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  “They exceeded the mandate that we set out for them!” He said finally. “And as a result, we are going to war!”

  “Nonsense!” Ravoof snapped. “We may very well be going to war but it is not because of our military operations. The terrorists that struck Mumbai operated on their soil.” Ravoof pointed to the TV as though it were Pakistan itself. “The terrorists were being provided arms by Pakistani military personnel. We had nothing to do with it. We did not want to decimate their military forces inside Kashmir, but they are the ones who decided to use these forces to protect the terrorists. Effectively providing them shelter while Muzammil and his men moved freely declaring jihad against us. That man and his commanders are now dead. We did that! That was the mandate we gave our military. And in that our service-chiefs were successful! Don’t you dare try to pin this war, if it happens, on them!”

  Bafna shook his head. “I see I have wasted my time coming here.”

  “And what did you expect my response to be?” Ravoof leaned forward. “Did you expect an accomplice to partake in your misguided anger? I am sorry, my friend. But I have long since forgotten the political maneuverings required for survival in this party of ours. But I still retain enough mental faculty to decide in my country’s favor when it is needed.”

  Bafna sighed and walked to the door, and then turned around: “do you think Islamabad will listen to reason and understand that we had to strike these terrorist locations after what happened to Mumbai?”

  “Islamabad?” Ravoof noted and shook his head. “I think you meant Rawalpindi. And the answer is ‘no’. They knew exactly what they were ramping up when they decided to arm the jihadists with nuclear weapons. This is all a chain of events that is inevitable. Perhaps their expectation was that we would not respond. When we threatened to do it, it upset their plans and they decided to ramp up their forces in Kashmir to deter us.”

  “And we struck anyway,” Bafna added neutrally.

  “We did. We had to.”

  “So what’s next?” Bafna said as he walked back in.

  “They won’t back down. No matter what we say or do. It is a matter of ego to them now. They have been challenged and their prestige has been destroyed. The terrorist commanders are dead and their men will demand vengeance. If the Pak army backs down now, they will lose their heads to the sharp swords of their own jihadists.”

  “There is nothing we can do to stop it?” Bafna asked.

  “If there is anything to be learnt from the past seven decades,” Ravoof said with emphasis, “it is that the Pak army must be defeated on the battlefield in order for it to listen to reason. Don’t expect diplomacy to work on Generals with bruised egos. The young officers in their army who were humiliated in 1971, instigated the 1999 war. Those humiliated in the 1999 war are now in charge of this one. That’s how it goes in Rawalpindi.”

  Bafna exhaled in frustration and looked out the windows: “what a bunch of morons.”

  “Indeed.”

  “What about Muzammil and his commanders?” Bafna said as he faced Ravoof again.

  “What about him?” Ravoof said, careful with his choice of words now.

  “How did we know where he and his commanders were? How did we kill them?”

  “That is entirely out of my domain. I am not a military expert. Perhaps the service-chiefs or Basu can fill us in.”

  Bafna nodded. “Yes, I think that would be best. Incredibly precise operation, that! No?”

  Ravoof nodded silently. The man was correct. Bafna pounded his fist on the wooden desk: “goddamn it! We are going to war, aren’t we?”

  “If not today, then next week. There is no way to tide this over without one!”

  Bafna blurted out an expletive and walked out of the office, closing the doors behind him. Ravoof sat in silence collecting his thoughts. He had to anticipate Islamabad’s political moves on the world stage and counteract them to India’s advantage. Perhaps find a way to scare the Pakistanis enough to caused them to back away from war?

  Perhaps.

  He also made a mental note to try and find out from Basu on exactly what had happened to Muzammil…

  “Is that him?” Basu asked.

  Ansari nodded with a smile. “That’s our bastard.”

  The two men watched as a group of Paras jumped down from the rear of the army truck and helped a man in salwar-kameez to get down. He was handcuffed and had a cover around his head to prevent him from seeing where he was. Pathanya saw the two senior men standing next to the lowered cargo ramp of the C-130J and walked over.

  “Excellent work, major.” Ansari said casually.

  “How did it go?” Basu asked out of curiosity.

  “As well as could be expected, sir.” Pathanya replied. “We took one casualty. A bullet wound to the leg. He will recover. And we laid waste to a lot of senior terrorist commanders. So I would say it was a good night.”

  “Indeed!” Basu added, with slight amusement in his voice. Pathanya turned to see Muzammil being bundled into the back of the aircraft and turned to Ansari: “what’s going to happen to him?”

  “He,” Ansari said neutrally, “is going to tell us exactly where he got that nuclear warhead for Mumbai.”

  Pathanya understood what that meant. This man had been assumed dead by the Pakistanis as well as by his remaining comrades. Nobody knew he was still alive and in Indian hands. Once Muzammil realized that too, there would be no incentive for him to hold back whatever he knew. He was not a prisoner of war. Neither was he a criminal. So what was he? Nobody. Just an anonymous body of intelligence for RAW and military-intelligence. Considering how many innocent people had died in Mumbai, Muzammil’s interrogators were not likely to be civil with him…

  “Sir, what are my orders?” Pathanya asked Ansari.

  “Pathfinder is still with us for the moment.” Ansari said as they watched the cargo ramp door being raised. “Depending on what that bastard reveals, we may have other targets to go after.”

  Basu turned to face Pathanya: “Indeed. This isn’t over.”

  ──── 17 ────

  Lt-colonel Kulkarni rubbed his eyes to remove the sand that had blown in. This seemed to happen almost like clockwork. But what surprised him the most was not the conditions of the blistering desert he had just rolled into, but rather the way his body was struggling to acclimatize. Of course, having spent his last three years in the mountains of Ladakh had changed his acclimatization. He found himself much more readily suited now for the mountains than for the desert.

  He was being given a refresher course in desert warfare by the Thar desert which, even in March, felt as though it was somehow closer to the sun than the rest of the planet. He had arrived here a week ago and was still struggling to breathe when the afternoon heat began to boil everything around them. Touching the metal of the main-battle-tanks under his command after about two-o-clock in the afternoon was hazardous. Of course, he realized that in the freezing plains of Ladakh, it had been the same with the ice…

  Kulkarni looked up as three Gypsy vehicles drove up to his tents. He saw his commanding-officer and other senior staff sitting in the vehicles. Brigadier Sudarshan smiled as he walked off the parked vehicle and headed for the shade of the tents. He shook Kulkarni’s hand and saw his reddish eyes.

  “The sand getting to you?” He laughed.

  “No complaints, sir.” Kulkarni said with a straight face.

  “Don’t lie to me,” Sudarshan replied with a chuckle. “You are younger to me and all that, but I know how this works. I have been dealing with the desert all my life!”

  Kulkarni waved the officers inside the tent. Sudarshan walked in and surveyed the very-basic interiors of Kulkarni’s command-center out here. The swaying cloth of the tent held down by stumps as well as the howl of the desert winds. The tent was filled with banks of radios and battlefield computers, powered by generators outside. A single map-table created from an overturned wood carton filled the rest of the space. Several younger of
ficers in Kulkarni’s command were inside. Sudarshan turned to Kulkarni:

  “Spartan as they come, eh?”

  Kulkarni closed the cover of the tents. “Only temporary, sir. My real command-center is inside my tank.”

  “So,” Sudarshan said as he nodded to his aide. The aide opened the maps on the wooden carton. “We have the plan sorted out for you and your boys.”

  “Punjab sector?”

  Sudarshan shook his head: “Negative. The desert.”

  Kulkarni did his best to keep a straight face, but wasn’t successful. Sudarshan had known his eager tank commander long enough to catch that: “I know the feeling. But the main offensive will be launched by the T-90 units in the Punjab. Not my recommendation, mind you.”

  “Considering what happened in Ladakh…” Kulkarni said and then bit off his sentence. It was not his place to say anything more. Besides, he hardly needed to. Sudarshan was there, wasn’t he? The man had lost more men in combat operations against the Chinese than Kulkarni had in his entire command. Entire mechanized battalions had been lost in the massive battles for the frozen plains of Ladakh during the China war. The mountains there were still littered with burnt-out hulks of Indian and Chinese vehicles.

  The deciding factor in those battles had been the arrival of the advanced Arjun tanks of the 43RD Armored Regiment in the mountains. Kulkarni’s tanks. The original T-72 force in the sector had been lost in the first day of combat against masses of Chinese T-99 tanks and other armored vehicles. The Arjun tanks out-gunned and out-matched anything the Chinese had. This thin line of tanks under Kulkarni’s command had allowed India to hold on to that territory despite two weeks of hard combat…

  As overall commander of the mechanized forces in the sector, Sudarshan had been Kulkarni’s operational commander during the war. In the years hence, he had moved on to other commands. But he had not lost sight of Kulkarni and had taken him under his wing. So when Sudarshan had been brought to the plains of Punjab and Rajasthan to coordinate offensive planning, he had brought Kulkarni with him.

  Sudarshan sighed. “It’s not that easy to convince mindsets, Kulkarni. The senior brass wants the T-90s to lead the charge this time around. Based on what I gather, the Arjun tank’s achievements in Ladakh has deeply embarrassed the senior armor brass. Sorry to say this, but your achievements are being dismissed as an outlier to the overall armor doctrine. So the small Arjun force in Ladakh will stay where it is. The rest of your tanks will stay here in the desert. The brass is massing the T-90s for the charge to Lahore.”

  “Beg pardon, sir,” Kulkarni said neutrally, “but what the hell am I supposed to tell my boys about what we are to do in this war? Are our capabilities to be wasted attacking isolated groups of Pak armor and outposts?”

  Sudarshan motioned Kulkarni to the maps. He took a second to orient himself on the map and then pointed to their current location in the desert. “We are here,” he jabbed a finger on the map. “Twenty-five kilometers east of the border. Further west, we have this strategic highway the Pakistanis call the N-5. Heading northeast to southwest, it passes through Sukkur to the south and Rahim-Yar-Khan to the north before merging into other highways heading to Multan. West of it is the Indus river. We take the highway, and we will sever Rawalpindi’s control of the country in two pieces. You will lead the cavalry charge to the N-5.”

  Kulkarni saw that the locations mentioned were deep inside Pakistan and were no place for light-armor units. The Arjun tanks under his command, however, could take care of themselves out there.

  “Enemy strength, sir?”

  “Hard to say for now,” Sudarshan said. “Definitely units from the enemy II-Corps at Multan. They may even bring in support from XXX-Corps further northeast.”

  “So we will meet their 1ST Armored Division in combat?” Kulkarni asked and got a nod in response so he continued: “good. Who are we taking along with us?”

  “Who are we taking?” Sudarshan looked to his aide as though it were a joke. “Everybody! Kulkarni, we are taking every tank we can muster between the 43RD and the 75TH regiments, to the N-5!”

  Pakistani forces south of Multan were formidable. Discounting the tanks left as reserve in Ladakh to deter the Chinese, the total number of Arjun tanks tagged for this effort was slightly greater than one-hundred.

  “Of course,” Sudarshan mused, “…this is all assuming that a war does happen. We think it might. Then again, it may not. Keep your powder dry, Kulkarni.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “What’s the E-T-A on track start?”

  “Uh…approximately thirty seconds. White-hot.”

  “Main screen please.”

  Malhotra turned to see Sinha standing next to him with a cup of tea. He took it with a smile and turned to face the large screen in front of them as it flicked into operation with grayscale imagery. One of the RISAT satellites had just begun its pass on another stretch of the terrain west of the international border between India and Pakistan. Compared with the vast desolation of Tibet, the view here was different. Villages, mud, concrete roads, trees and bushes. Water and canals.

  Obstacles.

  Malhotra saw the trap being laid out by the Pakistanis to channel attacking Indian forces into kill zones east of the city of Lahore. The analysis would have to wait but even a superficial view of the imagery showed the immense obstacles to an attacking force from the urbanization of the terrain. Not to mention the presence of jihadists amongst the civilians who were already rallying in the streets of Lahore and other Pakistani cities.

  “This will never work,” Malhotra blurted out. Sinha looked up from the print-out images in his hand and removed his reading glasses.

  “What won’t work?”

  “The ground offensive we are preparing.”

  “Oh?” The navy man asked. Ground offensives were not his domain. “And why not?”

  “Too many obstacles in the way,” Malhotra turned to Sinha: “too many villages that cannot be avoided, too many civilians to search and impound to weed out the jihadists and too many intertwined kill-zones set up by the Pakis. We will lose men and vehicles by the hundreds for the short trip between the border and the outskirts of Lahore. This is not 1965!”

  “Army headquarters needs to be able to launch a major offensive against the Pak army if conflict erupts,” Sinha observed neutrally.

  “Well, it cannot be in this sector. Hopefully they will agree with me when we show them these images.”

  “And if they don’t agree?”

  “Then it will be a massacre.” Malhotra replied and walked into his office to make some calls.

  ──── 18 ────

  “Take a seat, Basu.” Ravoof welcomed the RAW chief into his office with a smile. Ravoof took his seat after Basu had done the same opposite the desk.

  “So I hear Islamabad has withdrawn its officials from its embassy here in Delhi,” Basu noted with a smile.

  “They have,” Ravoof replied. “And the war rhetoric is through the roof on the streets in Pakistan. The civilian government in Islamabad is not able to keep it under lids now that the Pak army has been humiliated. If the latter want war to restore their honor, there is nothing the civilian government can do to stop it. Their power, or lack thereof, has never been more apparent as in the last few days. The line-of-control is burning, jihadists are foaming in their mouths chanting war cries in the streets of Lahore and Karachi and the Pak army is mobilizing.”

  “Are we optimistic about staring them down?” Basu asked seriously.

  Ravoof shook his head: “I don’t think so. Our attacks on the LET commanders has deeply humiliated the ISI. And our air-force has crushed the morale of their air-force. The Pakistanis don’t know how to respond to all this. Not least because they never expected us to carry out our threats to them. I guess past governments had left them with a sense of complacency.”

  “Maybe,” Basu offered, “they thought we would shy away from the threat of war in our weakened state following the
China war.”

  “Indeed!” Ravoof leaned back in his seat. “But in their strike on Mumbai, they under-estimated our response. God knows what their endgame scenario was.”

  “Is,” Basu corrected Ravoof.

  The latter nodded his agreement to the correction and then leaned forward: “which brings me to a more sensitive matter. How did things go, um, up north?”

  Basu kept a neutral expression for several seconds. The room went silent as both men stared at each other. Finally, Basu relented and offered a slight smile, but said nothing.

  “Well,” Ravoof leaned back into his chair yet again, “we will need to establish links to the ISI for the strike on Mumbai before we can take it to the prime-minister. We need to prove that the ISI gave him the bomb.”

  “Does it matter anymore?” Basu asked. “The Pakistanis are acting like rabid dogs looking for war. Maybe the war will start today, maybe tomorrow, or maybe next week. What difference does one man’s confession make now? Shouldn’t we be focusing on the larger picture instead?”

  “Don’t you get it, Basu?” Ravoof asked sharply. “Don’t you see that the war will not achieve anything substantial? The power-players in Islamabad will escape unharmed. So will most of the Generals in Rawalpindi who carried out the dirty strike on Mumbai. The war will cost Pakistan the lives of tens of thousands. But to the ones in power, what is the loss of tens of thousands in a land of three-hundred million poor and destitute? The strike on Mumbai, however, will hurt us. It is already doing so. You have seen the economic projections. This strike will send us back by a decade. In exchange the war will cost Pakistan its economy entirely. But the country is a basket-case ready to be toppled over at any time. So I ask you: is that a fair exchange? The people in power in Rawalpindi and Islamabad will retain their power after the war. No. If this has to have any meaning, we must set an example!”