BLOWBACK (22 page)

In such ops one can never tell what the blowback will be.
Anbu’s words as they had bid farewell to Iqbal at the start of the operation echoed in Sami’s mind.
One can never tell which way things will blow… and who they will blow away.
Sami suppressed a shiver.

‘Why not move in and take them all out?’ Tiwathia wondered aloud.

‘You know why, Vikram,’ Sami said impatiently. ‘Not until we identify the real brains behind the YPS and their conduit to the Pakis. Otherwise, this whole operation is meaningless.’

‘I know,’ Tiwthia said resignedly, but his eyes reflected his deep unease.

If they made a mistake the cost would be paid in blood – the blood of innocents.

M
ost of the others had dozed off by the time Asif and Imtiaz finished assembling the bombs. They used the same method as the previous time and the bombs were wrapped in similar blue-green pieces of polythene. The amount of explosive and shrapnel used in each was also the same; that was the only way Imtiaz and Asif had been trained to assemble bombs.

‘Right, guys,’ Asif called out as he stepped back from the table. ‘Gather around.’ One by one the bombers roused themselves and began to cluster around the table. ‘This is what we’re going to do.’ Giving precise commands, he paired them off into teams and began to brief them over the large city map that had been pulled out of a tourist brochure and spread across the table. The briefing this time took much longer since they had not carried out a dry run or a reconnaissance earlier. ‘As soon as you’re done, I want all of you to head straight to the railway station and take the train to Delhi.’

‘Delhi? Aren’t we going back to Pune?’ Imtiaz voiced the question before Iqbal could.

‘No, we’ll take the first train out and that happens to be the one going to Delhi. We need to clear out of the city immediately,’ Asif explained. ‘From Delhi, arrangements have been made for us to move back to our own cities.’

‘Where do we stay in Delhi?’ one of the others asked.

‘Just head straight for Bardhan House.’

‘The one near Jamia?’

‘That’s the one.’ Asif nodded. ‘You lot stay with Zia, he knows the way… it’s his place.’ Asif indicated five of them. ‘You three,’ he said, pointing at three others, ‘will move with Nissar. The others – Imtiaz, Abid and Iqbal – will be with me. And if anyone gets separated, you know my number, get to a PCO and call me.’

‘How about some money, Asif bhai?’ Ashraf, the youngest of the lot, asked sheepishly.

‘That’s all you ever think about.’ Asif gave him an almost playful grin. Ashraf was about to protest when Asif cut him off. ‘Don’t worry, I was just kidding. Here.’ He reached into his bag and pulled out some bundles of five-hundred-rupee notes and began to dole out one half of each bundle to every man in the room. Iqbal hid his revulsion as he took the twenty-five thousand rupees that Asif gave him.

These guys are well funded for sure. I wonder who is doling out such huge chunks of money to them? Is it Mujib bhai? Colonel Anbu was right, we need to get to the root of it if we want to eliminate this group.

One by one the strike teams began to move out. Once again Iqbal found himself paired with Asif, so they were the last to leave the room. Asif subjected the apartment to a thorough scrutiny, to make sure that nothing incriminating had been left behind. Then, carefully placing the last bomb in his backpack, he led the way out of the apartment, locking it behind him. He hid the key in the flowerpot near the door and then they headed out. They hailed the first empty cycle rickshaw that went past and Asif told the driver, ‘Railway station chalo.’

‘Railway station?’ Iqbal asked as he got in behind him. ‘Aren’t we going to first...’ Iqbal stopped when Asif glared at him. Putting his mouth close to Iqbal’s ear, Asif hissed, ‘Just shut up and do what I tell you to.’

Iqbal subsided as the rickshaw creaked its way through the chaotic city traffic but his mind worked furiously around the possibilities of where they were headed and what might await them there. He suppressed a shudder as he remembered the destruction after the Sarojini Nagar bombings and he thought of Tanaz, by herself at home. Then he forced himself to focus on the present. Looking around at the city trundling past, he tried to spot any of the Force 22 officers.
Where are they?
he thought worriedly.

Try as he might, Iqbal was unable to shake off the dark sense of foreboding that nagged at him.

D
hankar had followed the terror cell moving with Asif from the railway station to the apartment without any problem. None of them was trained and all were complacent enough not to watch for a tail or any surveillance. Holed up in a tea shack across the road, from where he could keep an eye on the entrance to the apartment block that the terrorists had entered, Dhankar reported in to Sami.

The Force 22 chopper had already landed in Varanasi and the team had hit the ground running. Ankita had set up base at the nearest police station, where the local ATTF and BDS teams had also converged.

Sami and Tiwathia left immediately and linked up with Dhankar at the tea stall. Dhankar quickly brought them up to speed.

‘There are fourteen of them, including Iqbal.’

‘That means a minimum of seven targets or a maximum of fourteen,’ Tiwathia surmised.

‘I would say seven,’ Sami said thoughtfully. ‘From what Iqbal has told us, after what happened in Surat, Asif is not going to trust anyone to operate alone.’

They thought about that for a moment.

‘I tend to agree with you,’ Tiwathia finally concurred.

‘Anyway, you two keep an eye on things here while I coordinate with the local cops. How long do you reckon we have?’

‘The last team just got in twenty minutes ago, so I would say we have at least a couple of hours before these bastards go live. No! Wait! I don’t think they’ll execute in the afternoon. That’s the lean time at most temples and wouldn’t make much sense.’

‘I think they’ll target the evening aarti, that’s when the temples are most crowded.’

‘Makes sense.’ Sami checked his watch. ‘So that gives us at least four hours... three at the very least. That should be enough.’ He got up and headed back to their temporary base. Despite the confidence he had displayed to the others, Sami was sweating; he knew that three hours were barely enough. There was too much to be done.

All likely targets had to be identified and covered with adequate troops. And all this had to be done discreetly. Neither the terrorists, nor the media or the public could get even a whiff of it. If it leaked, there would be total panic and the operation would blow. Sami arched his back, trying to rid himself of the stress he could feel starting to build. The surveillance teams would have to be in position to follow the terrorist strike teams whenever they moved out. Sami surveyed the area around the tea stall. It occurred to him that it wasn’t the best place to plant surveillance teams. They would stand out like priests in a brothel.
We’ll need a ton of luck to pull this one off.

L
uckily, they had a fair share of luck coming their way that day. The first lucky break was Shashank Pandey, the local ATTF boss. Pandey was a completely hands-on guy and one of the first city cops to receive specialized training in anti-terror operations. He was also a local Varanasi lad and knew every narrow lane that meandered through the temple city. The second stroke of luck was that the Varanasi BDS was up to speed and geared for such threats. When Sami walked into the police station, Ankita was busy plotting likely targets with them on the large city map that spanned the wall.

‘What have we got so far?’ Sami asked, taking charge of the situation.

‘We have firmed up on eighteen likely targets,’ Ankita said, pointing at the red thumbtacks plotted on the map all around the apartment where the bombers were holed up. ‘There are fourteen more if we include the ones that are farther away and of course, the most obvious ones like the bus stations, the railway station, the court house, etc.’ She indicated a second set of orange thumbtacks that were spread out farther away, around the red ones in the inner ring. ‘As for when; we are guessing they will strike around –’

‘– evening aarti time,’ Pandey finished. ‘That’s when the crowd is at its densest and they can hope for maximum casualties.’

‘That’s exactly what we thought,’ Sami replied. ‘So what do you suggest?’ he asked Pandey, deferring to the local man’s knowledge of the terrain they were operating on.

‘I suggest we deploy the BDS here, here and here.’ Pandey unhesitatingly pointed out a series of positions on the map. ‘We should deploy the ATTF to cover the routes in and out of the safehouse they’re using; that way we’ll pick up the jokers when they move out and follow them to their destinations.’

‘Fair enough. How good are your guys?’

‘Good enough!’ Pandey met his gaze calmly, understanding why the question had been asked and not taking umbrage at it. ‘They’ll get the job done.’ There was a short silence before he added, still speaking in his quiet tone, ‘I understand your concern, sir, but this is our town and we won’t let any stupid bastards take it apart.’

‘Good!’ Sami felt a surge of confidence. ‘Then let’s do it. And remember, we have to be very careful that no one gets wind of this, especially the media.’

‘Don’t worry, they won’t.’

The meeting broke up and a stream of orders began to flow out. Within minutes boots began to hit the ground. Quietly, without any fanfare, a cordon of security personnel spread out and began to take position, covering the potential targets. By the time the first terror bomber team had moved out of the apartment, the security cordon was in place.

T
he bombers left the apartment in pairs at intermittent intervals. No one spotted the surveillance teams that had carefully taken position behind them. As they moved out with their lethal cargo, a host of quietly whispered instructions went back and forth between the hunters, adjusting and realigning the security cordon as the destinations and targets of the bombers became increasingly apparent. Cameras equipped with long-distance lenses began to whir into action, recording every possible nuance of the strike, gathering the evidence that would one day help deliver these death merchants to the gallows.

Dhankar and Tiwathia were already in position at the railway station when the first of the bomber teams arrived after delivering the bombs. By the time the sixth team arrived at the station, the first three bombs had already been found and defused. The fourth and fifth bombs were defused just as Asif and Iqbal reached the station. Tiwathia was just a few feet away when Asif halted to make the phone call which, yet again, triggered the dispatch of the email threat by the wardriver in Mumbai.

However, as in any battle, things didn’t go exactly as planned. The men following the sixth team lost sight of them when they were a hundred metres away from the Sankat Mochan Hanuman temple. By the time the surveillance team located the bomb, the timer was close to running out. With swift presence of mind, the BDS man threw a bomb-suppression safety blanket over the bomb and placed a bomb blanket around it. Then he quickly began to hustle people away from the site.

A bomb blanket is made of multiple layers of treated Kevlar ballistic fibre sewn into a fire retardant and water resistant cover. Depending on the type of material used, it offers varying degrees of protection by containing the shrapnel and fragments generated by the bomb blast.

The BDS man had just started shepherding people away when the timer on the bomb completed its stipulated run and unleashed the explosion. The bomb blanket minimized the impact of the explosion by reducing the shrapnel that shot out with the blast. Even so, the four people closest to it were cut down. One of them was the BDS man. In other circumstances he would have been shielded by the Kevlar jacket BDS personnel wear on operational duty, but today they had been ordered to dress in normal civilian clothing.

A
sif and Iqbal were halfway across the platform when news of the blast came through. Asif paused briefly in front of the television before he ran towards their train which had just begun to move.

Dhankar and Tiwathia also saw the newsflash and it distracted them momentarily.

Shit! How did that happen?

They were distracted long enough not to notice that Asif had halted near a bench placed opposite the television. Barely stopping for a second, Asif lowered the bag he was carrying and shoved it under the bench before he resumed his race towards the train that had now started to pick up speed. Following a few steps behind him, Iqbal only realized that Asif no longer had the bomb bag slung over his shoulder when they were boarding the train. He looked back and saw Tiwathia and Dhankar jump into the bogey behind them. For a moment their eyes met. Tiwathia noted the desperate look in Iqbal’s eyes, but it didn’t register that Iqbal could be trying to tell him something. Their eye contact broke as both men were pushed inside as the last minute press of people tried to board the train and a shoal of red-shirted porters scrambled to get off.

Iqbal grew frantic as panic drove out all cohesive thought from his mind. He could see the bodies of his mother and sister in the carnage that would ensue when the bomb went off on the crowded platform. His mind was a blank.
How do I let them know? Should I just jump off and get to the bomb myself?

But even that option ceased to exist as the train pulled away from the platform and gathered speed.

Should I pull the chain and bring the train to a halt? Should I tell Asif that I have to go to the bathroom and run across to inform Tiwathia?

He was still trying to figure out a solution when Asif tugged at his arm. ‘Those are our berths. You sit. I need to go to the toilet.’ He headed towards the end of the bogey, moving in the direction opposite from where Tiwathia and Dhankar had boarded the train.

The minute he was out of sight, Iqbal turned and began to push his way through the crowd of people trying to settle their luggage and themselves for the night ahead. Harried looks, frayed nerves, bawling kids, scattered bags and the unadulterated stench of people packed together like sardines made his progress maddeningly slow. It took all his willpower to stop himself from screaming at those who blocked the narrow aisle. Finally he reached the end of the bogey and lunged through the inter-connecting doors and yet another set of people. By now he was almost light-headed with anxiety. Then he suddenly spied Tiwathia on the lower berth, facing away from him.