped. A dozen enemy rifles in front of them, and an abyss of betrayal behind them. This was it. The end of the line.
Jake didn't panic. He didn't shout.
He laughed.
It was a short, cold, ugly sound that was utterly devoid of humor. It echoed in the tense, smoke-filled room.
"Surrender?" he said into the phone, his voice dripping with a theatrical, mocking disbelief. "General, you have it completely backwards."
He leaned against the desk, a picture of impossible calm. "I'm calling to accept your surrender."
A stunned, crackling silence came from the other end of the line. Jake could almost hear the man's aristocratic jaw drop.
"You and your government, General," Jake continued, his voice dropping to a low, icy hiss, "have been caught red-handed, conspiring with the illegitimate Provisional Government against the forces of the Russian Revolution."
"I have documents. I have telegraph intercepts. I have the testimony of captured officers. Oberst Nicolai has made a fatal, career-ending error, and you, General, are now his accomplice."
He was turning their own trap into a weapon. He was building a new reality out of thin air, and his sheer, unadulterated confidence was making it real. Shliapnikov was looking at him as if he'd grown a second head.
Before the sputtering general on the line could form a coherent sentence, Jake laid out his terms, sharp and fast.
"You will order the cadets in this building to stand down. Immediately. You will create a safe corridor for my men to withdraw from this building unmolested. You will forget this phone call ever happened."
He paused, letting the demands sink in. "In exchange for your full cooperation, this… unfortunate little incident… stays between us."
His voice hardened. "Refuse, and by sunrise, every newspaper in Petrograd, from the Bolshevik Pravda to the Kadet Rech, will have screaming headlines. Proof that Germany is not liberating Russia, but trying to install its own puppets to continue the Tsar's bloody war. The Russian people, General, will not be pleased."
It was a monstrous, beautiful bluff. He was blackmailing a German General in the middle of a firefight, using a war he hadn't even won yet as his weapon.
A furious, aristocratic voice began shouting in German on the other end. Jake cut him off.
"Check your military telegraph, General. Now. My men at the Kronstadt naval base have already started transmitting the evidence to every Allied embassy in Scandinavia."
It was a lie. A perfect, unverifiable lie that forced the General to make a choice in the next ten seconds. Risk a diplomatic catastrophe that could prolong the war by years, or sacrifice a few dozen Russian cadets in a building hundreds of miles away.
The furious shouting stopped. The silence on the line was thick with hatred.
Then, a clipped, furious order barked in German.
A moment later, a Russian officer in the besieged room, his ear pressed to a field telephone, yelled out. "Stand down! Cease fire! Cease fire now! By order of the High Command!"
The shooting stopped. The sudden silence was more shocking than the noise.
The cadets in the room looked up from their barricades, their faces masks of confusion and utter betrayal. They had been winning.
Jake didn't give them time to think. He gave his own order. "Shliapnikov! Seize all documents! Everything! From every office on this floor!"
His men moved with the brutal efficiency of conquerors. They stormed out of the telegraph room, sweeping through the adjacent offices, stuffing classified papers, codebooks, and strategic military plans into rough canvas sacks.
They hadn't just survived. They had just decapitated the enemy's entire military command structure.
An hour later, Jake walked back into the Bolshevik headquarters at the Smolny Institute.
He wasn't a desperate survivor. He was a conquering hero. He and his men were bloody, exhausted, and smeared with grime, but they walked with the swagger of victors.
Lenin and Trotsky stood over a large map on the main strategy table, their faces grim. They looked up as Jake entered, their expressions hardening.
Then they saw the sacks.
Jake and his men unceremoniously dumped sack after sack onto the table, sending papers and files spilling across the map of Russia.
"The Admiralty has fallen," Jake said, his voice raw. "And I brought you the Provisional Government's entire war plan as a souvenir."
The room was silent. Lenin, his eyes narrowed with suspicion, picked up a thick file. He opened it. His eyes scanned the first page, then widened in disbelief.
It was the complete disposition of every single military unit near Petrograd still loyal to the Provisional Government. Their numbers, their commanders, their ammunition levels. Everything.
Trotsky, pushing past a sailor, grabbed another folder. His sharp intake of breath was audible. It was the government's secret correspondence with the British embassy, begging for troops and gold to crush the Bolsheviks.
This wasn't just a victory. It was a death blow.
Jake had delivered the key to winning the entire revolution on a silver platter. He was no longer a useful demon. He was no longer a wild card general.
He was the single most powerful and effective man in the room, and every single person there knew it. The balance of power had just irrevocably shifted.
Jake held back one last file. A thin one, bound in red leather. He had found it in the commander's personal safe.
"This one is special," he said, his voice low.
Lenin looked up from the documents, his eyes locking with Jake's. A silent, cautious question passed between them.
Jake slid the red file across the table.
"It's the proof," Jake said, his voice dropping even lower, a cold, triumphant fire burning in his eyes. "Proof that half of the ministers in the Provisional Government are taking money from German industrialists. Not to win the war. Just to prolong it for their own profit."
He tapped the cover of the file. "Bank records. Swiss accounts. Names."
He hadn't just brought them a weapon to win the war. He had brought them a political nuke, a single piece of paper that could obliterate their enemies without firing another shot. And he was the only one who knew how to use it.