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  Gephel kept his peace and stared at the television screen. They had ‘requisitioned’ the officer’s mess at the Ladakh Scouts base for the time being despite the growing SOCOM base in Leh. The main detachment of Paras at Leh was drawing too much attention to themselves. And attention was something Ansari and Gephel could do without. However, the more attention the others drew to themselves, the less attention would be given to the two dozen men working with Ansari…

  “So Muzammil is our main target?” Pathanya asked.

  “Yes.” Ansari stated flatly. “He is currently in the Deosai valley in occupied Kashmir, organizing his jihad army for operations against us. It won’t succeed. These rag-tag buggers are going to disperse like cockroaches when we deliver steel rain on them. However, that’s not your main concern. Leave the bearded foot-soldiers to the rest of the army and your buddies in SOCOM. We are going after this bugger and his field commanders!”

  “So we are to take him alive?” Kamidalla asked.

  “If we can, we will.” Ansari looked at the others. “But if there is any risk of him getting away, you nail his ass! Understood?”

  “Yes sir!” The group responded in near unison. Their actual body language said: “With pleasure!” Ansari smiled and turned to Gephel: “You have the floor, colonel.”

  Gephel nodded and got up from his seat. He then paced for a few steps and faced the group of men: “As you are aware, from painful experiences, the biggest issue for any such operation is intelligence and timing. We need both if we are to arrive at the target and take him out when it is of maximum advantage to us and minimum advantage to the enemy.” Gephel then walked to the wall that had now been covered with maps of regions north of the line of control. He took the wooden pointer and poked at a point called Deosai on the map. “This region is where our target individual is spending most of his time these days. We know where he is and he doesn’t seem to mind us watching him all that much. The bugger feels very secure within his army of mujahedeen and the Paki air-force that’s protecting them. For now. South of there, you have the line-of-control and it is heavily fortified with layers of sensors, battlefield radars and observation posts. Very similar to our defensive line south from there. Mr. Basu here,” Gephel nodded to the RAW director, “assures us that when the time comes we will have the location of the target down to a few hundred meters. However, the issue at the moment,” he wave his hand at the maps of occupied Kashmir, “…is to find an ingress and egress route through these massive defenses.”

  “Rest assured,” Ansari interjected, “we will figure that out. In the meantime, I want you all to get acquainted with every detail of the target, the terrain and all relevant locations of interest to us. Our RAW friends here are proving very cooperative in helping us orient to the multi-dimensional problem. Use them effectively. Ask questions!”

  “And now would be a good time to start,” Basu added with a smile. Pathanya and his men were already spreading out in smaller groups. A few were by the map, others were looking at the profile pictures of Muzammil from the files Basu and his men had brought over. Pathanya walked over to the map, lay his fingers on it and glanced up at the map scale. He frowned.

  “Yes, major?” Basu noted the look.

  “Sir,” Pathanya turned to face Basu, “putting aside the actual takedown of the target and his entourage, it is going to be near impossible for us to walk in or out for such a distance from the border. Even if we could sneak in undetected, we are going to have every jihadi in Deosai on our heels within an hour after we conduct our strike.” Pathanya looked at Ansari, who in turn looked at Gephel. The latter crossed his arms and nodded: “The thought has occurred to us as well. Rest assured, your team will not be walking into the A-O.”

  “Helicopters, sir?” Kamidalla said as he turned away from the map. Gephel nodded. Kamidalla shared a look with Pathanya that said more than they actually needed to. Ansari understood.

  “Gentlemen, rest easy,” he said soothingly. “We will find the ingress and egress routes. Count on it. We are not going to send you in without a viable plan here. But as you can expect, all this is being put together faster than we would normally like. Which is why you are all here. Most of you have had extensive combat experience in special-warfare operations against the Chinese in the Himalayas. For all practical purposes, this operation is just more of the same. These new enemies have beards, lack training and battlefield competency, but they make up for it with zeal and determination. But they are no different from any other enemy you have faced before.”

  “Sir, what is the timeline on this?” Pathanya asked. “When do we go?”

  Ansari crossed his arms, leaned back against the sofa and frowned: “Well, major, that’s the tricky question, isn’t it? Our ingress and egress depends a lot on what the rest of the military does to, shall we say, ‘light-up-the-sky’. When they go, we go. And they may go within hours. So time is a no-shit entity for us right now. Expect to go with little warning.”

  “Yes sir.” Pathanya replied, understanding the general operational constraints on this mission. Ansari looked at his wristwatch and nodded to Gephel, who also got up from his seat. The Pathfinders came to attention as the two colonels and Basu left the room. Behind them they left a room full of maps, files and several RAW officers to help Pathanya and his men in putting the meat on the bare bones objective that had now been handed to them.

  ──── 9 ────

  “We have inbounds!”

  The young air-force officer sitting at his console didn’t flinch as he noted the two popups on his screen. The onboard computer within the belly of the Indian ERJ-145 airborne-radar aircraft went to work. It classed the inbounds as two southbound fighters and provided the estimated speed and altitude in abbreviations next to the inverted “Vee” on the operator consoles. The officer staring at the screen simply had to read off the data into his comms mouthpiece to relay the same to his boss, overseeing the half dozen people onboard over their shoulders.

  “What do we have?” the mission-controller said as he walked up behind the operator, looking at the screen over his right shoulder. The operator moved his eyes to the side panel of the screen to see the radar auto-classification for the aircraft type.

  “PAF F-16s, scrambled out of Skardu.”

  “Well, that didn’t take them long,” the MC said and then straightened himself. After a second he turned to his right to another operator: “Rambler flight still on station?”

  “Roger that, sir!” Rambler was a flight of three Mig-29s of No. 28 Squadron out of Leh.

  “How long before they are bingo on fuel?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Good enough,” the MC noted. “Bring them up.”

  Rambler had been on station for very little time. But as with all Mig-29s, the Indian ones were very low on endurance. They left a nasty trail of smoke in their wake and had to be refueled often to maintain them on station. The current flight would not be making it home on their own fuel if they decided to go head-to-head with the Pakistani F-16s.

  Then next choice would have been a flight of four Mig-21 Bisons out of Pathankot airbase further south. But they were farther away and also less capable than the upgraded Mig-29s relative to the Block-52 F-16s armed with AMRAAMs. And if the long-range missile threat was replaced with combat “in the merge”, commonly known as dog-fighting, the Mig-29s would run circles around the F-16 of any Block model. Despite its fuel-guzzling nature, the Fulcrum was a bruiser of a fighter. Besides, the Bisons would be running into their own fuel and endurance problems. At least the Mog-29s could refuel mid-air…

  “Do we have a tanker up here?” The MC asked over his comms, as he carefully made his way further up the cabin. The operators and the consoles inside the Embraer ERJ-145 aircraft took up a lot of space. And the aircraft was small to begin with. The Indian modification to this aircraft had basically taken a standard ERJ-145 and fitted it out with some of the most advanced homegrown radar and electronic-warfare sys
tems. The result was an aircraft bristling with antennae, empennages and bulges. And a cabin that was crowded, to say the least.

  “No sir.” A voice on his comms said. “But we do have one on the ground at Srinagar.”

  “Then scramble it! Our Fulcrum boys are going to get really thirsty soon enough.”

  “Roger!”

  The tanker in question was an IL-78 from the No. 78 Mid-Air-Refueling Squadron or MARS. It was the air-force’s only mid-air refueling squadron and was equipped with half a dozen IL-78s. These aircraft were basically modifications of the IL-78 platform that carried Israeli refueling pods. The air-force was extremely short-handed on tankers and it was something that had been glaringly visible for the last decade. But because the situation had not been rectified, the air-force was left very short on tankers. The result was that the controllers onboard the airborne-radar aircraft had to stage-manage the deployment of tankers and decide which aircraft had priority over others for refueling. And not all refueling needs could be met. Those that didn’t get their requirements met were forced to break station and head home, regardless of how bad the threat situation in the skies might be.

  The MC made his way into the cockpit cabin where he found the two pilots and the flight engineer scanning the skies. Compared with the cramped, hot and relatively windowless interiors of the main cabin, the cockpit was very comfortable and offered a bright panoramic view of the snowcapped and sunlit Himalayas.

  “You guys aware of the situation?” He asked. The pilots turned to face him momentarily and then went back to scanning the skies for activity. He knew they were informed. The data fusion between the radar computer and the cockpits of all Indian aircraft in the skies here, was complete. If something could not be sent via datalink, it was made available via voice comms.

  “We are,” the pilot said without looking away.

  “So what’s our exit strategy?” The MC asked.

  “If the buggers make a beeline for us, I am breaking pattern and diving for the south. Pike flight with their Sukhois are tagged to run interference.”

  The MC nodded agreement. There was precedence for this. The air-force had lost one of its ERJ-145s over the border between Sikkim and Tibet during the last days of the China war. A regiment of Chinese Su-27s had decided to make mincemeat out of the Indian early-warning aircraft. In that they had been successful, despite the Indian air-force surging as many fighters it could to get into that fight. The aircraft had been shot down in exchange for large Flanker losses for the Chinese. But it had underscored the point for the surviving Indian crews who manned these early warning aircraft: they were always the main target for the enemy.

  Indeed, the air-force had done the same to the Chinese 76TH Airborne Command and Control Regiment during the war. And it was expected that the Pakistanis had learnt from it as well. They had operated closely with their Chinese brethren, flying the ZDK-03 ‘Karakoram Eagle’ early-warning aircraft over the skies of occupied Kashmir. So it was impossible for them not have paid attention to the losses incurred by their allies during the war.

  Which begs the question: where is that airborne radar aircraft of theirs? The MC thought. A moment later he got his answer: “Detecting atmospheric bounced signals from a long-range radar!”

  Speak of the devil…he brought up the headset from around his neck and put it over his ears. Simultaneously he turned away from the cockpit and headed back in.

  “Range?” He walked past the operators to the console where the electronic-warfare officer was sitting.

  “Over the horizon. But southbound.” One look at the screen info gave him what the source azimuth.

  “Our Gilgit bird?” The EW officer turned over his shoulder to face the MC. It was like a game of chess. These were all set-piece moves in three-dimensional space. The chessboard was the Himalayas.

  “Of course,” he replied. “Both sides are setting up their chess pieces on the board. And that,” he jabbed his finger on the screen showing the source azimuth of the PAF radar aircraft, “is the enemy queen taking her place on the board!”

  “Rambler is taking position on BARCAP, sir!” another operator said nearby. The MC turned to face the man as the EW operator went back to his tasks.

  “They have the two Pak birds acquired?”

  “Roger!” The operator replied sharply after a moment.

  “Good. Tell rambler-leader to keep his flight on a short leash. No need for antics here that may snowball on us. He is not weapons-free until I say so! Understood?”

  “Wilco!”

  As the operators went to work, the MC wondered how he was supposed to take the initiative in an air-war where the other side was being handed the initiative by the Indian government. Until twenty-four hours ago there had been very little PAF presence hard-deployed inside occupied Kashmir. Sure, there were constant flights of Mirage-IIIs and even some older-model F-16s over the line-of-control, but these were being staged from airbases inside Pakistan. The amount of time it took to fly from these airbases into Kashmir meant that a proper window of opportunity existed for the Indians to strike from their airbases located much closer to the area. By the time the Pakistanis could have reacted, it would have been all over.

  But because New-Delhi had stated its intentions prematurely, the PAF had responded within hours and had deployed fighters to temporary airbases at Skardu and Gilgit. And now this is where they would stay until the threat of Indian action dissipated. As such, these PAF fighters and support aircraft now represented a blocking force that would have to be swept aside before the strike could go through.

  If they ever do! The MC reminded himself. He was not privy to what the brass were telling the civilian leaders at the moment. But he shuddered to think of what the civilian leaders might do in light of these new developments. The Chinese were making a lot of military noise now. All in all, the stage was being set to force India into inaction.

  Like most men in the unit, he knew people and relatives in Mumbai who had been forced to leave the city as a result of the chaos there. He had been forced to relieve some of his men from operations as a result of their mental anguish. The post-attack devastation had gripped the soul of the nation over the past week and morale had sagged. As commander, the morale of his men was a factor that he never swept aside.

  But if the Indian military was forced to sit this one out, as it had been forced to do in the past after every major terrorist attack, he feared the stress would break his men. And that worried him more than anything the Pakistanis and the Chinese could muster against him on the battlefield.

  The massive Mi-26 helicopter touched down on the tarmac at Pune airbase. As the undercarriage wheels touched the tarmac and pressed down against it, the rotor-wash threw up a grass and dust cloud that enveloped the tarmac. Ambulances and fire-trucks were already heading towards it. These vehicles came to a screeching halt next to the helicopter and men dressed in NBC protection coveralls and masks rushed to the ramp and the cockpit side door, carrying stretchers and other emergency equipment…

  Verma was standing in his flight-suit inside the control tower, watching the poignant sight. From here, he had a bird’s view of the tarmac. He saw a half-dozen men carry a badly shaking loadmaster on a stretcher off the rear cargo ramp of the helicopter. Medical officers were checking his body for radiation exposure as the closed the door of the ambulance. Another casualty in the tremendous operations to evacuate civilians from the radiation affected zones…

  God damn it! Verma swore at the ambulance as its loud sirens died away. He saw the flight-crew of the helicopter disembarking and being scrubbed by the NBC crews, who were taking no chances. Already several vehicles had arrived that would wash off any lingering radioactive material from the helicopter before it would be declared safe to fly again. Another ambulance rapidly sped off with the flight crew.

  Finally Verma turned away from the windows and faced the other officers from his staff that had accompanied him here. He nodded for them to get going. Within mi
nutes he was downstairs and on the tarmac walking towards the three Gypsy vehicles. He turned around as they heard one of the tower control officers running to him: “Sir! Urgent call from air-headquarters!”

  “I will take it in the tower. Route it via base ops comms for me.”

  “Wilco, sir!” The tower officer waved Verma in. A minute later Verma took the speaker: “guardian-operations, guardian-actual speaking!”

  “Verma, how are things looking at your end?” Verma recognized the Bhosale’s voice.

  “We are holding, sir.” Verma said with after a heavy sigh. “I am taking casualties as we speak, but my boys are getting the job done.”

  “Sorry to hear about your boys, Verma. Dirty situation overall, but by every account I have heard, your men have handled it well. Keep it up!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “That said,” Bhosale continued, “I need you to pack your bags and get yourself up to Srinagar in a hustle. You know our plans. But I need a man with your experience to be the master of ceremonies when the curtains part. The current man in charge is clearly in over his head on all this!”

  “That’s surprising.” Verma noted. He personally knew the man Bhosale was referring to, and that man was a competent commander.

  “Not his fault.” Bhosale conceded. “He had family in Mumbai and he hasn’t heard from them in days. The man’s morale has plummeted. I had to relieve him. Can’t have a man in that emotional state leading our guys into combat. Get yourself to Srinagar and take charge. I have notified Ravi that you are to be delegated to his command for the time being. You will get further details from him when you get there. Get moving, ASAP!”

  “Roger that, sir! I will be on the way within the hour.”

  ──── 10 ────

  “Where are you taking me?” Gephel said as he grabbed on to the rails on the Gypsy.