At three in the morning, Major General Kondrashov led the remaining four thousand troops of the Northern Column as they trudged in a ragged, straggling line through the snow. Driven by desperation, the Soviet forces had completely abandoned the dignity and discipline of a regular army. Their formation had stretched into a single-file line over two kilometers long.
There was a chillingly cruel logic to this method of marching: As long as I am not the one at the very back, I might live a little longer.
"Move! Don't look back!" Soviet officers shoved the men along.
The sides of the snow path were littered with wailing wounded. They had been dumped from stretchers by their own comrades and kicked into the deep drifts. These abandoned men were the gifts the Soviets left for the Finns; the commanders reasoned that if the Finns were busy administering "mercy shots" or clearing the obstructive wounded, the main body might gain a few extra minutes for their flight.
It was a total breakdown of order, an ugly race for survival. Kondrashov watched it all from amidst his circle of guards, saying nothing as he moved slowly forward.
In the vision of the Eye of Death, the dark red line of the column was twitching in agony across the snow. At regular intervals, heat signatures turned cold and blue, marking yet another abandoned soul freezing solid in the minus forty-degree abyss.
Walter encountered several comrades from the ski patrol. Working in coordination, they harassed the column's flanks incessantly. He squeezed the trigger while gliding at high speed; every crack of his Mosin-Nagant inevitably claimed a Soviet NCO attempting to maintain order.
By now, the Soviet troops were numb. They heard the gunfire from the flank but didn't even turn their heads. They simply stared down at the ground, mechanically moving legs that had long since lost all sensation to the frost.
At four in the morning, the Northern Column reached the edge of the forest three kilometers east of Lemetti. This was the exit of a pass the local Finns called the "Valley of Death." Steep, rocky heights flanked both sides, leaving only a narrow forest trail choked with snow in the middle.
Finland's elite 4th Jaeger Battalion had been waiting here for a long time.
Unlike Walter's harassing ski teams, the Jaegers' mission was total physical erasure. Utilizing their superior mobility, they had arrived hours ahead of the Soviets. Over a dozen Maxim guns had been painstakingly dismantled and hauled up to the heights. Their barrels were shrouded in bone-white camouflage cloth, and their cooling jackets were filled with specialized antifreeze.
The Finnish Jaegers lay prone in their foxholes, allowing the falling snow to bury them.
Walter pulled to a stop on a high ridge overlooking the scene. He spotted a cluster of heat signatures so bright they were nearly blinding. It was the power center of the Northern Column. There were over a dozen officers and staff in heavy greatcoats, and even a low-crawling BA-10 armored car, surrounded by an entire reinforced company of elite guards.
In the bitter night, the heat radiating from the armored car's engine glowed like a small, burning sun in Walter's vision. The Soviets had concentrated their remaining "family silver" in the center.
At the head of the column, six or seven hundred "cannon fodder" infantry, moving like clockwork dolls due to hypothermia, stumbled into the mouth of the valley. But on the heights above, the 4th Jaeger Battalion remained silent. They ignored the worthless lead infantry, their muzzles micro-adjusting to lock onto the "heat center" slowly entering the kill zone.
One minute, two minutes...
The moment the silhouette of the armored car entered the crossfire zone…
Whump—!
A piercing flare, trailing a sickly white light, tore through the night sky and erupted over the valley. The Soviet armored car, emblazoned with a red star, stood out starkly in the glare.
"FIRE!!"
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat—!
In an instant, the darkness on both sides of the canyon was ripped apart by a dozen violent tongues of fire. The dull, mechanical, ceaseless roar of the Maxim guns created a deafening echo in the narrow pass. This wasn't precision fire; it was an unreserved deluge of metal.
The staff officers huddled together discussing routes were instantly riddled with bullets, blood blossoming across their forms.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
A hail of 7.62mm rounds struck the side armor of the BA-10, sending up dense showers of sparks. The armored car tried to turn around on the narrow snow track, but its tires skidded. It slammed headlong into a tree trunk, blocking the escape route for the column behind it.
Because the column was so overextended and visibility in the forest was poor, the sudden attack severed the force into several isolated segments.
"It's a total mess."
The soldiers at the rear were blocked by the pile of corpses and the armored car. Terrified, they tried to bolt toward the flanks, only to run straight into the enfilade fire networks the Jaegers had set at the forest edge. In the deep snow, the Soviet soldiers couldn't even manage to drop prone; they could only watch as the bullets reaped them like scythes through their knees and chests.
Amidst the screams and gunsmoke, Walter locked onto a massive heat signature just behind the armored car. It was a group of the most fearless guards. Ignoring the machine-gun fire, they were literally paving a path through the snow pits with the bodies of their fallen.
A burly commander draped in a general's greatcoat rolled out of the chaos, supported by guards fighting to the death.
Near the BA-10, the battle had entered its most primal and bloody stage. Walter saw white shadows gliding at high speed from the forest gloom. These were the elite assault teams of the 4th Jaeger Battalion, wielding Suomi submachine guns and gleaming knives.
"There's something in that car!" a Finnish soldier yelled in a raspy voice.
The reason the armored car had been so fiercely protected was that it served as more than just a mobile command post; it was the 18th Rifle Division's secret archive and the home of the division's soul, the Divisional Colors.
The soldiers of the Soviet Color Guard erupted with a near-pathological fanaticism. These few dozen guards had been handpicked by Kondrashov. Even though they were starving until their vision blurred, even though their ammunition was spent, they leveled their bayonets and roared as they charged the Finns through the waist-deep snow.
It was a death-struggle to preserve the last shred of military honor.
"For the Soviet Union! Don't let the flag fall!" the Color Guard officer, a bearded Captain, swung an empty Tokarev pistol like a club, smashing it into a charging Finn.
The two forces collided in the snow trenches. In the narrow path where extreme cold met darkness, firearms became heavy clubs. Puukko knives clashed with long Soviet bayonets, producing a bone-jarring screech of metal on metal.
Rat-tat-tat—!
The severely overheated machine gun atop the armored car continued to resist until a Finnish soldier scored a direct hit with a grenade. With an earth-shaking explosion, the machine-gun turret was blown clean off.
The Captain of the Color Guard was the last to fall. He held the rear door of the armored car, refusing to drop despite being hit three times, until two Jaegers lunged forward and drove their knives through his chest. He gripped the door handle with a death grip, eyes wide, attempting to bar the enemy's entry until his final breath.
"Area clear! Quick, open it!"
Several Finnish soldiers pried open the deformed armor plating.
"Found it!"
A Jaeger dragged a long object wrapped in layers of oilcloth from the depths of the cabin. As he tore the wrapping away, a heavy, blood-red flag was revealed to the wind and snow.
It was the Divisional Colors of the Soviet 18th Rifle Division.
The gold-embroidered hammer and sickle on the fabric fluttered weakly in the freezing wind, looking utterly hollow.
"We got it! We've hooked the soul of the 18th Division!" the Finnish soldiers let out a primal, cathartic roar.
A hundred meters away in the depths of the forest, Major General Kondrashov, being dragged along by his dozen surviving guards, heard that heartbreaking roar from behind. He did not look back. As a Divisional Commander, he knew exactly what losing the colors meant. The designation of the 18th Rifle Division had, in this moment, been effectively erased from the Red Army's order of battle.
"Run... keep running..." Kondrashov scrambled through the snow on all fours.
He had abandoned the flag soaked in the blood of ten thousand men, abandoned his subordinates being harvested by Maxim guns, and abandoned the last of his pride as a soldier.
Walter saw the small cluster of heat signatures representing the commander attempting to cross the edge of a dangerous marsh, a no-man's-land on the northern side of the Valley of Death.
He stepped onto his skis once more, performing a silent overtake through the flank of the forest. The Jaeger Battalion had the flag. He was going after the General's star.
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