Chimera (4 page)

Special teams of soldiers would be sent inside Tibet disguised as Tibetan rebels and would wage covert war alongside them against PLA forces. The soldiers would be of Tibetan ethnicity for the most part and would speak the language to allow them to merge within the locals. But where would such soldiers come from? The Special Frontier Force, or SFF, trained from Tibetan refugees who had fled to India over the years, had become too public over the years thanks to their employment in various operations and wars. They were too closely watched by the Chinese and posed a security threat to the entire objective. Instead, the men had been gleaned from other sources and regular units of the newly formed Indian Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, as it was called. They had been covertly trained over the year and were armed and equipped for combat. And having entered Tibet within a few months of the start of the initial protests, were now waging covert war against the PLA regular forces deployed in the region.

Their entire objective depended on secrecy and deniability. The Indian intelligence services had ensured that these men had been removed from all records and for all intents and purposes had been given Tibetan pseudo-identities. Their ranks prior to their selection no longer applied, even though military protocols
were
applied within the units. They were being supported by intelligence data and electronic assets as and when they could be diverted without drawing too much attention within the Indian Army echelons. If the planners within the DOD were not careful, they could trigger war with China and they knew it.

Hell
… Gephel thought.
All it would take is one mistake. Just one
…

But at some dark, deep inner level, he wondered whether that was necessarily a bad thing? Gephel came from a long line of Tibetan generations before his grandparents had rushed along with thousands of others from Gyantse in Tibet, their original hometown, to India via Nepal during the rebellion of 1959. He had heard the stories countless times from his parents, who had been toddlers when they had arrived to welcoming hands in India. The Red-Cross gave them food and shelter, and gave Gephel a home. He had considered himself and his future generations in debt of this country ever since. Just like his parents had taught him to do. So when he had applied for the Indian Army and was denied, only to be taken up on that offer by the RAW, he had felt no qualms in offering his services to go back across the Himalayas numerous times on very high risk intelligence missions over his career. He had been trained along the lines of the Indian Paratroopers and had been allowed to join the Army by a grateful RAW Director after his repeated requests to do so.

And he had done well. He had risen to the ranks of Lieutenant-Colonel within the army under what his peers considered to be mysterious circumstances. But everybody left him alone once they realized his background through rumors. He hated the looks of suspicion from the senior commanders he worked with in SOCOM once they all had a chance to look at his career-service-vitae. So in a way it had given him pleasure when the RAW operations officers had dropped by his office a few months ago about taking part in the upcoming plans for Tibet.

And they had done a good job collecting men similar to him, he had realized once he had a chance to meet them at a remote training base in the northern state of Uttar-Pradesh. He had met Major Ngawang there. Once they had inserted into Tibet, he had carried out his objectives with clarity, vision and determination. But over the last few weeks he had begun to see that the overall plans had failed. The rebellion was faltering and Tibet would once again return to the iron grasp of the Chinese sooner rather than later. Once winter set in, it would signal the end of the last sputters of resistance from the rebels. And what then?

What he and his team had seen over the past day here was highly symptomatic of this reality… 

The combined force of ten men under Gephel had been holed up in the hills northwest of the village for the past day. They had watched the botched attempt on the PLA convoy by the rebels that had left the lead truck burning under the force of an improvised roadside bomb. Other such devices had apparently not worked as they should have, and sure enough the rest of the convoy had stopped and dozens of soldiers had deployed into the houses bordering the road. It then became a house-to-house fight between an overwhelming PLA infantry force and a small rebel unit.

But for all their flaws, the Tibetan rebels had fought bravely. That was something Gephel could concede. Of course, from a military standpoint it had not been enough. In modern warfare, it usually never is. The Tibetans within the eastern outskirts of the village had been wiped out to the last man. More rebels had converged from the east to help their besieged comrades, but they too were now retreating in a running battle with that PLA battalion. The PLA for their part had been caught by surprise initially, but that hadn’t lasted long. There were now APC convoys coming down the road from the northeast with their headlights switched on in a show of defiance. Artillery had pounded the hills east of the village for an hour before a fresh PLA infantry Battalion had begun advancing across the river towards the eastern hills. The original Battalion that had been ambushed was now on holding status in the western outskirts of the village, clearing the remaining houses.

“Incoming...” Ngawang reported as he watched a PLA mortar platoon getting ready to drop smoke cover for their advancing troops.

“Organized, disciplined...and predictable,” Gephel said as he made mental notes about the PLA tactics, equipment, logistics, command and control and ISR capabilities.

That was when a burst of gunfire rang out from one of the extreme western houses in the village. It caught everybody by surprise, Gephel and Ngawang included. They refocused their binoculars to find a section of PLA troops returning fire on a small house near whose door an officer now lay in a pool of blood. The tactical orientation of the Chinese forces had been eastwards thus far. Now there was confusion everywhere. There were several more grenade explosions that left three more soldiers dead on the main street of the village...

“Oh Shit!” Gephel said to no one in particular.

Although his team was not under fire, the fact was that the Chinese would soon begin advancing into these hills and more eyes would be facing this way now. The team ran an extreme risk of detection now more by accident rather than design. Sure enough, the first mortar shells were now hitting the foothills just below them. Gephel lowered himself behind cover and picked up his rifle with one hand; stowing his binoculars with the other while he shouted out orders:

“All right, we need to get out of here before they start searching these peaks. Move! Move! Move!”

IAF PHALCON AWACS,

OVER WESTERN LADAKH

MAY 15, 1848 HRS

“Inbound. Single-ship contact detected bearing two-one-nine heading southeast. Range two-one-zero kilo-mike. Angels thirty,” the radar console operator reported over the intercom. Wing-Commander Verma, the flight operations commander, was already walking over to the concerned console and peered at the computer screen over their shoulders.

“Type?”

Verma mentally absorbed the details from the screen. The operator shifted the interface screen to initiate inbound track. A second later the computer ran over the flight profile parameters with a known intelligence database before displaying the result on a corner of the screen.

“Possible J-10 variant. Designating inbound contact November-two-four. Track initiated,” the operator was already moving through the protocols but Verma remained lost in his own analysis.

“Might be a close formation two-ship flight. The reds don’t usually fly single aircraft patrols.”

“Could be, sir. Difficult to tell at this point. The contact is trying to keep within the peaks as best as he can. Once he gets closer we can differentiate the radar signature,” the operator did not look away from his monitor screens.

“Point of origin?”

“Bearing suggests dust-off from Kashgar, but we show no J-10 deployments that far west.”

“Until now that is.
This
is called real-time intelligence. CINC-WAC needs to know that his commie threat level just went up a notch,” Verma noted dryly. “Anyway, where is this bugger going?”

“The current flight path takes him to the south.”

“How close is he going to get to our airspace with the current heading?” Verma continued as he watched that inverted ‘V’ on the screen heading downwards.

“Around sixty to seventy kilometers east of the LAC on the way to Shipki Pass to the south. Doesn’t look like he is planning to approach anything important.”

“Doesn’t matter. That’s close enough,” Verma said and walked away from the console and to the airborne controller:

“Who’s up today?”

“Three Mig-29s at Leh ORP.”

“Good. Get them in the air and direct them towards November-two-four. Keep them on radar standby and over our airspace. Weapons release on hold. We don’t want any accidents. Do it.” Verma ordered.

LEH AIRBASE

INDIA

MAY 15, 1915 HRS

The sun had gone down some time back, and now only the western edge of the sky was a shade of dark red. Bright stars had begun to appear on the eastern skies. On the ground, activity was frantic at the southern end of the airbase as sounds of turbines spooling up filled the air. Inside the well-lit Hardened-Aircraft-Shelters or HAS, three Mig-29 pilots were strapping into their seats as the ground crewmen armed the weapons and conducted final visual checks. A minute later the first Mig-29 taxied out of the shelter into the darkness outside. This was not war, and so the runway perimeter lights were still on, as were the anti-collision strobe-lights of the aircraft as they moved out one behind the other towards the end of the runway. A minute later the thunder of afterburners reverberated in the surrounding hills as the first of the three air-defense fighters streaked down the end of the runway and lifted into the air...

HILLS OVERLOOKING THE VILLAGE OF SHIQUANHE

SOUTHWESTERN TIBET

MAY 15, 1930 HRS

The path down the hillside was not easy. The loose gravel and shifting rocks meant that one small mistake and one could end up sliding down the side and smashing into the rocks below. But there was no choice at the moment. Gephel and the other soldiers of his team were moving down the northern side of the slope and attempting to reach the next line of hills parallel to the one they were on. On the southern side of this hill the battle between the remaining Tibetan rebels and the PLA was in full flow, with the Chinese now hammering the hillside and the outskirts with artillery. In essence, the two PLA battalions in Shiquanhe were fighting on both the eastern and western outskirts of the village while controlling the central northeast-southwest road that ran through it. But it was not as serious a tactical problem as it might seem.  

The reason for this is that Tibetan plateau is relatively flat. Unlike the steep gradients along the Greater Himalayas on the southern edge of this plateau, most urban and rural areas of Tibet are accessible from numerous directions. In the case of Shiquanhe, another road ran down from the direction of the Aksai Chin to the northwest. Gephel and his team had been positioned to the north of the village with both these roads on either side of them, having descended towards the village from the north. But now with two PLA convoys inbound towards the village from both these roads, the only escape route was back north again. Doing so was not going to be easy. The ground was barren and exposed. If detected crossing these open terrains, the intruders ran the risk of annihilation.

At the base of the next line of hills, Gephel looked left and right to see his men taking cover behind some boulders. With their heavy backpacks strapped on and their rifles at shoulder level, they scanned the open terrain in front of them. The sky above was lit with stars, but there was no moonlight. The top of the hill the team had been on before was now silhouetted against the continuous flashes of manmade light from a mixture of flares and explosions. The headlights of the dozen odd vehicles driving down the road from the northwest were also visible, thanks to the good line of sight from their elevated positions.

“Troop trucks,” Ngawang reported as he handed the binoculars to Gephel.

“They will be swarming these peaks by afternoon tomorrow. I doubt they will do anything beyond securing the village tonight,” Gephel replied. A few seconds later he handed back the binoculars:

“We have till daybreak to get under cover.”

“What about our contacts?” Ngawang asked.

“They are probably dead. Those who aren’t will be taken away. Either way, there’s nothing for us here. Let’s move out,” 

“Yes sir,” Ngawang adjusted the night-vision optics attachment to his helmet before lowering it in front of his eyes. The rest of the team had done the same. Gephel was the last one to do it as he gave a final look to the flashing lights silhouetting the southern peaks behind them. Thirty seconds later he picked up his AK-47 rifle and moved out as Ngawang began leading the group across the cold, dark plains.

THE SKIES ABOVE SOUTHWESTERN TIBET