Coup d’État

by Ben Coes

  And then the mushroom cloud’s edges started to tear apart and dissipate. The killer wind drifted aloft in the innocent sky, the destruction of the deserted area just beginning as the fallout settled into the ground, to lie there for a quarter millennium to come.

  19

  IN THE AIR ABOVE THE INDUS RIVER

  KASHMIR

  At the Indian Army Base in Leh, Sergeant Noree noticed a bright green spot on the radar screen in front of him. He reached out, tapped the screen with his right index finger, thinking there was a malfunction, but the spot would not go away.

  “Lieutenant Ka’ash,” said Noree. “Come quickly.”

  The watch officer, Lieutenant Rasher Ka’ash, walked from his desk and stood behind Noree, leaning in and looking for himself at the screen.

  “Where is that?”

  “South of here. Karoo, the village.”

  “The mining town?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What is it?” asked Ka’ash.

  “I don’t know. Technically, if the system is functioning properly, it’s telling me this is some sort of fingerprint event.”

  “Fingerprint—”

  “Electronic. A bomb. A big bomb. But it can’t be.”

  “Why not?” asked Ka’ash.

  “They don’t make bombs that big.”

  “Check it out,” said Lieutenant Ka’ash. “Get a jet over there.”

  Leh, more than fifty miles north of Karoo, was the closest military facility to the war front. The dispatch team at Leh was heavily involved in the fighting for Skardu, managing the early coordination of the battle and now spearheading the movement of troops into Skardu, working with the command operations center in Udhampur to coordinate. The temporary military hospital at the base had more than five hundred beds, twenty doctors, sixty nurses, and was already overcrowded. Leh also served as IAF’s primary rescue and reconnaissance point, running choppers to the front lines, where injured soldiers were picked up and shuttled back to the hospital.

  Sergeant Noree studied his screen for a few seconds. When he saw an IAF jet heading back toward the base, he leaned forward, pressed the COMM link.

  “Targa Six, this is Leh dispatch,” said Noree.

  “Go, dispatch,” said a voice on Noree’s headset.

  “Detour east,” said Noree into his headset. “I’m programming in the sequence. You’ll see it in two.”

  “Got it,” said the pilot. “What am I looking for?”

  “This is a visual recon,” answered Noree. “Just check it out.”

  * * *

  Inside the IAF Su-30MKI attack jet, the pilot punched in the new coordinates, heading across the cloudless sky at seven thousand feet, at more than one thousand miles per hour. The jet flew along the snowcapped peaks of the Ladakh Range heading south. The pilot banked and aimed the jet toward the ground in order to get a better view. He pushed the jet to 1,200 miles per hour, scorching across the deserted, rocky, green and white terrain of the Indus Valley.

  The pilot flew toward the V-shaped canyon between Stakna Mountain and Shakti Mountain. For the first time, the pilot realized something was wrong. Between the mountains, as the plane came closer, he saw nothing but black. The pilot moved the throttle back, slowing the jet. Ahead, it was unmistakable now, the sky was black and rising like a wall, stopping at a horizontal line beneath the top of the mountains.

  The jet flew past a last peak and into the open valley. He gasped.

  “My God,” he whispered out loud when he could finally collect himself.

  “What?” asked Noree over the headset.

  The valley just beyond Stakna and Shakti was on fire. Where there should have been lush green and brown valley, the ground was a plain of low-flung flames and smoke as far as the eye could see. But most shocking of all was what floated above the burning plain, the signature mushroom cloud of an atomic blast. The cloud hung in the air as if in slow motion, a gargantuan cloud of dark gray, red, and black, the top of the cloud arched and round, the bottom a tornado that was connected by flames to the ground.

  The pilot forced himself to look away from the mesmerizing sight. He stared at his navigation screen. Karoo was still more than a mile away.

  Inside the jet’s cockpit, the heat sensor chirped. Instinctively, the pilot banked right, away from the scene.

  “Targa Six, I repeat,” barked Noree. “What do you have?”

  “You’re not going to believe this,” the pilot said quietly, still stunned. “I think they dropped a nuclear bomb. I’m putting it on video.”

  The pilot flipped a switch on the dash of the jet. Circling, he again aimed the nose of the Su-30MKI at the mushroom cloud.

  “Are you getting that?” the pilot asked.

  “Keep filming. I’m patching it to New Delhi.”

  20

  TOP PUB

  COOKTOWN HOTEL

  COOKTOWN

  The Cooktown Hotel was a rectangular, slightly dilapidated, tan clapboard building that looked like something out of the old West. It had a second-floor verandah that wrapped around the street-facing sides of the hotel and jutted over the sidewalk below. The hotel was centrally located, popular, but also a tad run-down, the rooms small and plain. There were better places to stay in Cooktown, better places to drink, and better places to eat. Still, it was an institution, a stone’s throw from the beach and the Coral Sea.

  Inside the hotel’s restaurant, called the Top Pub, Jamil sat alone at a chipped and scratched brown Formica table. The restaurant’s dozen tables were half filled with tourists. The waitress walked from the kitchen to his table and placed a plate down in front of him. On it sat a pickle, some potato chips, and a thick sandwich on rye bread.

  “There ya go,” she said. “Vegemite sandwich with a tomato, no onion.”

  “Thank you,” said Jamil. He’d ordered the sandwich upon her recommendation. Jamil knew the Vegemite was without question the worst dish on the menu, yet he pretended to be oblivious. It was meant to be somewhat of an insult, an inside joke, a putover on the stupid Arab tourist.

  Jamil smiled and politely examined the sandwich. He looked up at the bar a few tables away. The bar was empty except for a pair of college students, longish hair and tie-dye, one male and one female, who were chatting with the bartender, a short man with wildly unkempt, overgrown curly hair and a big handlebar mustache. The bartender had a thick Australian brogue and was engaged in conversation with the two college students. As he spoke, he kept looking over at him.

  Jamil tried not to stare back at the bartender. He picked up the Vegemite sandwich and took a big bite. The taste was like an old sweaty sock; salty, a hint of seaweed or rotten meat; soggy but grainy; disgusting. Some people liked it, particularly if you’d grown up with it, as many Australians had, but a newcomer to Vegemite usually had a different reaction, primarily nausea. More than one customer over the years, upon trying Vegemite for the first time, had outright puked on their plate after taking a bite.

  Of course, this is precisely why the waitress had recommended it. It’s why the bartender kept looking over. Jamil knew all this. But after growing up in a poor madrasa and sometimes going for days without food, then spending a year at Hezbollah’s Jaffna camps, eating whatever was fed to them by their sadistic al-Muqawama captains, he could eat anything. With a grin on his face, he powered down the sandwich, then licked the soupy brown Vegemite that spilled over onto his fingertips. He left the chips and the pickle on the plate.

  “Lookie there, will you,” said the waitress, smiling at Jamil after he’d finished. “Would ya like another?”

  “No, thanks. I’m stuffed. But my compliments to the chef.”

  “Would you like your check?”

  “I’m going to have a beer.”

  “Foster’s? It’s very good.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Jamil nodded, laughing to himself. Even he knew Foster’s was considered piss water by Australians.

  Jamil had spent the morning with A
hmed, driving to the village of Lakeland in the north. He left Ahmed at the Lakeland Downs Motel then doubled back to Cooktown. After arriving in Cooktown, he walked up and down the main street then down to the pier. After lunch, he’d get a hotel room somewhere, maybe right here or someplace slightly more run-down. The harder the environment, the worse the food, the more he felt himself sacrificing, the more proud Jamil became. If he didn’t need to occasionally make a phone call in private, Jamil would’ve been happy to sleep behind a tree. He was gaunt, but all muscle. After running IEDs across the Iranian border to Iraq the last four years, Australia was cake.

  In Jamil’s backpack was more than a hundred thousand dollars Australian, and he had no problem spending it. He knew Aswan Fortuna was a billionaire. Being cheap was about self-abuse. It was about reliving the sacrifices others had made in the name of Hezbollah.

  “Here you go,” said the waitress, sliding him a pint of beer. “One Foster’s, super large. Enjoy that for a bit, how ’bout.”

  “Thank you.”

  Jamil sipped the beer and stared at the rows of liquor bottles behind the bar. He listened to the two students and the bartender. They were describing the surfing off of Melbourne to the bartender and he was giving them directions to a local surfing spot he thought they would appreciate. Of course, Jamil wondered if he was fucking with them too. He had no doubt that if he asked for a decent surfing spot, within five minutes of getting in the water he’d get eaten by a shark.

  Jamil grinned to himself, drinking slowly and biding his time. We will win, he thought to himself. For every ounce of hatred you have for us, we will burn a pound of flesh. Look down upon me. Call me whatever you want. But soon I will make you pay. Your children, your grandchildren; the day is coming. These were the thoughts that got Jamil through the Vegemite, through the glass of warm, watery Foster’s.

  He’d been in Australia for nearly a month now, searching for the the American, Andreas. He was prepared to stay as long as it took.

  He remembered Ahmed’s words as he left him at the motel entrance: “Don’t mention his name. Don’t ask questions. People already suspect you of being a terrorist. You’re a tourist. If you hear or see anything, Tweet immediately.”

  Jamil sat at his table and sipped his beer. Beneath his windbreaker, he felt the silencer on his HK USP .45 caliber handgun jabbing into his left side, beneath his armpit. Eventually, the students left the bar. The bartender wiped down the bar with a blue rag and walked in and out of the kitchen, whistling the entire time.

  Later, a pair of middle-aged men, both sunburned, came in and sat at the bar. They spoke with the bartender about the Great Barrier Reef. The bartender clearly liked the two tourists, who were drinking gin and tonics and laughing. Jamil ordered a second beer, still eavesdropping. These two were easier to listen in on; Cockney accents from working-class Britain.

  “So what do people do around here, besides work the tourists?”

  “There’s a bunch of stations inland,” said the bartender. “Mainly cattle. Just wait around. The hands get awfully thirsty around dinnertime. They’ll try and push you right offa those stools too.”

  “I heard a story about a rancher saving a little girl’s life,” said one of the tourists. “They were talking about it at the hotel.”

  “Happened at Chasvur, twenty minutes north of town,” said the bartender. “One of the ranchers climbed a sheer rock face in the pitch-black.”

  Jamil heard the words and felt a chill run up his spine. He stepped to the bar.

  “Pardon me,” Jamil said to the bartender, interrupting his next story. “Did you just say that a man climbed a cliff in the dark to save a girl?”

  “A two-hundred-foot-tall cliff. But that wasn’t the half of it. He did it during a driving rainstorm. Climbed straight up Percy’s Ledge. Bare-handed. An American, I heard. Tough son of a bitch.”

  Jamil stared for an extra moment at the bartender. He was about to ask, Who was it? The words were on the tip of his tongue. But then, he realized, he didn’t need to ask.

  21

  CHURCH ROAD

  NEW DELHI, INDIA

  More than five hundred miles south of the Kashmir war front, the air in downtown New Delhi sweltered. The sun beat down relentlessly on the city, on the crowds of people walking, lining the streets, sitting in cafés. Near the Kendriya Bus Terminal, a ruckus ensued along Church Road as the bright red and blue lights appeared in the distance followed soon thereafter by the high-pitched tone of the sirens.

  At the lead, several police officers on motorcycles cleared the boulevard of people, forcing them off to the sides of the road. Soon, the motorcade came barreling down the road, cruising at more than sixty miles per hour, the sirens piercing the air.

  The motorcycles were followed by vans that contained sophisticated equipment that enabled secure communication between the inhabitants of the vehicles in the motorcade and other parties, such as the Indian Ministry of Defense. Following the vans, four black Range Rovers, lift gates opened, gunmen strapped to the backs, their automatic weapons out, cocked to fire. After the Range Rovers, long, dark limousines were interspersed with more large SUVs.

  Inside the seventh vehicle, a long, black, heavily fortified Mercedes-Benz limousine, President Rajiv Ghandra sat in the backseat.

  Ghandra, at fifty-four years old, looked younger than his age. He had brown eyes that were framed by a chiseled face and a sharp nose. Ghandra’s longish black hair was parted neatly in the middle. He wore a dark gray suit, a stylish blue button-down shirt, and a blue and red tie. The one unusual aspect to his demeanor, a thin scar above his right eye, only added to the allure that made Ghandra so popular, especially with women.

  A former IAF pilot, Ghandra had been elected to Parliament at the age of thirty-one. Now, in his second term as president, he looked as calm and serene as he did the first day of his presidency, completely unflappable, supremely confident, totally laid-back. He stared out the darkened, bulletproof glass of the limousine. His elbow was propped on the armrest, his hand formed into a fist that his jaw now rested on as he studied the crowds.

  “Rajiv,” said the man next to him, “you should read this before you go on television.”

  The man speaking was Indra Singh, India’s minister of defense. A short, dark-skinned, bald, stout man with an unruly mustache across his pudgy face, Singh had served in the IAF with Ghandra. The two men were also best friends. Singh was the only member of Ghandra’s cabinet allowed to call Ghandra by his first name.

  “Did you hear me?” Singh repeated. “The casualty count approaches twenty thousand. They’ll ask you about that. You don’t want to look unprepared.”

  Ghandra glanced at his friend, who sat poring over the papers in front of him.

  “Thank you,” said President Ghandra. “Do you think I’m a fucking idiot? The last thing I will talk about is body count.”

  “Why? Are you crazy? This will be watched by the entire country. The death count is mounting, and all at the hands of El-Khayab. Our countrymen need to become angry. We need their support.”

  “They’re already angry. Look at them. Be careful how much you stoke the fire because if it gets too hot it will burn the house down.”

  “Telling the people that casualties are mounting will rally them, Rajiv.”

  “The casualty count is at a pace that scares even me. If this war is ever going to end, there will need to be some sort of diplomatic settlement. If we get the Indian people too upset, that will be a practical impossibility.”

  “Your mind is obviously made up,” said Singh.

  “I need you to fight the war in Kashmir.” Ghandra patted his friend on the knee. “I don’t need your advice on communicating with the people of India. Had I relied on your political advice, I wouldn’t have been elected dogcatcher of Chennai.”

  “What do you really think of my advice, Mr. President?” Singh laughed. He folded his papers and looked out the window. The crowds were packed tight as they came closer to
the capitol building. “Still, I’m worried by what you say. We’ve acquired more than ten thousand square miles of Baltistan in less than three days. Are you suggesting we go back to the Line of Control?”

  “We’re in the process of possibly losing Kargil and the Mushkoh Valley,” snapped Ghandra. “Have you forgotten that? Pakistan now has as much leverage as we do. Maybe more.”

  “We’re not going to lose Kargil,” barked Singh defensively, reaching up and loosening his tie. He was sweating and he wiped his brow with his sleeve. “Northern Command has it under control, or will soon.”

  “At what cost?” asked Ghandra. “Our boys are dying by the hundreds every hour.”

  “Would you negotiate back to the Line of Control?” asked Singh. “What if you knew we were going to retake Kargil, which we will, I assure you. Would you give up what we’ve taken in Baltistan?”

  “To get Kargil back, yes,” said Ghandra. “We’ve taken Skardu and its mountains and yak herders, all the while ceding much more important territory. If we don’t watch out, El-Khayab is going to march right into Srinagar and then where are we? This thing has to cool down at some point.”

  “Your words concern me, Mr. President.”

  “Why?” asked Ghandra, a tinge of anger in his voice. “Do you think I don’t have resolve? Of course I do. Who authorized the movement toward Skardu? I’m just realistic. Did you read the remarks by the president of France? He’s right. At some point, self-defense becomes suicide. Kashmir is beautiful but the only thing we’ve acquired is a few million tons of copper, some cornfields, and yak milk. Do we really need all of this? The Line of Control has served as an effective buffer.”

  “So tell the prime minister to call the insane one and negotiate a settlement,” said Singh. “I don’t completely agree with you, but I support you. If that is to be our destiny, then let’s save some lives.”

  A loud ringing noise reverberated in the back of the limousine. On the right door, the phone came to life, flashing red. A second later, Singh’s cell phone chimed loudly.