Erevan Square was a sun-drenched stage of ordinary life. Merchants hawked their wares, children chased pigeons across the cobblestones, and the citizens of Tbilisi went about their morning under the watchful, bronze gaze of a poet's statue. It was a scene of perfect, mundane peace. But in the rooftops above, in the shadowed doorways of the surrounding buildings, and in the dark mouths of the alleys leading into the square, a deadly tension was coiled, ready to strike.
Hidden in a second-story room of a teahouse, Kamo watched the square through a pair of cheap binoculars. His heart was a slow, heavy drum in his chest. Soso's warnings had transformed his usual pre-operation thrill into a grim, cold focus. He was not just robbing a bank; he was knowingly engaging a prepared and waiting enemy.
At precisely 10:30 a.m., it appeared. The bank stagecoach, a heavy, reinforced carriage drawn by two sturdy horses, trundled into the square. But it was not alone. As Soso had predicted, the escort was heavy. Not the usual two guards, but a full contingent of a dozen mounted Cossacks, their rifles held at the ready, their faces hard and alert. They were not escorting money; they were baiting a trap.
Kamo gave a low whistle, the signal rippling through his hidden teams. On a rooftop opposite, Captain Rostov of the Okhrana smiled. The rats were taking the bait. He raised his hand, ready to give the signal to his own men.
The attack began with a sound no one was expecting. Not a gunshot, but a series of deafening, earth-shattering explosions. Kamo's bomb-throwers, positioned at the mouths of the key side streets, had thrown their grenades. But their targets were not the coach or the Cossacks. Their targets were the streets themselves. The bombs, packed with dynamite and nails, erupted in fountains of shattered cobblestones and shrapnel. Horses screamed and fell. The carefully planned charge routes for the Okhrana's hidden cavalry patrols were instantly transformed into impassable barriers of chaos and death.
Captain Rostov stared in disbelief, his smile vanishing. The revolutionaries weren't just attacking; they were reshaping the battlefield. They knew where his reserves were. How could they possibly know?
Before he could process the shock, the second phase of Kamo's attack began. Other revolutionaries, emerging from the crowd, threw smaller, more targeted bombs directly at the stagecoach and its immediate escort. The square dissolved into a maelstrom of smoke, screams, and panicked civilians. The air was filled with the thunder of explosions, the terrified neighing of horses, and the sharp crack of Mauser pistols. Kamo had used Soso's intelligence to neutralize Stolypin's primary trap with brutal, stunning efficiency.
But the Okhrana's trap was multi-layered. Rostov, though shocked, was a professional. He gave the signal. From the windows and rooftops of every building surrounding the square, his own hidden riflemen opened fire. The beautiful, elegant square was instantly transformed into a perfect, inescapable kill box.
Bullets stitched across the cobblestones, chipping stone from the poet's statue, tearing through the flimsy cover of market stalls. The Bolsheviks, who had been charging the wrecked coach, were suddenly pinned down, caught in a devastating crossfire. The air was filled with the whine of ricochets and the wet, percussive thud of rounds hitting flesh.
This was no heroic, one-sided battle. It was a meat grinder. The narrative of a clean, revolutionary action dissolved into the brutal, ugly reality of urban warfare. A young Bolshevik, not more than seventeen, was cut down as he tried to provide covering fire, his chest exploding in a spray of red. A civilian, a woman carrying a basket of bread, screamed and fell, caught in the crossfire, her life extinguished by a stray bullet.
Kamo's men were brave, hardened by years of street fights, but they were outnumbered and outgunned by the disciplined fire of the hidden riflemen. They started to take casualties. One man clutched his leg, a curse on his lips. Another simply slumped over behind a horse trough, his fight finished.
But they were not just thugs. They were soldiers, and they had a mission. While the main firefight raged, creating a wall of noise and lead, a small, secondary team, led by Kamo himself, moved with a single-minded purpose. Using the chaos as their shield, they dashed to the shattered, smoking wreck of the stagecoach. They ignored the wounded and the dying. They ignored the riflemen on the roofs. They were focused solely on the objective. With practiced efficiency, they ripped open the coach's strongbox and began hauling out the heavy sacks of cash, the massive payroll that would fund a revolution.
Captain Rostov, watching from his perch, screamed orders, trying to direct his men's fire onto the small team at the coach, but the square was a whirlwind of smoke, confusion, and screaming civilians. His perfect kill box had become an uncontrollable slaughter.
With three sacks of money secured, Kamo looked at the raging firefight. His men were being chewed to pieces. The temptation to stay, to fight, to kill the men who were killing his comrades, was immense. But Soso's final, ideologically-phrased order echoed in his mind: A plan without an escape is not Bolshevism.
He gave the signal, a high, piercing whistle that cut through the din. It was the signal to retreat.
The effect was immediate. The Bolsheviks did not fight to the last man. They did not make a glorious, suicidal stand. They broke. They executed the escape plan that Jake had insisted upon, the one Kamo had so obsessively drilled into them. Firing as they went, they pulled back from the square, not as a panicked mob, but as a disciplined unit, melting into the city's labyrinthine alleys, using the three separate, redundant routes they had memorized.
Captain Rostov watched in furious disbelief as his targets simply vanished. The firing died down, replaced by the groans of the wounded and the sirens of approaching medical carriages. He stood in the center of the carnage-filled square, a scene from a nightmare. He was surrounded by the bodies of his own dead soldiers, the corpses of innocent civilians, and the wreckage of a battle he was supposed to have won.
He had failed. Completely and utterly. He had been given perfect intelligence, a perfect trap. And somehow, the revolutionaries had known. They had anticipated his every move. They had been prepared not for a robbery, but for a war. They had been monstrously, inhumanly violent, but they had also been disciplined. And they had escaped with the money.
Rostov looked at the bloody cobblestones, the dead horses, the shattered windows. He knew, with a sickening certainty, that his report to St. Petersburg would be the last of his career. Prime Minister Stolypin did not tolerate failure. And he knew that the enemy had not just gotten lucky. They had a new leader. A leader who was playing a different, more intelligent, and far more brutal game. From the Okhrana's perspective, their prized asset in the Bolshevik party had just provided them with intelligence that had led directly to a catastrophic and bloody disaster for the Russian state.