Fenix (26 page)

              Kulkarni swiveled the
ABAMS
screen out of his way and peered into his commander sights: “rhino-actual to all elements: imminent enemy contact! Fix bayonets and prepare for a knife fight! Out.”

              “Targets?” He asked his gunner as the tank rumbled over yet another sand dune. He could see Arjun tanks on either side of him doing the same. The way rhino-one and rhino-three were staggered, rhino-three was to his south and was his “right hook”, which would swing down from the east on the enemy’s left flank if such an opportunity presented itself. Of course, if his own rhino-one took excessive casualties, rhino-three was also positioned to provide the second layer of tanks to reinforce his line. It was all about the commander’s options. He wanted to have as many of them as he could when the battle shaped itself…

              “Just a mass of dust clouds to the north,” the gunner replied without looking away from his optics. “Our friends are still rolling south.”

              “Keep our welcome presents hot and ready!” Kulkarni noted to his loader, who was sweating profusely and showing visible signs of nervousness. Kulkarni worried about his driver and loader more than his gunner. His gunner seemed to thrive on the chaos of combat and had ice water in his veins and had seen armor combat alongside Kulkarni in Ladakh. His other crew members were raw and had no prior combat experience. This would be their first battle.

Their baptism by fire.

“
Contact!
I have contact! Three kilometers at twelve-o-clock!” the gunner shouted, causing the loader to jerk.

Kulkarni calmly peered through his optics: “wait for a
clear
shot! Rhino-actual to all elements:
contact!
contact!
Maneuver offset by forty degrees east! Take your shots!”

On that command, the twenty-three Rhino-one tanks swiveled by forty degrees to east, but kept their turrets aimed north on independent stabilization. This presented the enemy with a sideways moving force which was harder to adjust for in the fire-control than a head-on target. To further complicate matters, Kulkarni had his force follow a zig-zag maneuver where enemy gunners could not apply a constant lead on the sideways motion when aiming. For its part, the advanced fire-control computers on the Arjun compensated for the motion, stabilized the turret and evaluated the motion leads without too much hassle for the gunner. It wasn’t as easy as point-n-shoot, but it was close…

Kulkarni felt his tank shudder and the turret filled up with slight smoke as the main gun recoiled and dumped an empty shell casing inside.

“Shot away!” The gunner shouted.

Kulkarni watched the round rip up the sandy terrain as it flew horizontal and low and went into the front glacis armor of the incoming Pakistani Al-khalid tank. The shot splattered into a fireball of sparks and smoke and then dissipated. The enemy tank shuddered to a halt. Moments later the engine compartment of that tank started spewing smoke.

“
On
target!
Move-on!
” Kulkarni confirmed. The turret was already swiveling to the left. His optics flared white as the next shot shook the tank and went on its way. It missed its intended foe and flew over the latter’s turret.

“Too high! Compensating!”

Kulkarni turned his attention to other matters. He swiveled his optics left and right and saw that a massive tank battle was now underway. Both sides were trading shots and the cohesiveness of rhino-one was dissipating. As expected under the conditions…

“Hold on,” the driver interrupted. “We are going over a dune!”

Kulkarni and three Arjun tanks to his side went over the dunes almost in formation. As they came over the dunes and went down the other side, the gunners got back into action again. The Arjun tank furthest to the north exploded in a fireball. Its debris flew radially in all directions.

“
Oh god!
Rhino-one-ten is gone! I say
again
, one-ten is burning up!”

The comms were instantly alive with the shocked voices of novice tankers. The hardened veterans just kept their heads down.  

Kulkarni turned his optics north just as his tank shuddered again. The smoke and smell inside his turret was becoming unbearable. But what he saw outside was even worse. There were now
seventeen
pillars of black smoke from burning tanks rising into the blue skies. Dust was everywhere and the ground was a churned mush of tank treads. Visibility was fast diminishing amidst the smoke and dust and his initial initiative was giving way to a chaotic melee. He swiped the sweat dripping into his eyes.

As he watched, a Pakistani Al-Khalid tank rumbled around the burning chassis of another burning Pakistani tank and made its way past of the bellowing smoke…straight in front of Kulkarni’s tank and another to his right. Kulkarni’s gunner was aiming the other way to engage some other target…

Kulkarni shouted the warning: “
Gunner!
Enemy armor contact
point-blank!
Twelve-o-clo…!” The sentence was killed midsentence by the fire of the main gun on the Pakistani tank. A split second later the forward chassis of the Arjun tank on Kulkarni’s right exploded into pieces and showered the entire area with debris. The burning Arjun tank shuddered to a halt with the main gun bent at an awkward angle.

Kulkarni turned in horror to see the Pakistani gunner swivel the main gun on their tank to point at
his
tank. His gunner did the same around the same time. He expected death to come instantly. The turret shuddered and the Al-khalid tank fell backwards against the momentum of the point-blank sabot round. A second later it exploded from the bottom up and the turret fell to the side amidst a tower of flame…

“Target destroyed!”

Kulkarni allowed himself to breathe again and could see his heart pounding against his ribcage.
That was too close!

He turned his optics right and saw that they were now leaving rhino-one-five burning behind them. The two enemy tanks three-hundred meters north were burning into blackened hulls as well. But the smoke from these tanks and all others was obscuring visibility. A brown haze had now replaced the blue skies. The scenery reminded Kulkarni of the Kuwaiti battlefields from the first Gulf war. The only light that seemed to enter this haze was from the flashes of main tank guns.

That was where
ABAMS
came into its own. Kulkarni could see
all
of his tanks against a terrain overlay. Those that were alive, anyway. The Pakistanis had no such capability. This allowed Kulkarni to maneuver his force regardless of outside visibility, detrimental as it was to his gunners. He could, if he wished, extricate his force from chaos and regroup further away.

Had that moment arrived?

That was the key question. And Kulkarni couldn’t say one way or the other. He had lost six tanks so far, based on their absence from
ABAMS
. Four others were mobility-killed and were fighting as standing-pillboxes. Three others were reporting minor damage.

The enemy was doing much worse. One of the features in
ABAMS
was the ability for each crew to mark targets for the others. That way, all tanks connected to the net could coordinate target strikes. Right now the
ABAMS
screen was only showing a handful of enemy targets marked. Could it be that in the heat of battle, his tanks were not updating the net?

Kulkarni opened comms: “rhino-actual to all rhino-one tanks: mark targets and status! Out.”

He turned back to the screen and saw that the status was reiterated as before, but of the five remaining enemy tanks, only three got marked. It was clear as day now: they had
destroyed
this enemy armor force.

There was another battalion of the 1
ST
Pakistani Armored Division to his east. And they had
no
clue
what had knifed through their sister battalion on their left flank. Could he now dig into this second enemy battalion from their rear by cutting north? Maybe. But first, he needed to extricate rhino-one from this mess.

“Driver, traverse north. Get us out of here!”

He felt his tank shudder to a halt and then swivel north, raking up sand all around. He switched comms: “rhino-actual to all rhino-one tanks: follow my lead. Those that are mobility-killed will hold positions. All others, form up! Rhino-three: bring yourself up. Rhino-actual is taking over –one
and
–three. Over.”

“Rhino-three copies all, leader. All yours.”

──── 25
────

R
avoof muttered an expletive as he watched the video feed from the Pakistani news channels showing massive clouds of dust rising from Indian missile strikes near Rahim Yar Khan and other places near Lahore. The Indian military was at work dismantling the Pakistani armed forces…

The one thing that was always a card with the Pakistanis was the nuclear one.
If
nuclear weapons would be used was not really a question. When and how will they be used? The
how
was not on Ravoof’s mind. The
when
was.

What would be the trigger? The threshold? The invisible line in the sand beyond which there was no turning back?

Could this be one?
He thought as he watched the Pakistani media channels fixated on the largish mushroom clouds that had flattened the outskirts of a village east of Rahim Yar Khan. Some of his army contacts had confirmed these as tactical missile strikes inside Pakistan by forces in Rajasthan. But that was the point. They were large
conventional
tactical missiles. Not
nuclear
ones. The Pakistani news channels, however, were whipping up a frenzy calling these as nuclear detonations…

And
that
, Ravoof reasoned, was fucking dangerous! Not least because there was as yet no sign of the Pakistani prime-minister. There were rumors that the Pakistani military had taken over and had detained him. Perhaps he had been killed in one of the Indian air-force strikes in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Perhaps he was choosing to stay low and keep his head down. Either way, he was out of the picture. Hussein was now the man to watch. And he was shrewd and ruthless. What was his nuclear trigger?

Ravoof walked over to the phone on the desk and dialed a number from memory. The number rang two times before going through the secure encryption tag noises. Few seconds later a familiar voice came on the line.

“Basu, are your people watching what the Pakistani media is spewing?” Ravoof asked calmly.

“We are,” Basu noted and then let out a deep breath. “It’s not good. They are whipping up a lot of rabid jihadis across the streets of Pakistan with this stuff. The demand for the deployment of nuclear warheads against us is growing on the streets there.”

“Well, can’t you shut them down?” Ravoof asked incredulously.

“Not with express orders to do so, no…” Basu’s voice trailed off and got replaced with background chatter.

“You there?” Ravoof asked impatiently.

“Yes, I am here. Look, I got things to do over here, so unless you have something specific for me in mind…”

“Look,” Ravoof asked, rubbing his forehead above the phone as he put his other arm on the desk., “assume for a second that we get you the authorization to shut these channels down,
can
you do it?”

“Maybe,” Basu replied after consideration. “These guys are using commercial satellites and other towers too numerous or risky to take down. But take down the
power
and we take down
everything
. Communications, television and the internet.”

Dear god!
Ravoof thought. “Can’t we do anything short of shutting their entire country down?”

“Not really,” Basu stated as matter of fact. “Maybe you should talk to the army brass and see if they have any ideas.
I
sure as hell don’t! What is your hesitation anyway? The Pakistanis are already used to having only few hours of electricity a day. Shut them down completely or not is not really that much of a stretch! The power grid takedown is an economic target which has direct military relevance. I suggest you consider it.”

“I will.” Ravoof nodded and made a mental note to do that via the prime-minister and General Potgam as soon as he was done here. “Now, what about this Hussein fellow? How’s he going to respond?”

“With everything,” Basu replied, “that we have been able to gather about the strike on Mumbai points to the complicity of that son of a bitch. He was involved. He knew. In what capacity? We have no idea. But his hands have felt the feel of nuclear warheads deployed against the infidels. He will not hesitate to use them again to stop us. Not when we are at the outskirts of Lahore.”

“So why wait? Why haven’t they used them already?”

“No idea. Maybe they thought they could keep us in check without resorting to nuclear weapons. Maybe they are struggling to maintain command-and-control. But now that these strikes by the army are progressing deep into Pakistani soil on all fronts, the timer has started.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?” Ravoof asked as a chill went down his spine.

“It means,” Basu said patiently, “get your people out of New-Delhi.
Now!
”