Dragonfire (28 page)

Signals were sent and received through antennas concealed in the roofs of the farmhouse building. Air-conditioning units were installed inside the outer buildings. A sewage system ran into an
underground river. The bunker operated from a generator fitted into the complex. If that broke down, there were two emergency generators in the farmhouse.

Military staff, dressed up as farmers, had continued working the property throughout construction and the interim period during which it wasn’t used. Any satellite pictures or human agents
passing the place would have seen a rich landowner’s property and nothing suspicious. No transmission, not even a test, had been sent from the site. The encrypted code had never been used
before. Once signals began, the Karwana nuclear bunker would have up to two days before being located and an indefinite time before the code was cracked.

Most of the National Security Council flew out to Karwana by helicopter as soon as Pakistan carried out its tactical nuclear attack. The Prime Minister carried with him the nuclear codes and
would have ordered a retaliatory strike if any missile launch had been detected from Pakistan while he was in the air. It had not. The Indian air force and 333rd Artillery Group had already drawn
up plans for a wave of strikes intended to cripple the military government of Pakistan.

India had almost a thousand combat aircraft. But while the SU30 was a state-of-the-art weapon which could take on anything used against it and the Light Combat Aircraft could hold its own, many
other aircraft such as the old MiG-21s were close to obsolete and failed to perform well. For the first wave of attacks against Pakistan, the older aircraft were used, except for the offensive
against Kahuta, which needed high-precision bombing.

Reports back from the pilots suggested that Pakistan’s air power had either collapsed or that aircraft had been flown to Afghanistan and Iran in order to stop them being destroyed. Dozens
of Pakistani aircraft had been used in attacks against Indian airbases in the minutes before the tactical nuclear strike. They had limited success and early estimates were that Pakistan lost more
than forty aircraft in that wave of sorties.

It was impossible to know the success of the Indian strikes on the Pakistani missile bunkers. Unni Khrishnan, India’s Chief of Army Staff, wanted to maintain strikes against them, but
shift the emphasis to destroying the Pakistani airbases known to have nuclear-capable aircraft. At the same time, he was keeping back far more aircraft than he would prefer, in order to counter the
threat from the east by China.

Meanwhile fighting in Kashmir, outside Lahore and around Sialkot had virtually stopped, indicating that Pakistan’s central command and control system was close to being paralysed. As soon
as Khrishnan heard that the first wave of strikes were finished, he ordered the second attacks to begin.

One of Pakistan’s newest and most threatening nuclear-capable aircraft was the Fantan A-5M, recognized by the bubble canopy on its fuselage and pointed nose. It was a single-seater,
twin-engine supersonic fighter developed by the Nanchang Aircraft Company of China. Its particular skill was at low-level flying and was designed as a support aircraft for ground troops and ships
moving forward in an attack. The cannon on each wing were mounted close to the fuselage, leaving room for racks of spare fuel tanks, missiles or bombs – including a laser-guided nuclear bomb
of up to 20 kilotons.

Very few of the American-made F-16 Fighting Falcons remained in service. This was the aircraft used in the tactical strike and three had been lost then to pursuing Indian aircraft. Pakistan had
hoped to build up a substantive force of F-16s, but its difficult relationship with the United States had left them without a full supply of spares and unpredictable maintenance schedules. Of the
forty originally acquired by Pakistan, only twenty-five remained, in three squadrons. In 1990, the air force had ordered another 71 F-16s, but they were never delivered because of Pakistan’s
attempts to develop nuclear weapons. When it became clear that Pakistan was not going to stop its programme, Washington ended its military supply relationship. The money so far paid for the F-16s
was returned. The aircraft was not the weapon of choice for delivering a nuclear bomb, but, by improvising the electrical system, it could be used for a nuclear strike on visually acquired
targets.

The third nuclear-capable aircraft was the French-made Mirage, a single-seater, ground-attack and fighter reconnaissance aircraft, which could carry two 20-kiloton nuclear bombs. Although
Khrishnan had details on the whereabouts of the Fantans and F-16s, a squadron of Mirages had vanished in the overnight cloud cover and so far remained undetected. India’s counterforce attack
planning was complicated by the thirty different airbases in Pakistan which were able to host the nuclear-capable aircraft. The ten Major Operational Bases (MOB) were the peacetime bases for the
aircraft. Of those, only Sargodha and Samungli had been neutralized in the strikes on the missile bunkers. Chaklala, which was the main airbase of Rawalpindi, would be dealt with in a separate
operation.

The other seven MOBs, Faisal and Masroor near Karachi, Mianwali north of Sargodha, Minhas/Kamra north of Islamabad, Peshawar in the north-west, Rafiqui/Shorkot north-east of Multan and Risalpur
in the far north, would be targeted in the second major operation to start as soon as the missile-bunker sorties had ended.

Thirty minutes later, Khrishnan would launch a second wave of attacks against the Forward Operational Bases (FOBs), which only became fully operational during wartime. Lahore had been taken care
of by Indian artillery on the outskirts of the city. Multan had been attacked as a missile base. The new targets were to be the southern bases of Mirpur Khas and Nawabshah, west of Karachi, Murid,
south-west of Islamabad, Pasni on the southern coast, Risalewala and Vihari, south-west of Lahore, Shahbaz in the centre of the country and Sukkur to the south of Shahbaz.

The other nuclear-capable airfields were known as satellite bases for emergency landing and recovery during both peacetime and wartime. Khrishnan hoped that once Pakistan realized the wrath it
had unleashed, bombing these would be unnecessary.

Connaught Place, Delhi, India

Local time: 0900 Monday 7 May 2007
GMT: 0330 Monday 7 May 2007

Journalists disputed the
exact time the riots broke out. Many claimed to witness the first killing, depending where they were in Delhi, or in India at the time. The
sturdy communities of Old Delhi, living cheek by jowl in the hot narrow slumlike streets, were old hands at bloodshed, and there it took the same course as it had for generations. The Hindus
claimed they were attacked by Muslims. The Muslims insisted they were the innocent party. Nevertheless, after the first flash of violence, slaughter began on both sides.

It may well have been the Hindus who struck first, aggrieved that an Islamic nation had unleashed the bomb on their armed forces. But the issues soon gave way to grievances and blind revenge for
a cruelty which had occurred just minutes before. In the mixed slums of other main cities, Calcutta, Bhopal, Patna, Hyderabad and many more, hostilities broke out in the hours after the nuclear
strike. Bombay, ruled by a grass-roots Hindu movement, saw some of the worst atrocities against Muslims, allegedly encouraged by the state government itself.

But if the real political issues of communalism and nuclear power were played out anywhere it was in Delhi’s Connaught Place. Before the rioting started, a small group of about three
hundred people gathered there with anti-nuclear placards. They spaced themselves in groups of about ten right around the outer pavements and stood silently, as if waiting to be engulfed by a
mushroom cloud.

‘The nuclear bomb is the most anti-democratic, anti-national, anti-human, outright evil thing that man has ever made,’ read one leaflet they were handing out, words taken from the
author Arundhati Roy, whose writings had made her a figurehead of the anti-nuclear campaign. ‘If only nuclear war was just another kind of war.’

It was a strange morning in Delhi. In the first instance, roads out of the capital became clogged with refugees, most on foot or with animals, so that within a few hours Delhi was, in effect,
cordoned off with no land route in or out. Government announcements appealed for people to stay at home or go to work as usual. They had some effect, and factories reported that about 50 per cent
of staff had turned up. The security forces were exemplary, with hardly a man going sick or choosing his family over his duty.

News of the Pakistani attack had been widely broadcast, but very few understood the meaning of ‘tactical battlefield strike’ or that they were in no immediate danger. The population
acted as if it was living out its final hours, so great was the ignorance about nuclear warfare. Hospitals were overwhelmed with people complaining of radiation sickness. Violence broke out when
doctors tried to send people home. Many shops opened as usual, and hawkers around Connaught Place imaginatively created potions and masks which would ward off a nuclear death. Thousands flocked to
the temples and shrines looking for solace. Others, looking for someone to blame, killed and rioted.

Soon, however, when the searing of the sun and the cloudless May sky carried through the morning unchanged, impatience and irritation set in, as if India had been cheated of her final
Armageddon. Then there were announcements of India’s retaliatory strikes, creating a lull in the tension and new excitement. India was neither destroyed nor victorious. Nor had the war ended.
When the holocaust failed to appear, the acute personal emotion of waiting for death diminished and tedium set in. The fatalistic citizens of the Indian capital resorted to getting on with the
routine of their lives. Those frustrated with pent-up fear and aggression took to the streets again.

The anti-nuclear protesters stayed their ground throughout, understanding more than most the issues involved. But they appeared too knowledgeable for the situation. There was an air of the
‘I told you so’ about them, as they pushed leaflets into hands of the public and tied their placards to lamp-posts. Nor did they suggest any solution which Indians could have accepted.
Should it declare away its nuclear weapons as a result of the Pakistani attack, then India might as well ground its air force and surrender.

The movement had never been a powerful one and the activists protesting that morning were from the educated and liberal middle class. They were brave to be out. Their arguments against nuclear
weapons were well thought out and made sense against the backwardness of India. But nations stumble forward more in folly than in wisdom, and the eloquent voice of writers like Arundhati Roy cut
little ice against the raw pride of an impoverished nation.

Her name was Shanti Tirthankara, aged twenty-three, a graduate in civil engineering, with a special interest in rural irrigation. She was attractive, bubbly and outspoken, with long, dark hair,
which blew back and forth across her face as she read from an article by Ms Roy. Coincidentally, her father, a wealthy businessman from the Jain community, had an office and large rambling
apartment in the old buildings of Connaught Place.

Shanti Tirthankara died on the streets where she had grown up. Quite a crowd had grown up around her. ‘The air will become fire,’ she read in Hindi. ‘The wind will spread the
flames. When everything there is to burn has burned and the fires die, smoke will rise and shut out the sun. The earth will be enveloped in darkness. There will be no day. Only interminable night.
Temperatures will drop to far below freezing and nuclear winter will set in. Water will turn into toxic ice. Radioactive fallout will seep through the earth and contaminate groundwater. Most living
things, animal and vegetable, fish and fowl, will die.’

A single rifle shot hit her in the heart, fired by a policeman, and no one found out why because he was beaten to death minutes later. A mob surged, spontaneously, disorganized, horribly cruel,
tearing down the anti-nuclear placards, beating the activists and fighting the police at the same time. Petrol bombs were thrown into shops and black smoke curled up on the clear, hot morning, the
latest evidence of India’s precarious existence.

Connaught Place was burning just as it had done in the great watersheds of history before and Indians died as police bullets tried to bring their great civilization into line. But as the rioters
were cleared from Connaught Place, the debris and the bodies left behind, they found another common target for their anger. Communities throughout India were not suffering from nuclear radiation,
but from the aggression of misplaced blame. Eight hundred metres to the south-west down Parliament Street lay Parliament House and the offices of government.

Three policemen died as the mob broke through the cordon. Rioters died in the hail of fire which followed. But by now, the mob was thousands strong, many running with burning rags and petrol
bombs to attack the seat of power.

General Headquarters, Rawalpindi, Pakistan

Local time: 0830 Monday 7 May 2007
GMT: 0330 Monday 7 May 2007

‘Sargodha and Multan
are out of action, sir,’ said Masood. ‘We have lost communications. Kahuta is paralysed. We have lost twenty-three of our thirty
nuclear-capable airfields. The pilots have taken the aircraft wherever they can to avoid them being destroyed. Most are in Kabul and Kandahar in Afghanistan, Saravan, Zahedan and Khash in Iran and
Kashgar in China. Sialkot is vulnerable and we are facing defeat there. Lahore remains under artillery bombardment.’

‘The good news?’ said Hamid Khan.

‘We are winning decisively in the Kashmir Valley. The Indians have lost thousands of men and dozens of helicopters. They were ill-prepared.’

‘What of Rawalpindi?’

‘The Chaklala airbase is badly damaged and unusable at present. Apart from that, we do not appear to have been a target.’

‘Good,’ said Khan. ‘So far it is as I had planned.’

‘I’m sorry, sir?’ said Masood, looking confused.