Fenix (7 page)

──── 6
────

M
alhotra sat up on the couch and rolled his legs on to the floor, letting out a deep breath. He rolled his head up to see Sinha standing near the couch, his body silhouetted against the lights in the small break room of the operations center. But he did see the navy officer smiling.

              “Don’t you have better things to be doing than waking old men from their beloved sleep!” Malhotra said and then yawned. Sinha walked over to the small kitchen area in the room and picked up two cups of tea from the various kettles lined up there. Malhotra saw that unlike himself, his colleague was immaculately dressed in his crisply ironed navy coat down to the golden stripes rank insignia.

             
Damn navy!
He thought with a muffled grunt.
Do they always have to be so stereotypically  immaculate?

              He got up and grabbed his own coat lined up on the headrest of the couch as Sinha walked over with two cups.

              “Sorry to wake you up from your beauty sleep,” Sinha said with a crooked smile, “But things have been happening that need your attention rather quickly.”

              “Good or bad?” Malhotra sipped his tea. Sinha cocked his eyebrows: “Considering things, I am not sure what ‘good’ would mean or even look like.”

             
So true…
Malhotra thought as the hot drink began having its effect, though his eyes probably would still be bloodshot from the long and extremely busy day.

              “Anyway,” Sinha walked over to the table where his papers were stacked. He put down the cup and removed a couple of files marked with red and black stripes along its borders. He handed it to Malhotra.

              “What’s this?” Malhotra opened the files and saw the title at the top of the page:
OVERHEAD IMAGERY REQUESTS, AIR HEADQUARTERS, PRIORITY ZULU
. He glanced further down to see that the request came directly from the top brass of the air-force. Further down the page were a list of latitude and longitude coordinates for about one dozen locations. From the rough grids memorized to Malhotra now from the China war, he recognized some of the locations…

              “Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir?” He said.

Sinha nodded.               “Sounds like the balloon is about to go up.” Malhotra re-read the tasking orders and timelines. “And it looks like
your
boys in Kashmir are going to go clean up the house across the line-of-control.”

              “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Malhotra said as he reached the last page of the file and then looked up: “Where’s the rest of this stuff?”

              “That’s all they deemed for us to know,” Sinha noted dryly. Malhotra sighed and made a mental note to try and call up Air-chief-marshal Bhosale to find out more about these locations. He tossed the closed file back on the table.

              “What’s our readiness for this?” Malhotra pointed to the file on the table. “Keeping our commitment to the disaster management teams in Mumbai?” Both men collected their files and papers and prepared to head back into the operations room. 

              “Two birds,” Sinha noted. “
RISAT
s.”

              “Okay,” Sinha said as he reached the door for the operations center and turned to wait for his colleague to catch up to him. “Send out tasking orders for the two birds and let’s find out what is at those coordinates.”

              “Yes sir,” Sinha replied as Malhotra opened the door. The silence of the sound-proof break room was instantly flooded by the buzz and chatter of the operations center. Sinha walked out and Malhotra followed behind him, rubbing his eyes to try and stay awake.

A
nsari sat up straight in his seat as the aircraft shuddered after touching down on the concrete runway. The turboprop engines groaned at full power as the air-force AN-32 transport began to slow. Several seconds later the aircraft was rolling off the runway and headed towards the military tarmac. Ansari saw his fellow passengers getting ready to exit the aircraft. There were the soldiers coming back to their units deployed in Kashmir, the odd government employees and even several Ladakh civilians. All were sitting in the forward cargo cabin of the aircraft, communicating to each other above the din of the engine noise through shouts.

Ansari kept his peace, however. He was sitting with his back against metallic wall of the cabin. His only company was the air-force warrant-officer who was the loadmaster on this particular flight from Chandigarh to Leh. Ansari looked at the warrant officer in his green flight overalls and his earphones covering both ears as he listened to the cockpit radio chatter.

              Ansari yawned. It had been a long two nights and a very early start to this day. But under the circumstances, there had been little choice in the matter. After his meeting with Basu two days ago, things had moved fast. Perhaps faster than Ansari would have liked. Basu
had
delivered as he had promised. Ansari
had
found all his requests for personnel and equipment approved by
SOCOM
with the highest of authority. On the flight, he finally had some time to review the plans and expectation and make objective decisions about the next steps. He had convinced himself that the broad authority given to him for the job at hand could not have come from anyone other than the star-ranked senior-brass at his parent command. So
why
the obtrusive secrecy?

              Deniability.

              The job that he now held was blackest of the black. It had every potential of triggering a full-scale war.

But that wasn’t right, was it? After all, the entire Indian military
was
gearing up for the upcoming missions inside Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir. And if and when those missions went through, war might break out anyway. But there was also the hope that it won’t.

             
But if my mission goes awry, there will be no such hopes…
He leaned back rested his head against the bare metal skin of the aircraft fuselage.

              Ansari wasn’t new to these dirty operations. He had overseen the Pathfinder missions inside Tibet with the aid of his field man and fellow Pathfinder, Colonel Gephel. Gephel had been a Lt-colonel then and overall field commander for the Pathfinders. The Pathfinder missions were themselves based on a firm foundation of revenge. Their design was not so much a sprint as they were a marathon. The idea was to bleed the Chinese inside Tibet until such a point that they were willing to make concessions on how they handled the Tibetans. And in that role the Pathfinders
were
effective. In fact, they were
too
effective and ultimately had the net effect of driving both nations to war.

              That question of accountability had kept Ansari awake for countless nights afterwards. He had never questioned his mission and strategic objectives when he had acted as the liaison between Basu, Chakri and the others in South-Block in New-Delhi and Gephel and his Pathfinder teams out in the freezing snow and ice of southern Tibet. He had never flinched at the countless lists of death and destruction wrought upon by these missions on Chinese military forces. But the sudden, massive and precipitous Chinese attack on India had caught his conscious off-guard. The war that had resulted the deaths of tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians on both sides. Bhutan had been savaged with nuclear weapons. And northwestern China had suffered a similar fate.

             
Were all of these consequences of my actions?

              Ansari let out deep breath and shook his head to clear his thoughts. The cabin was filled with the whining noise of the cargo ramp opening. He turned to see the bright sunlight reflecting off the concrete tarmac. Sunlight glistened off the shiny new ice patches and a chillingly cold wind swept through the cabin. The loadmaster jumped off the ramp on to the tarmac and Ansari prepared to do the same. He didn’t have to worry about personal belongings; he didn’t have any. His only concern was the winter jacket of his and his beret. He was wearing a regular army beret today instead of his red one that indicated his special-forces lineage. That would only draw unnecessary attention. Especially when the whole of Kashmir was on edge.

              He returned the salute from the warrant-officer at the base of the ramp and walked off, looking around the airbase. Leh was abuzz with military activity. He cocked his head upwards to see a bright blue morning sky reverberating with the thunder of Mig-29 fighters on air-defense duties. To his side, a pair of massive air-force C-17 transport aircraft were parked, disgorging tons of cargo, vehicles and soldiers…

              Not hard to guess our intentions, is it?
Ansari thought as he put on his beret, shielding his thinning white hair from the bitter cold winds. He realized that amongst all this activity lay anonymity for himself. With the massive military mobilization in Kashmir, top brass were moving back and forth. If there was anybody in the pay of the Pakistanis watching the airfield for the arrivals and departures, he or she would have plenty to report. Amongst all that, a lowly colonel could blend in without drawing too much attention.

              “Our enemies
never
learn,” a voice said behind Ansari.

              “And command doesn’t
know
any better!” Ansari replied almost on reflex and then smiled as he turned around. “Gephel! You old dog!”

              The bearish Gephel caught Ansari in a hug that left the latter gasping. Ansari looked his friend over, dressed as he was in combat fatigues similarly lacking in special-forces insignia. He didn’t say anything on that and didn’t have to.

              “What brings you to these neck of the woods…uh, rocks?” Gephel said, still smiling. “Don’t see too many of you
command
folks out in the mud with the boys!”

              “Yeah, yeah,” Ansari observed and then fished into his bulky winter coat pockets. He fished out a small box of sweets that he knew Gephel liked and tossed the box over to him. Gephel took it with a smile and his eyes lit up.

              “I thought you would be missing these out here!” Ansari noted as Gephel wasted no time unpacking the small box. “You don’t know,” he said without looking away from his efforts to snap open the box, “how many air-force pilots I have bribed to try and get them to bring these goodies for me to this god-forsaken place!” Ansari smiled and then looked around.

              “Listen Gephel, we need to talk. Any place
less
open we can go to?”

              “Absolutely!” Gephel said, at once becoming serious. He waved to the small Gypsy utility vehicle parked on the tarmac next to the AN-32 and began walking to it. Both men jumped on and Gephel accelerated the vehicle off the tarmac and towards the army base near the airfield.

              “So what’s going on?” Gephel said while driving past a convoy of trucks. “I mean besides the obvious, of course!”

              “What have you heard?” Ansari asked above the noise of the vehicle engine. He cocked his eyes to the passing convoys: “About all this?”

              “Only what the brass deems itself to tell us.” Gephel noted. “And the regular swathe of rumors over drinks in the mess, of course!”

              “Of course!”

              “But mainly that we are going to be handing major pain-in-a-can to the Pakis for what they did to Mumbai. Some guys are even talking of unrestricted ops across the Rubicon!”

              Ansari kept his peace as he absorbed the scent, looks and feel of this place. He missed being in the field.

              “But what do you
think
is about to happen?” Ansari asked again.

              “Nothing.” Gephel responded dryly. “Same shit, different day.
We
mobilize,
they
mobilize. The winter doesn’t help and ensures that mountain passes remain closed. The brass reports the same to the political chiefs in Delhi and the whole thing is shelved while diplomacy get a new life. And the folks in Islamabad have a good laugh all through and through.”

              Gephel pulled the vehicle over to the mess of a Ladakh Scouts unit that was moving into the region. It was as anonymous a place as could be found. Gephel then turned to Ansari: “and until you called up to tell me you were coming, I would have remained convinced that I was correct in my deductions.”

              “But not anymore?” Ansari smiled.

              “Not anymore! So what do you have for me?”

              “Something to make your hair stand on its end!” Ansari said with a crooked smile as both men walked into the deserted mess room and headed outside into the rocky garden. The garden was at the base of the snow-covered mountains that bracketed the airfield. Ansari took a half hour to explain his plans to Gephel. And Gephel nodded silently as he absorbed the whole intent of the plans…