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  “All rhino elements! Check fire! Halt! Halt! Halt!”

  The tank shuddered to a halt and the guns stopped firing. Kulkarni continued to peer through his sights while his gunner waited for the view to clear. He depressed the button to flick the view from thermal to visual, changing the white-black monochrome view into shades of brown, green and blue of the sky above. For his purposes, however, the view was no better: they couldn’t see anything.

  “Rhino-two, -three and -four. Do you have targets?”

  “Negative.”

  “No targets.”

  “Uh…we are brown-out. Can’t distinguish anything!”

  Kulkarni realized that they had driven up right in front of the Pakistani infantry lines. He must have been facing perhaps two companies of troops at best. The rest of that Pakistani battalion must be nearby somewhere…

  “Rhino-four,” he said without peering away from his sights, “peel off here and flank southwest with your boys. I want to see how far south this enemy defensive line stretches. Rhino-three, do the same to the northwest. Rhino-two, you are with me. We are rolling over these bastards to our front. Rhino-three and –four, rendezvous with us down the road, two kilometers out. Don’t get bogged down. I want you guys scouting, not slugging it out. Understood?”

  “Roger. Rhino-three copies all. Out.”

  “Rhino-four at your service. Combat recon all the way.”

  Kulkarni saw the twelve tanks of rhino-four to the south swiveling to the southwest and spewing smoke and sand as they began rolling in formation. He swiveled his sights to the north and saw another twelve tanks of rhino-three doing the same. That left the bulk of Rhino still staggered around him, and the dust cloud was settling.

  He switched frequencies: “all elements, rhino-one and rhino-two: charge on my mark. Engage and destroy all enemy forces. Watch for enemy infantry who might let you roll over their positions and engage you from the rear. Gunners, prepare for a close-in fight!”

  As if to prove a point, a Pakistani large-caliber artillery shell landed at the edge of the road, showering his parked Arjun with sand and gravel. The shadow of the airborne gravel drifted over the tank against the blue sky above.

  Kulkarni smiled cruelly: “charge!”

  The tank jerked into motion and accelerated against the rising growl of the diesel engines. The main guns spoke up again and pummeled what remained of the few Pakistani infantry positions lined with trenches. They were now close enough to the position to see past it. Kulkarni and his crews got their first glimpse of what was behind the Pakistani lines. He could make out silhouettes of trucks and what appeared to be a box-shaped armored vehicle moving behind smoke…

  “Gunner! Enemy M113 moving behind the lines! Five degrees off, seven-hundred meters!”

  “I have it!”

  The tank shuddered and the turret filled with smoke as the gunner let loose a high-explosive round. Kulkarni never took his eyes off the sights and saw the round fly almost horizontally and reach out like a finger of death to the boxy M113 personnel carrier. The latter exploded in a fireball and was shoved to the side of the road before it started bellowing thick, black smoke.

  “Hit!” Kulkarni exclaimed.

  The driver chimed in: “I see enemy soldiers moving to my left, three-hundred meters! I see some heavy weapons!”

  The gunner swiveled the turret to the left. “I see them!”

  Kulkarni heard the metallic snapping noises of the co-axial machineguns as they raked the enemy positions. The loader snapped the next high-explosive round into the gun in the meantime. The machinegun fire stopped for a couple seconds and the turret shook as the high-explosive round went on its way. The machinegun fire started up again and the cycle repeated as they prepared to overrun this first line of Pakistani defenses…

  Kulkarni had other things to worry about than keeping an eye on his crew. They were a well-oiled team and didn’t need his constant supervision. But the rest of the taskforce did. He saw that several other tanks on his left and right were moving almost parallel to him as they approached the enemy lines. He also noticed that the Pakistani artillery had stopped fire now that rhino was literally on top of the defenders. The sixty-ton Indian tanks had less to worry about getting hit than the Pakistani infantry and thin-skinned APCs here. He noticed trucks behind the Pakistani defenses beginning to roll west with haste, abandoning their soldiers here. High-explosive rounds from rhino-four to the southwest slammed into the truck convoy with lethal effect. He could see the tank rounds slicing across his view left to right…

  “Rhino-four, I see you to the southwest. Be careful of your fire! We are on your right, five-hundred meters east of the convoy you are engaging! Over.”

  “We see you, rhino-one. No worries.”

  Kulkarni smiled. Nothing calmed men in combat more than a simple gesture of calmness from their leaders. Rhino-four units were professionally mopping up the Pakistani rear echelon units.

  The driver chimed in: “trenches in twenty meters. Hold on.”

  Kulkarni gripped the turret frame tighter. The tank jerked down, hit the other end of the trench and climbed back up, its engines groaning all the way. They were passing through the enemy positions now. The constant clatter of machinegun fire was dying.

  A flash of light caught Kulkarni’s peripheral vision. He looked just in time to see an RPG-29 rocket, fired from a nearby group of shrubs, hit the left tread of an Arjun parked to his right. The small explosion ripped through the treads and the tread links flew off in all directions along with two of the wheels. The latter slammed into Kulkarni’s turret with a massive clang before smaller debris showered all around…

  The radio came alive instantly: “rhino-one-three is hit! I say again, one-three is hit! We just took a fucking anti-tank rocket to our tread!”

  “This is one-seven! Who fired? Does anybody see the shooter?”

  “Negative! Negative! I don’t see anybody.”

  “Shooter in the shrubs!” Kulkarni shouted. “Near the burning M113! One-fifty meters west!” The damaged Arjun tank to his right staggered to a halt.

  “Kill those bastards!”

  Five separate tanks fired a combination of tank rounds and machinegun rounds into the shrubbery pointed out by Kulkarni. The latter location disappeared into a ball of fire and dirt. Two other surviving Pakistani soldiers made a break for it from behind the wrecked M113. They were ripped to shreds by a volley of machinegun rounds from the tanks.

  Kulkarni noted that the gunners didn’t stop there. They were still hammering the shredded bodies of the soldiers with rounds out of sheer rage…

  “Check fire! Check fire!” Kulkarni ordered. “You got them, damn it!” He swiveled his sights to rhino-one-three, bellowing smoke now from its front chassis. “What’s your status, one-three?”

  “We are mobility-killed over here, one-one. Driver injured. We need to get him out. Over.”

  “Roger,” Kulkarni replied. He looked around and saw no signs of surviving enemy soldiers. Still, it was highly dangerous for the crew of any of his tanks to unbutton their turrets to help a crewmember. It was time to bring up the combat-engineers…

  “Rhino-one to trishul-actual. We have one tank immobilized three kilometers east of your position on way to waypoint baker. Also one casevac. Suggest you get some of your boys up here. Over.”

  “Trishul-actual copies. Standby for support. Out.”

  Kulkarni couldn’t wait around, however. He switched comms back to rhino-one-three: “can you guys hold out here while trishul catches up? What’s your weapon status?”

  “We can hold here, sir. Main gun and co-ax are operational. We are a sixty-ton pillbox. Don’t wait around for us. We will catch up with you before you know it!”

  Kulkarni nodded to himself as he replied: “roger. Don’t take too long. All other elements, prepare to ro…”

  That sentence stopped in his throat as a massive rain of artillery shells slammed into the parked tanks, enveloping them in a dense c
loud of dust and smoke. Inside the turret, Kulkarni felt the cling-clang of ricocheting metallic shrapnel.

  “God. Damn. It.” He said and then realized the comms were still open: “all elements, move! Now! The Pakis are shelling their own positions! I guess they figured we have already taken it!”

  Kulkarni got on the comms to Sudarshan just as his tank rumbled forward, followed by the others: “for the love of god, will somebody please take care of the enemy artillery?!”

  “Up you come, you brute!” Major “Ferrite” Subramanian said as he watched the lead Tatra 8x8 trucks pitch up on the sandy embankment of the road. The truck engines groaned as the front wheels lifted into the air. The driver pressed the accelerator to bring the vehicle forward and it landed back on all eight wheels and tossed a cloud sand backwards. The combat-engineers guiding the traffic off the mine-cleared lane pulled their arms up into a cross when all eight wheels cleared the sloped embankment walls. That was the sign for the driver that their vehicle was clear on the road and free to maneuver.

  Subramanian squinted in the sunlight blazing into his eyes and walked back to his parked Gypsy. His radio-operator was sitting in the cloth-covered rear cabin with an embankment of radios: “get me steel-central.”

  The radio-operator pulled a phone-like speaker off and checked the comms: “ferrite to steel-central, over.”

  “Steel-central copies. Reading you five-by-five. Over.”

  Subramanian took the speaker: “steel-central, this is ferrite-actual. Be advised, Ferrite is clearing the breach point and heading into murky waters.”

  “Roger. Advise you hurry! Rhino is getting hammered west of you! Out.” The link was replaced with static. The abruptness of that caught Subramanian by surprise. He looked at his headset as though it were a person and then handed it back to the radioman.

  “I guess they want us to hurry.” Subramanian frowned. It wasn’t his fault the Pakistani artillery guns were located outside the effective operating range of his systems. He had told the division commander that this was going to happen. The Pakistanis were smart enough to deploy their crown jewels further west, outside the range of the forward-deployed Indian counter-battery systems. His mobile BEL weapon-locating-radars, or “welars”, as his crews called them, had a theoretical instrumented range in excess of actual practical ranges. He knew to deploy his radars with potential targets within the smaller practical ranges rather than the longer theoretical ones. But somebody at command had overridden his suggestions and placed him well inside Indian defense lines for protection against Pakistani air attacks.

  Well, that was all fine and good, but what purpose was he to serve with his radars if they were outside the detection range of targets? It had been simple numbers. Command had placed his units a few kilometers inside Indian lines. Rhino was now five kilometers west of that line. And the Pakistani guns were about twenty kilometers west of Rhino! With an effective range of about twenty-five kilometers, how was he supposed to detect anything?

  So when the Pakistani shells began raining down, he had found his trucks in the long convoy of vehicles making it through the breach lanes instead of being any help in locating and destroying the enemy guns.

  “Somebody seriously fucked up!” Subramanian growled as he put on his sunglasses and got into the front seat of the Gypsy next to the driver, motioning him to drive on. The latter folded the paper maps in his hands into neat squares so that only the next location and the nearby grids were visible on the top-most fold. He put it on the dashboard before attending to the gears.

  The vehicle accelerated off the shrubs near the road. Subramanian held on to the vehicle as it pitched up and got on to the Islamgarh road in front of his assembled convoys. He looked back from the side of his vehicle to see the half-dozen Tatra vehicles and several army trucks plus other vehicles revving up behind him. He turned to his driver:

  “You know the location we are going to?”

  “Yes sir. Two kilometers west from that destroyed Pakistani outpost you see up the road. Rhino moved through here an hour ago. Mechanized convoys from trishul are already ahead of us. We go three-hundred meters north from of the road from there.”

  “…and find a place there to set up.” Subramanian finished the thought for his driver. He saw the black smoke bellowing from the abandoned Pakistani outpost up the road. Further on the horizon he could make out other columns of smoke from where rhino had overrun the Pakistani infantry units…

  “Good. How long?”

  “Ten minutes if we race through!” The driver offered.

  “Do it.”

  “Be advised Rhino-one…” Kulkarni pulled away from the optics and closed his eyes to concentrate on the incoming radio transmission: “…incoming Pakistani armor forces due north, three kilometers! Battalion strength. Over.”

  “Rhino copies all!” Kulkarni shouted just as the gunner let loose another main gun round.

  “Say again, Rhino. Steel-central does not copy your last!”

  Goddamn it…Kulkarni repeated: “rhino copies all, steel-central! We are moving to engage! Out.” He then changed frequencies: “rhino-two, you have the ball. Finish these bastards. Rhino-four, move up the road another two kilometers and lock it down. Rhino-two will mop up and merge with you. Rhino-three, you are with us. Disengage and form up on me! We are heading north!”

  As the comms became alive with affirmatives, Kulkarni ignored it, opened his eyes and then swiveled the ABAMS screen around as the turret shuddered again from a main gun round. They were just about done mopping up the Pakistani convoy of trucks and M113 armored-personal-carriers that they had run into over here. The latter had been taken completely by surprise by the rapidity of the Indian advance.

  Too bad for them.

  Kulkarni had other things to worry about now. The Pakistanis were beginning to realize the severity of what was unfolding on the Islamgarh road and Kulkarni could only surmise that they were scared stiff by its implications. And so they were reacting in force. Steel-central had been noting the constant arrival of armored columns from Bahawalpur to the north and Shadadkot to the south. But there was a time and distance gap between the two locations and that meant that they would arrive in theater at different times. That was fine with Kulkarni, for it meant that instead of having to break up his strength into two, he could keep it combined and swing north and smash the Bahawalpur forces before pivoting south and taking on the much weaker Shadadkot axis. All the while continuing to move west towards his objective.

  The ABAMS screen showed him what he needed to see. Green markers put there by steel-central showed the inbound Pakistani armored battalion north of him. His other tank commanders were seeing what he saw. And that made it easier for him to swivel his entire force without massive chaos within his formations. On cue, he felt the chassis of the tank swiveling north even though the gunner kept the turret aligned with his targets to the west. That was the power of the Arjun fire-control over all of other Russian designed tanks in the Indian arsenal. The driver, gunner and tank commander were operating independently within the same turret without creating difficulties for one another. Under fire, this fluidity meant the difference between life and death.

  Forty-eight Arjun tanks turned north and accelerated across the desert, adding to the already massive dust cloud that was enveloping the sector in addition to the columns of black smoke. The other tanks continued to rampage past the Pakistani survivors. Within a few minutes the Arjuns heading north had aligned their turrets to match the direction and were looking for enemy tanks…

  “All right, gentlemen. This is where metal meets metal!” Kulkarni said over the comms. “So far, we have crushed and rolled over all enemy defenses on the border. I guarantee that the Pakistani high command is shaking in their boots on what is happening out here. On what we represent! So they are sending in their best. Makes no difference to me. We will crush them all! Take no prisoners! Rhino-actual out!”

  Kulkarni looked away from his sights to see the soot cover
ed faces of his loader and gunner smiling at him. The gunner turned back to see through his sights. The loader didn’t need a cue. He pulled out an anti-armor sabot round from the onboard storage and slid it into the main-gun breech. It loaded with a metallic clang.

  The hydraulic arms swung into action and pushed the square-paneled radar off the roof of the truck, tilting it to nearly sixty degrees off the base. The motors mounted on the truck rotated this radar unit by thirty degrees in the azimuth plane and then stopped with a jerk.

  “Okay, let’s go.” Subramanian said as he uncrossed his arms and waved at the soldiers standing nearby with the desert camouflage netting. The netting consisted of sand-colored webbing laced with shrubs uprooted from locations nearby. The soldiers were already clambering on the trucks and spreading the netting over the vehicles. Once completed, the brown-painted vehicles would be damn-near impossible to spot visually from the air.

  Subramanian watched and then blinked his eyes as sweat rolled into them from his forehead. His hands instinctively reached his eyes to rub them clear.

  Damn heat!

  He glanced at the blazing sun. The desert was already turning into a furnace. Well, that was life out here. He sighed and walked back to the command tent, one-hundred meters away. He noticed the buried cables crisscrossing the sand between the different vehicles.

  The cables connected the different vehicles. Each welar truck consisted of its own self-contained crew, but drew its power from a different vehicle. Three such pairs of radar and power vehicles were deployed in an arc spread over a kilometer. The idea was to provide high resolution data on inbound projectiles. All of these connected to the tent that Subramanian was walking to. That tent was where the remote display monitors were hooked up and where he would coordinate the operations of the individual crews and Brigadier Sudarshan. The latter would then connect him to any counter-battery systems in the area.