BLOWBACK (28 page)

‘Iqbal! Where are you? We’ve been trying to...’

‘Sir, there’s no time. I want you to call me back on this number immediately. This phone has no balance left.’

‘Okay.’ Anbu grasped the situation immediately. ‘End the call.’

The phone in Iqbal’s hand began to ring almost as soon as he had disconnected.

‘Sir, they’ve already moved out and...’ In a rush, Iqbal brought the colonel up to speed, giving details of the church that Imtiaz was targeting and the directions to Khalid’s target. ‘It can’t be more than a couple of minutes away from the Punjabi Bagh Club.’

‘Okay! Got that! And you have no idea where Asif is headed?’ Anbu asked as he rapidly made notes and assimilated the details.

‘No, sir, not the faintest.’

‘And Mujib?’

‘No clue, sir.’

‘Fine, now listen.’ Anbu had already weighed the options available to them. ‘First, we need to focus on preventing the strikes. We can have the Green Park church and the one at Punjabi Bagh covered well in time. You stay where you are till I send someone there to defuse the bomb in the van.’

‘And what about Asif, sir?’

‘We’ll simply have to cover the major churches and hope for the best, Iqbal.’

‘But what if...’

‘There’s no time for that now, son,’ Anbu cut him off urgently. Then, realizing the state of Iqbal’s mind, he added more gently, ‘You’ve done a fine job, Iqbal. Now stand by till Dhankar reaches you.’ Disconnecting the call, Anbu started the counter-attack immediately.

Within minutes the Force 22 officers had swung into action. The ATTF and BDS teams were not far behind. Ever since they had assembled in Delhi, they had been on tenterhooks, waiting eagerly for that tiny blinking light that would guide them to Iqbal and their unsuspecting quarries.

The wait was finally over, though not in the manner they had hoped for.

D
hankar and Tiwathia were lucky to get a clear run from the ATTF base in Delhi Cantonment and reached the Yeshwant Place complex at precisely 0828 hours. They found Iqbal in the parking lot, pacing around the van feverishly.

‘Let’s get this damn thing out of here.’ Tiwathia got into the van with Iqbal and they headed out of the parking lot, Dhankar following closely behind. ‘Head for Nehru Park, that should be isolated enough.’

A mile or so along the road, Tiwathia pointed at a narrow service lane running along one side of the park. ‘There, that should be okay. Pull up.’

Six more minutes had elapsed by the time Iqbal brought the van to a stop in the almost deserted service lane. Dhankar halted behind him and ran forward with his tool kit. Popping open the hood of the van, he first disconnected the battery terminals and then began to scour the van, starting from the front. Almost instantly, he spotted the additional wiring that had been jury-rigged for the bomb. Finding the bomb did not take more than a minute. Disarming it took five.

‘Now let’s get back to the base,’ said Dhankar as he emerged from the van, wiping his hands on his jeans and beating the dust off his clothes.

‘Any idea if they’ve located Asif yet?’ Iqbal couldn’t help asking. ‘And what about the others...’

‘Don’t worry about it, Iqbal. We’re doing everything we can.’ Tiwathia pushed him into the van. ‘Let’s go.’

There was no point in explaining the obvious to Iqbal – that finding Asif in the short time available could be close to impossible. Delhi had an abundance of churches; almost all of them had Christmas carnivals and fetes on today. Finding Asif was going to be a real challenge and would require more than luck.

Taking down Imtiaz and Khalid, of course, was going to be easier.

I
mtiaz was about to head for the bathroom to get rid of his Santa outfit when Khare and Katoch came up from behind and pinned him down, much to the consternation of the people milling around the colourful stalls. Imtiaz saw the cold, pitiless look in the eyes of the men holding him and realized the game was over. He went without a fight.

‘Which van is it?’ Khare prodded him with his handgun.

‘What van?’ Imtiaz tried to keep his face expressionless.

The handgun slammed into his collarbone with a thud, driving him down to his knees. Though no sound escaped him, tears of pain swam into his eyes. ‘Don’t fuck around, shithead,’ Khare snarled. ‘We don’t have time for these games. Which one is it?’

‘That white one over there,’ Imtiaz croaked, pointing with a shaky finger, trying to press down the pain in his almost certainly fractured collarbone with the other hand.

There were still four minutes left for nine o’clock when the bomb in the van was defused and the vehicle driven away to the safe confines of the nearest BDS compound.

K
halid did not go down without a fight. He tried to break free and run when Deopa and Vashisht closed in on him. His brief flight for freedom lasted until the butt of Deopa’s pistol slammed down on his head. Knowing they needed him alive and awake until the bomb was found, Deopa had aimed the blow at his upper body, but in the struggle, it landed bang on his head. In the heat of the moment, Deopa struck much harder than he had intended to and Khalid went down as though he had been poleaxed. There was only one minute left for nine when he fell unconscious to the ground.

‘Shit! What did you have to do that for, dumbass? We needed him awake to tell us which van the bomb in is.’

‘Sorry! I didn’t mean to, but the fucker moved...’

‘Bugger it. Let’s get to the parking lot. How many vans can there be?’

There were sixteen; after all, the moderately priced Maruti van is a cost-effective option for the large Indian family. It took almost as many minutes for the BDS people to sweep through them. Even then, it was just 0914 hours by the time they located the bomb and rendered it harmless.

‘Luckily the morons had not booby-trapped the bombs,’ the sweaty BDS man remarked as he finally emerged from the van, throwing off the heavy protective gear he was clad in.

Three of the four strikes had been neutralized. That left only one unaccounted for.

W
here the hell can he be?
The thought gnawed at Anbu as he paced the floor relentlessly, listening to the stream of reports pouring in on the ATTF Ops Room radio set. He knew they had to find Asif. The alternative was too terrible to contemplate. But the hardened combat veteran also knew that it was a mammoth, if not impossible task.
There are just too many churches... and with Christmas round the corner, all of them will be packed to the brim.

D
eopa was raising his gun hand to strike Khalid down when, a dozen miles away, Asif noticed a knot of tense-looking men stride into the Vasant Kunj church which stands on the tri-junction of D Block. They were scanning the crowd intently as they slowly made their way through the fete.

Cops?
His instincts kicked in instantly.
Either they know, or
…

Realizing that he didn’t have time to arm the tree bomb, he decided to give it a miss. Slowly backing away from the stall he was manning, Asif used the happy, boisterous crowd of people milling around as cover to move towards the toilets at the rear of the church. He moved slowly, careful not to do anything to draw attention to himself.

Other than two young boys, the men’s toilet was empty when Asif entered. Neither boy paid any heed to Asif as he got into one of the cubicles. It took him a couple of minutes to get rid of the Santa outfit, two more to clean up and smoothen out the suit he had been wearing underneath, straighten his hair and leave.

‘I
t’s almost 0915 hours, sir,’ Ankita reminded Anbu softly in the ATTF Ops Room. ‘Should I tell them to activate the jammers?’

Jamming all the mobile networks functional in Delhi was the final option available to Anbu. Ever since Iqbal had told them that Asif would be using his mobile to activate the bombs, he had known that it was the one feasible option they had. It would give them some more time to find the remaining bomb. He was loath to do it only because he knew the furore it was bound to create later.

‘Iqbal said they were planning to activate only at 0945 hours, right?’

‘That’s right, sir.’ Ankita nodded, her eyes drawn towards the clock again.

They watched as the long black hands raced on inexorably, with unbelievable rapidity, towards the designated time.

‘Give them another couple of minutes... if we don’t find the bastard by then, we’ll activate the jammers.’ Anbu made up his mind as the fragile second hand swept around the clock face once more like a racehorse out of control.

B
lending effortlessly into the noisy crowd, Asif exited the church along with a large group of people who were also leaving. Almost immediately, he saw a second set of men with a sniffer dog scanning the vehicles in the car park. They seemed to be concentrating on the Maruti vans, of which there were plenty.

Asif felt a flash of rage as he realized they had been betrayed. It was only a matter of time before the police found the van with the bomb. He continued walking slowly and separated from the group of people he had been walking with only when they were well clear of the gates.

Asif was crossing the road when an ATTF man spotted the crumpled Santa costume in the toilet cubicle.

‘I have the costume. He is out here somewhere.’

Radio sets began to hiss urgently.

‘Look for a guy in a suit.’

Trained eyes began to scan the crowd. In the frenzy, the detachment commander forgot to report the sighting to the ATTF Ops Room.

There were dozens of young men in Sunday suits strolling all over the place. Several of them were accosted, most of them not too gently, and none with any positive result.

It was 0919 hours when Asif got into the cab parked at the taxi stand, just ahead of the T-Junction, about two hundred metres away from the church.

‘S
ir.’ Ankita’s voice nudged Anbu’s attention back towards the clock on the ATTF Ops Room wall. ‘It’s 0920 hours now.’

‘Go ahead, Ankita, we still have twenty, twenty-five minutes, but I think you’re right, they may not be able to find the right church in time… we can’t take a chance.’ Anbu nodded. ‘Activate the jammers.’

Ankita picked up the phone and began to order activation of the jammers. Each of the cellular service providers operating in the National Capital Region of Delhi had already been warned and all of them were ready to go into action. Just one call from her was enough to render every mobile phone in the National Capital Region useless, and no calls, text or multimedia messages would get through.

One by one, Ankita began to shut down the cellular phone networks.

A
nkita was speaking to the second cellular phone network when Asif told the cab driver, ‘Domestic airport. Let’s make it fast. I have a flight to catch.’

The rather ancient, black and yellow Tata Indica cab had just pulled onto the road and begun to gather speed when Asif extracted his mobile phone and began to key in a short text message to the phones embedded in the bombs in the vans.

The message was short and ironically appropriate:
BOOM!

It took Asif virtually no time to key it in. Adding the numbers of the four recipient phones from his phonebook took a little more time. Out of sheer habit or some deep-seated instinct, the first recipient phone was the one embedded in the bomb of the van he had left parked near the Vasant Kunj church.

Having added the other three numbers, a moment later Asif thumbed the green SEND button on his phone and the deadly text message swirled away in the ether even as Ankita started dialling the third cellular servicer provider.

N
ine hundred metres away, the sniffer dog gave his first warning growl as he closed in on the sky-blue Maruti van parked in the middle of the parking lot outside the church. That was when the phone in the bomb received the incoming text message alert and activated the detonator. The phone was in silent-vibration mode but then, it wasn’t required to ring or vibrate; all it had to do was pass on an impulse. It did so, silently and efficiently. A second later, with a deafening roar, the forty kilograms of RDX planted in the van exploded. The van buckled briefly before it blew apart. The dog and his handler were thrown into the air as hot fiery metal enveloped the parking lot.

Like a series of thunderclaps, one by one, the fuel tanks of several other cars parked around the van followed suit, spewing lethal metal fragments and fire all around. Terrified screams and shattered bodies mingled in the bloody maelstrom that engulfed the area around the church.

‘S
top here for a minute,’ Asif told the taxi driver as they went past the Vasant Kunj Central Market. He had heard the dull boom in the distance, over the screech of the Punjabi song erupting tinnily out of the cab’s ancient music system. It brought a smile of satisfaction to his face. ‘I just need to pick up a couple of things.’

He returned fifteen minutes and three shops later with a full duffel bag and they set off again. Apart from the expected traffic jam at the Mahipalpur bottleneck, the ride to the airport was uneventful.

At 1017 hours Asif entered the domestic flight departure terminal of Delhi airport. The e-ticket and Income Tax PAN card he handed over to the CISF (Central Industrial Security Force) man guarding the airport entry gate introduced him as Ian Smith. Heading straight for the toilet, he locked himself in the cubicle at the far end. About twenty minutes later, he exited the toilet and went across to the bank of Jet Airways check-in counters. The check-in for the 1150 flight to Pune had just started.

The clean-shaven man with rimless spectacles, clad in jeans and a matching jacket, bore little resemblance to the moustached, suited Asif who had entered the airport. Twenty minutes later, Ian Smith had cleared security and was sitting in the waiting area, reading a newspaper as he awaited the departure call for his flight. Right in front of him was a large plasma television silently displaying the news. He had been there for less than five minutes when scenes from the blast at the Vasant Kunj church flooded the television screen, spreading waves of consternation and anger in the waiting lounge. Almost all activity came to a halt as more and more people began to cluster around the television. People reached into their pockets and began to frantically check on their families and friends. Not many of them got through, since the cellular companies had only just started reactivating their networks.