THE HUNT FOR KOHINOOR BOOK 2 OF THE THRILLER SERIES FEATURING MEHRUNISA

by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

  A group of monkeys on the rail track. Afzal’s fingers itched for his AK-47 as his mind idly picked and popped the furry grey-brown things that studied him with keen eyes as his coach went past. Ha! Afzal grinned, back home none of you would have survived me! But he quickly changed the smirk to a harmless smile as his mind raced ahead furiously.

  The lake would be easy – a long leisurely lone boat ride and he’d tip the man enough to allow him sufficient time. Then he would recce the surround… The sallow face of the handler, Ansari, swam into view as Afzal deliberated. His right hand reached a nostril and plucked a hair out. What would have driven another man into a paroxysm of pain only drove a frisson of electricity through Qasim Afzal – he was known to habitually pull his nostril hair when in deep thought.

  That particular skill aided in building his aura. It helped that Afzal was a wrestler who tussled with young recruits and ate for breakfast the wrestlers’ soup, kala pacha. Eating an entire sheep head and feet every morning is guaranteed to give superhuman strength – so the Afghans believe. Either way, Afzal could tackle a posse of policemen single-handed, throttling necks, breaking bones, cracking skulls as he went.

  When he reached Bhakra, his one concern as he sauntered towards the dam was to somehow mask his six-foot five frame and appear nondescript as he proceeded with his investigation.

  Srinagar, India

  Wednesday 9:30 a.m.

  It was a conference room with a difference. Of the three men assembled in the antiseptic hospital room, one was flat on bed, recuperating from a gun wound, a second seemed bowed down with age and worry and the third had slumped his lean frame so casually in a chair as to appear indifferent. These men were tasked with what could be the nation’s greatest calamity and yet, nobody would be faulted if one look at them didn’t inspire a surge of confidence – the men looked beaten, not even up to facing the challenge of a jigsaw puzzle, leave alone saving the nation.

  But looks are deceptive.

  SSP Raghav had taken a couple of bullets, lost blood, his body was enfeebled but his mind was on high alert. As for Jag Mishra, the wizened Director, Pakistan Desk, gazing at the navel was a form of contemplation – an aid to meditation used by his Brahmin ancestors for ages. Meanwhile, R.P. Singh was doing what came to him naturally: folding his lithe frame within the confines of a chair such that his mind was free to chase multiple scenarios. Mishra had dispatched a chopper to pick him up from Ferozepur and Singh was debriefed upon arrival. The doctor confirmed two broken ribs – the prescribed cure, rest and painkillers.

  ‘An attack from the water…’ Mishra said aloud. ‘In line with what the IB intercepts have shown.’ From his place at the foot of Raghav’s bed he looked up, his gaze sweeping over Singh seated in the chair beside the bed to a prone Raghav.

  ‘The sketch – from the Kohinoor – showed a few boats on water. And Mehrunisa’s translation indicated an attack from water,’ R.P. Singh added. To mouth the name of the woman he loved, whose life was in some abyss at present, was akin to undergoing a piece of exquisite Maoist torture, yet not a muscle twitched on Singh’s face. One part of his mind was orchestrating Mehrunisa’s rescue, another was continually debating with him the folly of such a plan, a third was arguing with him the logic of Snow Leopard being the right man for the job, while a fourth was processing a possible scenario for the attack on Bhakra Dam.

  ‘But the dam security was heightened after we got those intercepts,’ Raghav interjected.

  ‘Yes,’ Mishra assented. ‘The Bhakra administration has fortified the dam security. CISF guards the inner perimeter, the outer is protected by the police force of three states, Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh in close coordination. Additionally, we have put the place on high alert. There are more men at the entrance points and we have mounted checkpoints at the access roads leading to the dam. A quick reaction team with commandos, a bomb disposal squad – all are being put in place.’

  ‘And yet, you are worried?’ Raghav prompted.

  ‘Dam security still does not regard the water channel as an effective strike area for the terrorists. The boats would not pack enough ammo to cause irretrievable damage to a dam. Certainly not Bhakra, which is Asia’s largest. Ideally, it would need a tanker of two to three hundred tonnes, packed with explosives and rammed into the dam by a suicide bomber. The entire lake has been scoured. However,’ he rubbed his chin, ‘there is no evidence of any such impending attack.’

  ‘Or we haven’t located it, yet,’ Singh said quietly.

  ‘And if the blast were to go off, we have no precedent to learn from. No past knowledge on damage control…’

  The enormity of just such an outcome washed over all of them: a sweeping torrent drowning entire villages, townships, farmland and humanity in its unrelenting march.

  ‘None whatsoever.’ Mishra straightened his safari shirt as he locked eyes with the two men. ‘Gentlemen, we are very much on our own.’

  Peshawar, Pakistan

  Wednesday 9:28 a.m.

  On reaching Peshawar Harry headed for Shoba Bazaar, an open-air market teeming with vehicles, repair workshops and mechanics. He weaved his motorcycle through the sprawl, boys flitting through with wire tea trays and men sipping tea and debating the latest bomb attack.

  He came to a halt in front of a large concrete shed that was packed with vehicles. At the bottom of the shed was a booth with a door of dark glass in aluminium casing that said: Palawan Store. From Pahalwan to Palawan, Harry grinned – the region sure had a thing for wrestlers. Parking his motorcycle, Harry handed a hundred Pakistani rupee note to a young boy who was working on a car tyre close by. With instructions to keep an eye on the bike and a similar reward at the end of the vigil, Harry walked up to the booth.

  Inside sat a middle-aged man dressed in a blue blazer with a mop of thick grey hair. He looked up, their eyes met. It took the man a fraction of a second longer before recognition dawned – Harry’s beard probably contributed to that. The next instant the two men were locked in an embrace.

  Harry had known Rab Nawaz Palawan since the young man first began playing buzkashi, a game that involved jostling to get at the carcass of a goat while on horseback, in the Jauzjan province of his native Afghanistan. His father Haji Tokhta and grandfather Ganja Palawan were chapandaz, or master players of buzkashi, and Palawan had a reputation to live up to. As a scion of a wealthy family, his interests were aligned with whoever ruled the country. Harry found a natural ally in Palawan during his regular forays into the country. Rab Nawaz instructed Harry in the art of Afghanistan’s national sport. The six-foot four and athletically built Harry took to the strenuous equestrian sport with vigour. And the two men built a friendship based on mutual interests. In fact, Harry had participated in the game of buzkashi that preceded Rab Nawaz’s wedding – an Afghan tradition.

  However, the Palawan family saw business deteriorate during the civil war. When safety could no longer be guaranteed Rab Nawaz decided to move to the frontier town of Peshawar in Pakistan. Harry used his contacts to help his friend relocate.

  Palawan’s business – of wholesale carpets and cars – flourished. On the side, he continued to keep the tradition of buzkashi alive in this alien land, along with Afghan culinary art, culture and tradition. His restaurant Khyber Pass, located in the heart of Peshawar’s posh Hayatabad township, was a preferred haunt of US consulate employees and the local gentry. He had managed to level a plot of land inside the Khurasan Refugee Camp – it allowed a few rounds of his beloved sport to young Afghan men at the camp. Over the years Harry and Rab Nawaz had stayed in touch, and while the Afghan had some inkling of the true nature of Harry’s work, he never asked. To all practical purposes Harry was an antiques dealer who dealt in carpets, which was a logical point of contact between the two.

  Today, Harry had stopped at Rab Nawaz’s shop with a very specific request. Afghans lay claim to being the original tamers of wild
horses, and historical records testify to their exceptional riding skills. Those same skills had halted Alexander’s advance into Afghanistan for two years. Afghan horsemen were, from those days, famous for swooping down on unsuspecting enemies and bodily whisking them away – buzkashi was a peacetime version of that same feat. Harry was fortunate to learn the skill of buzkashi from a chapandaz such as Rab Nawaz. Besides the strength required of both horse and rider, the chapandaz had to perform a feat of balancing while pulling, pushing, snatching and carrying away the calf to deposit it in the winning circle. Now, Harry would need to deploy the same skill in a more treacherous terrain where the prize was his daughter.

  Rab Nawaz ordered tea and the two men sat down to a discussion in low voices. Harry disclosed he needed a horse and while he could not detail the purpose, what he had in mind mandated the best buzkashi horse in Rab Nawaz’s team. Anybody privy to Harry’s plan would have balked at its audacity. Precisely the reason why the ace spy had decided to go with it – the element of surprise was with him. One mantra of the devotee of great battles of history was: We must always ask ourselves what the enemy least expects, and then do that.

  ‘Consider it as the most difficult buzkashi game of my life, and losing is not an option. Which horse would you choose, my friend?’

  Rab Nawaz wagged his head and said, ‘Better a poor rider on a good horse than a good rider on a poor horse.’ As any person familiar with the sport knew, the chapandaz was only one half of buzkashi, his mount the more vital element.

  ‘The terrain will be rocky and uneven and covered with snow. The game will be at night. And it will be played to the accompaniment of constant gunfire. Do you have a horse with the stomach for this?’

  Rab Nawaz stroked his goatee and thought. For centuries, northern Afghanistan has bred horses of exceptional endurance and speed, both crucial to buzkashi. Two types of breeds are used. One, called Tartar, comes primarily from the provinces of Baghlan, Kunduz, Badakhshan. Small, swift and sturdy, these horses captivated Alexander. What people often overlooked: horsemanship, not archery, was the ultimate key to the success of Mughals, who rode into elephant-favouring Hindustan from their Central Asian homeland on such horses. The second breed was Habash, the great stallion of the Turkistan plains. This vast expanse of arid steppes and low foothills, stretching from Mazar-i-Sharif to Maimana, nurtured this breed.

  After a thoughtful silence, Rab Nawaz spoke. ‘The fact that Peshawar is plagued by rocket attacks, suicide bombs and the rattle of gunfire might just have worked in your favour Harry. My horses are so used to the sound that it could be the noise of the Wakhan River tumbling down the grassy slopes of Afghanistan.’ He smirked. ‘And I think I have just the horse for you: Jerand. A red stallion Habash who can ram his opponent out of the way yet stand perfectly still. In another birth, I think he was a soldier-saint.’

  Harry allowed his face to relax slightly. ‘And buzkashi is always played in winter when snow covers the ground.’

  Peshawar, Pakistan

  Wednesday 10:45 a.m.

  Pukhtoonwali. That was one of the first words Harinder Singh Khosa learnt when he started covering Afghanistan as a spy. Pukhtoonwali, or the way of the Pathan – a complete code of unwritten attributes. The word Pathan was a derivative of Pukhtoon, which meant a way of life. Ghani Khan, the famous Pukhtoon poet, captured the essence of his people thus: ‘Pukhtoon loves fighting but hates to be a soldier, loves music but has great contempt for the musician, is kind and gentle but hates to show it, loves his new rifle and his old wife.’

  What Harry gleaned in his first few days was reinforced in the years to follow. Hot-blooded and hot-headed, poor and proud, principled yet devious, capable of being both a loving friend and a deadly enemy, the Pathan was at once contradictory and at odds with the modern world.

  Harry was heading out of Peshawar for the suburb of Adezai where lived a man whose Pukhtoonwali he was counting on to help him rescue his daughter. The scenic countryside would keep a newcomer engrossed. A backdrop of hills and mountains. Buses driving too fast. Camels led by young Kuchi, a nomadic tribe whose members crisscrossed AfPak searching for odd jobs. Harry’s mind though was on Abdus Malik, the sixty-year-old mayor of Adezai.

  It was in 1988 that Harry first made the acquaintance of Abdus Malik. He was travelling the highway from Kabul to Peshawar on a clandestine mission. Young men had started to pour into Afghanistan to fight jihad and rid the country of Soviets. Millions of Afghan refugees fleeing the Soviet occupation were in turn pouring into Pakistan. Pakistan’s ISI, in cooperation with the CIA, supported the mujahidin. In retaliation for Pakistan’s assistance to the insurgents, the KHAD Afghan security service carried out several operations against Pakistan. India had stepped back and was assessing the situation from a strategic perspective. Its Cold War ally, the Soviet Union, had begun to plan an exit strategy from Afghanistan and Harry was told to learn all he could.

  Harry was at Khyber Pass that day. A narrow, steep-sided pass, fifty-three kilometres long, it wound through the Safed Koh mountains and cut through the Pathan territory that straddled the restive AfPak border. For centuries a trade and invasion route from central Asia, Khyber Pass was the gateway to famed Hindustan through which had marched the armies of Alexander, the Mongol warriors Timur and Mahmud of Ghazni, and the Persian Nadir Shah.

  At the tourist spot of Jamrud Fort, Harry decided to stretch his legs. He was breathing in the cool autumn air when a hissing sounded, followed by a loud blast. A rocket, succeeded by several others. Harry ducked behind a stone column as pandemonium broke out. People scrambled, smoke clouded the air and fires blazed where the rockets had found their mark. A crazed camel, his back on fire, ran towards the edge of the pass and leapt off into the void of the mountains below.

  The chaos was blinding, but Harry noticed a blazing car some yards away. A woman flailed her arms in the rear seat. Crouching, Harry dashed forward. The woman was fighting flames that had engulfed the seat. Harry tore off his jacket to douse them. By the time he pulled her out of the car and deposited her by the roadside she was unconscious. A bundle in the front seat caught his eye. An infant lay mewling. The mother must have panicked and put him there. Harry scooped up the baby who was remarkably unhurt.

  Many mujahidin groups were holed up in the cavernous hilly region. It would be several hours before order was restored to the scene. Harry was able to give first aid to the woman and hold her baby as she regained her composure. Then a man showed up.

  Abdus Malik had heard the news of the attack and rushed up from his village of Adezai on the suburbs of Peshawar. His wife and child were accompanying his brother’s family on a day trip to the fort. The other members of the family had all perished in the attack as they consumed soft drinks at a stall that was hit by one rocket.

  Surely it was providence that had saved Abdus Malik’s wife and son, Harry remarked. ‘No,’ the grateful husband and father shook his head, ‘it was you who saved my family. And for that I shall owe you the eternal debt of my own life.’ It was one of the tenets of Pukhtoonwali: a life was indebted forever to the one who saved it.

  It was that creed Harry was banking on as he rode furiously down the rutted road to Adezai. A Pathan never forgot his promise. And if Harry was to save his daughter, the time had come for Abdus Malik to redeem his pledge.

  Bhakra Dam, India

  Wednesday 10:18 a.m.

  It was his day off and he was spending it as he had

  the last few months. A trek up the mountain brought him to a dhaba from where he had 5-star-resort-worthy views of Gobind Sagar Lake, reservoir of Bhakra Dam. Here he would have his morning tea and aloo-poori for breakfast and review his readiness for Kohinoor.

  The chilly air of the Shivalik hills tickled his nose – Abu was a man from the sweltering Deccan plateau – and he took a noisy sip of the sugary tea, the vapours wafting to his face. An entire village was submerged to create the lak
e – once released, the water would go as far as the capital Delhi, drowning everything in its path. It was an audacious plan but highly probable – what was shocking was the ease with which they would be able to mount it…

  Dam security had been the big concern – after all, it was India’s most prestigious dam, declared a ‘temple’ by Nehru, and a known target of terrorists. But no, Abu slurped the last of his tea, the dam security was as much of a mess as the rest of the country. First, security was split amongst the police forces of the three states that adjoined the dam: Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana. Indian intel had recommended that the Central Industrial Security Force take over, but the states couldn’t agree on how to apportion the costs of CISF personnel.

  Ha!

  A laugh burst out of Abu and rang loudly in the thin air. One of the dhaba boys grinned in his direction, brows raised and Abu waved him off good-naturedly. Hindustan. Absurdistan, he grinned to himself. Due to the inter-state wrangling, the CISF had a nominal presence at the dam.

  He opened the folded newspaper he’d carried up with him and re-read with pleasure.

  Officials say Bhakra Dam security satisfactory

  Chandigarh: Newly-appointed chairman of Bhakra-Beas Management Board (BBMB) D.K. Gupta said he was satisfied with the security arrangements at the Bhakra Dam in Himachal Pradesh. ‘IB (Intelligence Bureau) and the power ministry are jointly working in this direction. I have already visited the dam and am totally satisfied with the arrangements. Security forces have been deployed there by the state government,’ Gupta told reporters here.