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  “Shit! This is no fucking natural disaster! We have been attacked!” one of the young Lieutenants in the room exclaimed. Pathanya pushed past the young officers to take a closer look at the television screen.

  The room around him was already a hotbed of a dozen simultaneous conversations, ranging from panicked first reactions, to anger, sadness and shock based exclamations. Kamidalla let loose his own choice expletives under his breath, just loud enough for Pathanya to turn his head on. He muted the television and turned to Kamidalla:

  “Forget the fucking vacations! Scramble everybody for war! Headquarters is probably still running around like a headless chicken but we need to get prepared by the time they are. Time to get ahead of this!”

  Kamidalla nodded and then turned to the group of young officers behind him: “Quiet!” It was loud enough that his veins showed up on his forehead. “Pull yourselves together! You are officers, for god’s sake! Army officers! Act like it! This shit…” he pointed to the television screen showing the mushroom cloud, “is just the start. We will find out who did this and we will kill them. When the time comes, the army is going to look to us to slit the enemy’s throats. So put your personal stuff away, right now!”

  The room was now completely silent. Pathanya switched off the television and turned to face the group.

  “Gentlemen, let’s face the facts. This is, in all probability, a terrorist strike. If we were under a full-up attack, we wouldn’t be here in this mess hall five hours after the fact. The only reason we haven’t been briefed about this is because this has just happened. That said, expect the unexpected, gentlemen. We are the tip of the spear that will be shoved through the bodies of whoever did this insidious attack. So get yourselves in that mode. I want everybody ready with their equipment within the hour! Dismissed!”

  As the young officers saluted and left the room soberly, and Kamidalla started to do the same, Pathanya grabbed the man by his shoulder, motioning him to stay behind. He waited till the last of the officers had left the room. He then looked his friend in the eye:

  “Regardless of what we tell these boys, Samik, this situation is not going to stay in control. We can take a bet on who’s responsible for this attack but my money is on our Pakistani friends. You can’t just get nuclear weapons anywhere except in Pakistan. The government will figure this out sooner or later, and what happens after is anybody’s guess. God knows what they are thinking at this very moment!”

  Kamidalla nodded in agreement. He then smiled wickedly: “Well, don’t know about you, sir, but this will be my first war! And damn it to hell if I am going to be sitting in Mizoram when the balloon goes up. I am going to go find the old man about this.”

  Pathanya looked at the man neutrally and then nodded. Kamidalla walked out of the room, leaving Pathanya to his thoughts. He sighed as he switched on the television again to see the consistent videos showing the mushroom cloud north of Mumbai.

  Kamidalla’s enthusiasm for getting his feet wet did not seem unnatural to him. He had been the same when he had been tagged to lead his recon team into Bhutan during the war with China. He had even beamed with pride when they had given his team the codename Spear. But he had been younger then, and not so much in years as in experience. His days in Bhutan during the war had tempered his enthusiasm more so than his colleagues here, many of whom had been forced to sit on the Pakistan border during the war, straining at the leash, but unreleased for combat against China. This younger crowd had not yet tasted the horror of modern, high-intensity war against a determined enemy.

  He had both seen and tasted it. And it wasn’t pretty. The fact that only four members of his original team had survived the war was testament to that fact. His enthusiasm for war had died alongside his men in the mountains of Bhutan…

  So what does that mean exactly? An inner voice spoke to him. Time to turn in your spurs and leave? Bullshit. Why the hell did you return, anyway?

  The army’s SOCOM was going to need his services and he knew it. He was one of the experienced combat leaders in their toolkit to be used for whatever this crisis required. For all of Kamidalla’s enthusiasm and competency, he had not been bloodied by war. Pathanya had. Literally…he reminded himself as his thought went to the scars on his leg. It was time to pull himself out of whatever was holding himself back. His face changed from neutrality to one of grim determination as he saw the latest videos showing convoys of army trucks making their way into Mumbai. Their drivers were kitted out with full nuclear-biological-chemical, or NBC, suits. He had prayed to god that he would not have to see such scenes in his lifetime.

  Isn’t that what my men died to prevent?

  He balled his hands into a fist and walked out of the room into the now-bustling corridors, leaving the television running as it was.

  “This has Lashkar-e-Taiba’s hands all over it.”

  “That simple?” Basu said as he lit his cigarette and took clicked the lighter off. He looked around at the men in the room as he puffed on his cigarette from behind his desk. Almost all of the men here were about his age. Most were even balding, as he had started to in the last few years.

  “You disagree?” One of the older men said from his seat at the couch.

  “Not really,” Basu said after consideration. “Just that I expected Makki’s boys to be smarter.”

  “You are disappointed that they only managed to kill what looks like a few thousand people? And irradiated northern Mumbai?” The old man said with emotion bristling in his voice. Basu ignored the anger in the room. As director of the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW, as India’s premier external intelligence agency was known, his job required objectivity and detachment. His colleagues in the room were struggling with it, though. He decided not to poke that emotion further for now.

  “So we are pinning this one on Makki then? Why?” Basu asked as he changed gears and put a mental note to later investigate his own thoughts on the matter. “Just because this looks like the result of a similar terrorist attack in 2008? Isn’t that too convenient?”

  “Well,” one of the other senior people replied, “Muzammil is already talking to the media from his hiding hole outside of Lahore and bragging about it. Like he did last time.”

  The man on couch grunted: “Those bastards are like leeches, taking credit for the kind of shit that others don’t want to take responsibility for!”

  Basu continued to puff his cigarette as he watched the conversation flow in front of him.

  “I take it that none of the actual operatives lived to tell the tale?” The man on the couch said again. Basu nodded agreement: “The bastards took down one of our coast-guard aircraft and a patrol vessel that attempted to stop them from reaching Mumbai. The crew of that vessel sacrificed themselves to save the citizens of the city!”

  “Shot down an aircraft?” The old man interjected.

  “One of the coast-guard patrol aircraft,” the analyst noted from the papers in front of him. “Let’s see…ah, okay. One of the Dornier-228 type aircraft. Coastal-security had vectored them to the inbound vessel to investigate. The aircraft made contact and ordered the vessel to stop its approach. The crew notified their command that the vessel was highly suspicious and asked a coast-guard ship to be deployed to assist in verification. The crew spent fifteen minutes buzzing the boat and collecting video before they were shot down by an onboard shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile…”

  “Wait,” the man on the couch said as he leaned forward. “We have the video of the ship firing the missile?”

  “They were streaming it to coastal-security ops-center at the time. They have the audio and video of it at naval headquarters at the moment,” the analyst noted and then cleared his throat. “Poignant stuff, the last few moments of that audio.”

  “I bet,” Basu noted neutrally. “Continue.”

  “Well, the coast-guard ship made it to the vessel while it was still about two-dozen kilometers away from Mumbai harbor. Shots were fired and they disabled the Pakistani b
oat’s engine, causing it to become dead in the water…”

  “And then the cornered LET bastards blew up their cargo prematurely.” Basu concluded and extinguished the cigarette in the tray before continuing: “Gentlemen, the use of the surface-to-air missile gives away the game, if you ask me. There is no way that that Makki or Muzammil could have managed these resources without the support of our usual suspects in the Inter-Services-Intelligence. The question is why the escalation to nuclear weapons? Knowing the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ is important, but also the ‘why’. When we find that out, we can get ahead of the enemy’s future plans.”

  The old man on the couch nodded agreement: “Tell the navy and coast-guard brass to keep a tight lid on that audio and video. If the enemy doesn’t know we have the evidence, we can get them to make predetermined moves on their original plan.”

  “Agreed,” Basu added. “But bear in mind that the planners for this strike in Pakistan probably know already that their original plan has failed. The detonation of the weapon so far out at sea has still gotten them damage to Mumbai, but not nearly on the scale it would have if they had succeeded as planned. So they will know that we know something about it. Expect the litany of denials and references to the supposed non-state actors to follow.”

  “South Block and the Prime Minister’s office is going to be asking us questions very soon,” the man on the couch noted. Basu leaned back in his chair as he thought that over.

  “I know…” he added absent mindedly, “…that they are going to want some action plans for us. Let’s look into that as well. Nuclear terrorism is not your usual run of the mill stuff. The government will want to take action on this one. If we have to get Makki’s head on a platter for it, we should have a plan to do that. Let’s get started on that one before we are asked for it.”

  “Military options?” the old man asked soberly.

  “Why not?” Basu replied, now sitting straighter. “Let’s be prepared for that as well. If we can solidify Rawalpindi’s and Haider’s involvement in this, there is every possibility of an open war.”

  The man in the couch grunted: “At least that will make our action plans doable! If we have active military support in our operations, that will remove Makki’s protection cover which he currently enjoys.”

  “We will see,” Basu noted neutrally. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves! This government hasn’t really followed up on any past provocations either. So I won’t be betting money this time either.”

  “Except,” Basu’s colleague added, “the nuclear threshold has been crossed this time. We will have to act or stand to invite further such strikes! There has to some line in the sand, no?

  Basu terminated the meeting shortly afterwards. He made a mental note to meet again after his meeting with the Prime Minister. He was still lost in his thoughts, trying to figure out a game, the rules of which he did not yet comprehend…

  Was this a new game?

  Or just the old one with different rules?

  He needed some advice on matters his department did not specialize in. Especially when it involved the military. Fortunately, he knew a man who did. An old friend with whom Basu and others had worked closely three years ago. He walked outside his office and asked his assistant to get him Lt-colonel Ansari at SOCOM.

  ──── 3 ────

  The crowd of civilians waiting to be airlifted out of northern Mumbai were pushed away by the wall of dust moved up by the approach of an air-force Mi-26 helicopter. People held on to their belongings as the dust cloud enveloped the grassy fields and the blades of the massive helicopter threatened to uproot trees and people from their feet. One member of the forward-deployed ground teams, dressed in a protective NBC suit down, brought his hands up above his head and made a cross as the helicopter’s wheels touched into the grass and hard terrain and compressed under the massive weight.

  The loud whine of the massive turbine engines began to lower. The ground crews moved up and began walking towards the ramp of the helicopter which was now opening. One of the army officers dressed in his NBC suit also ran up to the side of the helicopter just as the crew-chief opened the side door. The army captain was to the point as he spoke through his suit’s mask:

  “Can you take some of these civilians out of here on your return flight?”

  The crew-chief waved for him to hold and ran up to the cockpit where the pilot and co-pilot were seated. The pilot unstrapped himself and walked back to the side door. He saw that other army personnel were already unstrapping the BMP vehicle that they had airlifted in the cavernous interiors of the helicopter.

  “What’s the problem here?” he asked the army officer as he jumped on to the flattened grass. He was taken aback by the sight of the mask-wearing army officer in front of him. A voice in his head asked him: has it gone that bad here?

  “Sir,” the army man replied, “we have civilians caught out here and no mode of transport for them to be evacuated on! The roads are all clogged with water or traffic! Can you take some of them with you on the flight to Pune?”

  The pilot, was the commanding officer of the air-force’s “Featherweights” squadron that operated these massive helicopters. Over the decades, the attrition on the handful of available helicopters had been significant. Of the four available birds, one had been lost during operations in Bhutan and two others had been removed from the roster for no longer being airworthy; a result of heavy operations.

  The pilot looked back at the helicopter. This was his last bird available. It would not survive this hazardous operation. But under the circumstances, he was at a loss to find a better way for the last bird of his squadron to go…

  “Get them aboard as soon as the NBC recon vehicle has been offloaded and mobilized!” He then turned to his crew-chief: “Get the civilians on board. As many as you can! And as fast as you can! No mad dashes! In double file and up from the ramp!”

  The crew-chief nodded in the affirmative so the pilot nodded to the army officer. The latter man turned and ran to his men guarding the perimeter around the mass of civilians. Once back in the cockpit, the pilot looked at his co-pilot and sighed:

  “Call up Pune and tell them we have landed with the cargo and are disgorging. Also tell them to be prepared with DE-CON teams pending our return. We are taking as many civvies out of here as we can!”

  As the co-pilot began speaking on the comms, the pilot went back into the cargo cabin behind him and saw the armored NBC recon vehicle based roll off the ramp, leaving the helicopter’s fuselage visibly relaxed. A few moments later the first of the civilians began lining up at the back of the helicopter to begin boarding. The relief was visible on their faces and in their eyes. It was a tragic sight to see so many people being displaced from their homes this day…

  “Sir,” the co-pilot said, causing the pilot to turn around.

  “What?”

  “Ops wants to know how many civilians can we get out of here and how many more will need evac!”

  Thousands, probably! The pilot let out a muffled curse. He finally recollected his composure: “tell them we will need to make dozens of trips if we are to get all these people to the safe zones before the fallout hits this area!”

  Goddamn it!

  Air-Commodore Verma vented his frustration as he overheard the communications from the Mi-26 crew on the ground near the fallout areas. He turned away from the banks of radios lining his operations center at the air-force base in Pune. It wasn’t the first time he felt out of place during his tenure at command.

  You know what you look like? A fifty-three year old man well past his prime still wearing his green flight-suit and standing alongside men and women half his age as they run about making your orders into reality. Time to act like it, old boy!

  Verma sighed and resigned himself to the operations at hand. He had ordered pilots to their near-certain deaths during the war against the Chinese air-force. Back then he had done so from the operations cabin of a Phalcon airborne-warnin
g-and-control aircraft. Although those decisions had been difficult to bear afterwards, at the time they had presented a clear option to him to achieve his goals.

  This job today, was far more insidious.

  The enemy here was unfathomable: nuclear fallout. He could not go out and touch it, or kill it. The only option was to get out of its way. But without resources in hand, would he be forced to give the order he knew his pilots expected him to?

  His basic problem was the lack of helicopters to airlift so many people out of isolated areas in northern Mumbai within a few hours. That was when the first of the radiation fallout was predicted to start getting to dangerous levels. It was a simple problem of numbers: X number of helicopters needed for Y number of people to be airlifted out in Z hours. Since he could not provide X, so he had to give up on either Y or Z.

  Neither of which appealed to him as an acceptable option. He wasn’t going to be the one leaving innocent people on the ground. At the same time, he could not willingly expose both the civilians and his pilots to get everybody out. Something had to give.

  He walked over to the wooden table in the conference room of the operations center where dozens of large maps had been laid out. Most of them dealt with the geography of the Mumbai region. Other documents were satellite-based color-contour projections of current fallout patterns and projected ones at one-hour intervals. The room was abuzz with both army and air-force people running back and forth in near-chaos conditions. Lohegaon airbase in Pune was the obvious choice for running an operation of this magnitude. Pune because it housed the Army’s Southern Command which was responsible for the entire southern swathe of the Indian subcontinent, and Lohegaon because it was a large hub of air-force activity in the region alongside Nagpur airbase further west. Nagpur would have been Verma’s first choice but that location was where his superiors had made their “strategic” operations center. And as strange or even bizarre as that sounded, Pune was now the “forward” operations center.