Under the veil of night, the Karelian Isthmus was dyed a strange, dark purple. The wind whipped in from the direction of Lake Ladoga, carrying a howl that felt like it was slicing through skin.
Walter lay prone in the thick powder, his body pressed tight against the frozen earth as he hitched himself forward inch by inch toward the Soviet camp seven hundred meters away. Less than three meters to his side, Simo glided across the snow with the same fluid grace; to an untrained eye, he looked like nothing more than a drift of spindrift caught in the gale.
Behind them, the five soldiers, including the clerk clutching three grenades and the cook with a belt full of Molotov cocktails, held their breath. They had never imagined that in this war ruled by steel and heavy artillery, they would find the courage to leave their relatively safe trenches and take the fight to the enemy.
As the distance closed, the clamor of the Soviet camp grew distinct. Due to the seesaw nature of the front, the Red Army hadn't constructed formal fortifications. They had simply cleared a patch of ground at the forest's edge, where dozens of massive campfires now danced wildly in the wind. To most Soviet soldiers, the Finns on Hill L were already dead men walking. Fueled by alcohol, their sentry rotations were lax and scattered.
In the center of the clearing, the headlights of several trucks crisscrossed to illuminate a makeshift wooden stage. Three T-26 tanks sat idling behind the trucks, their exhaust pipes belching thin plumes of pale smoke that instantly crystallized in the sub-zero air.
A commissar, draped in a heavy sheepskin coat and wearing the iconic deep-blue peaked cap, stood atop the stage with a megaphone. In his agitation, his voice sounded exceptionally shrill in the biting air.
"Heroic soldiers of the 7th Army! Pride of the Red Army!"
The commissar's voice carried clearly to Walter in the darkness. Though he didn't understand Russian, Walter could feel the man's intense aura.
"Listen to the thunder of the cannons from the south, that is the salute of victory! Those Finnish curs once barked at the sky, claiming the Soviets would never cross Summa. And now? Summa is ours! Lähde is ours! Look at that bunker they called the 'Millionaire,' it sits there now like a squashed, rotten tomato!"
"Who did this? The great Soviet working class! The bayonets in your hands!"
A roar of fanatical cheering erupted from the camp. Soviet soldiers waved aluminum mess tins filled with their freshly issued Leningrad vodka.
"Comrade Stalin sent a telegram this morning! He salutes every Bolshevik shedding blood on the front! He tells us: 'Forward! Do not stop!'"
The commissar spun around, his white-gloved hand pointing toward the darkened silhouette of Hill L in the distance. His tone turned frigid and manic.
"Look at that hill! It is the final grave of the Finnish White Guard! Do they think hiding in a few mud pits can stop the iron hooves of the Red Army? Pure delusion!"
"Warriors, drain your cups! Once the cannons teach them the truth one last time, we charge! We will plant the red flag on that summit and charge toward Vyborg! Ura!"
The sky-shattering shout tore through the night.
Walter watched the scene coldly. Through the perception of the Eye of Death, he didn't see cheering heroes, but a collection of red-lit silhouettes radiating a sickly, feverish heat born of alcohol and zealotry.
At the edge of the clearing, a row of over a dozen M-30 122mm howitzers stood in a line. Their barrels were coated in a fine layer of frost, shimmering with a ghostly blue light in the firelight. These were the steel monsters that had shaved several meters off Hill L over the past two days.
Wooden ammunition crates were piled high around the gun pits. Two Soviet artillerymen huddled near a fire close to their piece, listlessly sharing a jar of pickled cucumbers. Walter crawled under the carriage of an M-30; the touch of the freezing steel sent a jolt of alertness through him.
He had a fleeting impulse: to swing the barrel around and fire a shell into the cheering crowd. But the thought vanished as quickly as it came. Operating a heavy gun like the M-30 was complex—unseating the trails, adjusting the coordinates, loading, and firing required the precise coordination of at least three or four men. Moreover, the muzzle flash would instantly pinpoint their location. Surrounded by hundreds of Russians, that would be suicide.
"Don't fire the guns," Walter signaled to the cook and clerk, pointing instead to the massive propellant casings and the breeches. "We're going to turn these things into scrap metal permanently."
Simo remained crouched directly behind Walter. He didn't have his M39 slung; he held it at the ready, the muzzle constantly tracking the camp. With the White Death acting as their guardian, the trembling in the clerk and the cook subsided, replaced by a surge of inexplicable confidence.
Walter gave a sharp hand signal. The group glided toward the fires like wraiths. The two Soviet gunners noticed nothing until it was too late. Walter and Simo lunged simultaneously, no gunshots, only the faint hiss of blades parting windpipes and the muffled thud of bodies hitting the snow.
The dagger in Walter's hand was still warm with blood. Ignoring the mess, he pointed to the mountain of ammunition crates behind the gun pit.
"Fast!" Walter ordered in a low whisper.
The cook pulled out a prepared Molotov cocktail while the clerk, his hands shaking, interlaced the fuses of two satchel charges and shoved them into an open crate of propellant charges.
"Drop it!"
The clerk let out a low, staccato grunt, lit the fuse, and bolted. The cook smashed two firebottles against the crates of casings.
BOOOOM—!!!
A deafening roar shattered the eardrums of everyone in camp. It was the power of multiple crates of 122mm shells detonating in a chain reaction. A massive orange-red fireball tore into the sky. The shockwave instantly overturned the two nearest howitzers, their barrels warping into useless scrap in the intense heat.
"Open fire!" Walter's Suomi submachine gun barked first in the firelight. Rat-tat-tat-tat! He sent a spray of lead into the panicked Soviet guards.
Simultaneously, seven hundred meters away on Hill L, Warrant Officer Niemi saw the brilliant signal.
"Boys! The Lieutenant did it! Let the Russians hear some noise!" Niemi squeezed the trigger of his Maxim.
Streamers of tracers poured down from the hill, piercing the dark purple night. Though the distance was great, the illusion of being fired upon from all sides caused the Soviet camp to descend into total chaos.
The firelight reflected off the commissar's face, which was twisted in a mixture of rage and terror. He stared at his detonating heavy guns, his eyes nearly bulging out of his head.
"What's happening? How many Finns are there? Are they counter-attacking?" The commissar grabbed his megaphone, his voice rising to a frantic pitch.
He looked at the muzzle flashes flickering in the shadows of the woods, then at the machine-gun lines spitting fire from the distant hill. A rational commander would have ordered the troops to consolidate and defend the camp, but this commissar, driven by vodka, holiday madness, and the standing order that "failure to take the hill means a court-martial," fell into a delusional, paranoid trance.
"They want to destroy our guns to make us flinch!" The commissar leaped off the wooden stage like a madman, pointing toward Hill L. "There's no one left up there! This is a feint! A final gasp!"
"First Company, stay and deal with the White Guard in the woods! Everyone else, follow me! Tankers, move! Forget the camp! Charge the hill! Rip the Finns' guts out!"
Walter had braced himself for a siege by hundreds, but he watched in shock as the bulk of the Soviet force failed to swarm them. Under the commissar's screaming orders, the three T-26 tanks yanked their steering levers, belching clouds of black smoke as they smashed through the camp's perimeter fencing.
With hundreds of Soviet infantrymen shouting "Ura!" behind them, they behaved like a herd of stampeding bulls, abandoning their logistics and heavy guns to launch a full-tilt counter-charge toward Hill L.
"That lunatic..." Walter shot a Soviet soldier trying to close in, staring in astonishment at the retreating steel silhouettes. "He's actually going to trade homes with us?"
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