by Deva, Mukul
Back in the Force 22 ops room, all three officers were staring at the radio set, waiting for Iqbal to respond. As the silence grew longer, their unease deepened.
‘Maybe he got interrupted and had to go silent,’ Ankita murmured hopefully.
‘Let us hope that is what happened,’ Sami muttered.
‘Guys, this isn’t the time for mind games,’ Anbu said, taking charge. ‘Show me the location.’ He watched as Sami highlighted the area on the map on the huge LCD screen at the far end of the room.
Anbu gave it a moment’s thought. ‘That is way out of the range of any assets we have in the area, or can hope to get there in the time available.’
‘It is way out, sir,’ Sami conceded.
‘I need to take this up the ladder, MS.’ He turned to Ankita. ‘While I do that, show me what’s happening there.’
Striding across to the secure phone on the table, Anbu called G.K. Rao and quickly apprised him of the situation.
‘Are you sure of the intel?’
‘Positive. I have a man on the ground watching them right now.’
‘Who?’
‘That is not important at the moment. What’s important is that he is a solid asset and I trust him. You can meet him when he gets back. Right now, let’s worry about what we have to do. We have very little time to take action; just a couple of hours, as a matter of fact.’
‘Okay, I understand. We may not be able to do much from here, but the Americans can. They have all the firepower they need in Afghanistan.’
‘I know, that’s why I called you,’ Anbu replied. ‘I need you to get the big man’s approval. Tell him to request the Americans to cooperate. After all, they have as much to lose as we do.’
‘I agree,’ said Rao. ‘This is our chance to take out the entire leadership team. We can’t blow it. Okay, hold on while I get the prime minister on a concall.’
There was a burst of music as Rao put Anbu on hold. After several minutes, his voice came back on.
‘Colonel, I have briefed the PM. He agrees.’
‘I must say you are right on top of things once again, Anbu,’ the PM cut in, sounding pleased. ‘Excellent work!’
‘Thank you, sir, but it is far from over. We need to act fast.’
‘Rest assured we will,’ the PM said firmly. ‘I want you to stay by your phone. You will be contacted very soon.’
The prime minister put down the phone and activated the hotline.
Far away in Washington, a phone in the basement of the White House began to ring. It was one among several phones that lay in neat rows along one side of the room. The computer screen in front of the duty operator told him the name of the country that had activated the hotline. Startled, he leapt up and took the call. Within minutes, there were phones ringing all over the place.
The phone lines were also starting to burn in the Pakistani Corps HQ in Peshawar. The corps duty officer who took the first call was shocked when he heard what the SIGINT man at the other end reported.
‘What are you saying?’ he asked several times. ‘Are you sure it’s coming from that area?’
‘Of course we are, sir.’
‘You triangulated the location?’
‘I am sorry, sir. It was not on air long enough for us to triangulate the precise location, but the set seems to be somewhere in the compound.’
‘Tell me more.’ The duty officer turned to the battle board, trying to focus on the map and gather the data he knew the corps commander would ask for.
‘It is definitely one of ours.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘We have a positive ID.’
‘Right!’ the duty officer said, quite confused by now. ‘Shoot me the transcript.’
‘We don’t have one, sir,’ the SIGINT officer said in an apologetic voice.
‘What do you mean? If it was one of ours, how could you not get a recording?’
‘Whoever was transmitting switched frequencies manually at every transmission. So we just managed to get a couple of garbled words.’
‘Give me what you have, you idiot!’ the duty officer snapped.
‘Well, the word Majnu was mentioned a couple of times, and then there was something about a Laila.’
‘Laila? Majnu? Are you trying to make a fool of me?’
‘No, sir, I can assure you that is what we caught.’
‘What are you saying? What on earth could it mean?’
‘I think, sir…’
‘Don’t think, you fucking idiot! You can’t record a transmission from our own radio sets and you want to start thinking. Bloody fool!’ He slammed down the phone, wondering what he would tell the corps commander. Normally, a dozen senior staff officers would have insulated him, as he was just the corps HQ duty officer. But this morning he had been ordered to pass on all inputs related to the meeting directly to the GOC.
He knew the general was going to blow a gasket. As it was, he had been behaving strangely the last few weeks, prying into all kinds of details he usually never concerned himself with.
Dreading the call but realizing the urgency, he reached for the phone and dialled the corps commander’s office.
The duty officer’s dread was not unfounded. General Tariq Khan, the GOC 11 Corps, blew several gaskets. Even under normal circumstances, the general was known to have a temper that ran on a very short leash. By the time he finished shouting, the duty officer was starting to rue the day he had been posted to the Corps HQ, a prized, relaxed posting under normal circumstances.
‘Tell those idiots to keep their ears peeled. Monitor all likely frequencies and keep me posted.’
‘Should I tell them to activate the jammer, sir? That way we can make sure whoever is using the radio will not be able to get anything else out.’
‘No, you frigging idiot!’ Tariq Khan grated. ‘That will knock all our troops out of communication. Just put the SIGINT morons on listening watch and tell the battalion commander to send out patrols. I want every inch of the area swept clean. Got that?’
‘Yes, sir,’ the duty officer replied in a suitably chastened tone.
‘And tell the CO I want each and every radio set of ours accounted for. I want that fucker caught and brought here – alive – whoever he is.’
‘I will get on to it right away, sir.’
General Tariq Khan paced the room as he pondered the situation.
He wondered if he should alert the muj, or if he should tell the Ameer to abort the meet. But the general knew the Ameer would be as pissed as hell, as would the chief. The whole thing had taken months of coordination and planning. If they aborted now, they would not be able to organize this meeting again soon. A third alternative suddenly occurred to him. Who would find out? Greed and fear skirmished in his head. Fear won, at least for the moment. He knew that no matter what he did, he needed to cover his ass.
He walked to the end of the room, turned and began to make his way back to the other end.
He ran through the likely threats and the precautions they had taken. Even if the Yanks came to know, would they dare to strike when there was a battalion of Pakistani troops around the compound? Not likely. They would not be sure if the Pakistanis were conducting an operation themselves, and surely they wouldn’t attack without a warning. After all, they were allies. And even if they did attack, they had enough men to beat off anything the Americans could put together in the little time available. Khan knew the battalion could handle anything short of a full-fledged, brigade-size offensive, and that was not likely to happen in the short time available. What else? Air strike? Drones? Khan decided to get another flight of fighters up as an additional precaution.
He reached for the phone. Miles away, another flight of F-16 fighters hit afterburners and screamed up in the air, heading for the compound they had to protect. Khan, meanwhile, continued to patrol his office.
The man who had delivered this unexpected headache to the Pakistani corps commander was still crouching in the darkest c
orner of the narrow ledge. The rapidly approaching darkness seemed to have unleashed a desire in a number of people to shoot off their load before night fell. Iqbal sighed wearily as he settled down to sit out another shitter. He dared not transmit again, not until he was alone.
From where he was sitting, Iqbal couldn’t see the Pakistani patrols that were combing the outer perimeter. The hunt for the elusive man transmitting from the area had begun. Luckily, they had started the sweep from the western side. It would still take them some time to reach the northern centre, which was roughly where Iqbal lay.
From his vantage point, Iqbal could see the road leading up to the compound. As he looked up he saw the third convoy thundering down the road.
Like General Tariq Khan, the normally placid Anbu was also pacing the Force 22 ops room. When the secure phone rang again, he ran across the room and caught it on the first ring.
‘Colonel Anbu?’ For a split second the American accent caught Anbu by surprise.
‘Yes!’ he replied, recovering quickly.
‘Hi! I’m Colonel Powell,’ the man at the other end continued. ‘I’m with Force HQ Afghanistan. We just got orders to coordinate a mission with you. The orders came from the high end of the foodchain. They told us this had to be done day before yesterday. Do you wanna put us to speed on it?’
‘That’s right, colonel. This is what is going on…’ Anbu spelt out what needed to be done.
‘Hang on a sec, let’s take a closer look at the target area.’ There was a pause. Anbu could hear muted commands being given in the background. ‘I have the satellite feed of the area coming in now, colonel. There certainly is a lot of activity taking place there. In fact, right now I can see a couple of suburban-type vehicles heading towards the compound. You want to tell me who these dudes are?’
Anbu told him about the Ameer-ul-Momineem and the tanzeem.
There was a much longer silence at the other end, as though the man was deliberating how much he should share of what he knew.
‘Right! We have also been getting intel on this guy but haven’t been able to pin him down yet, though we almost got him once…’ Powell paused. ‘So we can’t let these dumbasses walk out of this place. Right?’
So much for intel sharing, Anbu thought with a wry smile. ‘That’s right, colonel. If we allow them to get away this time, it will set all counter-terrorism efforts back by decades. If these leaders take charge of the jihad you can bet the world will see many more deadly attacks. We need to get a strike in there and we need to do it really fast.’
‘I get your point, Colonel Anbu, but I dunno if you can see the stuff they have down there… it’s a bugger’s muddle. There’s even a heavy-duty CAP, and I can see more F-16s coming in to join them. Say, do you have eyes on the target?’
There was a slight pause as Anbu considered the question. He did. In fact the real-time video feed from the Indian Cartosat 2 series satellite overhead was beaming in loud and clear on the screen in front of Anbu. That was what Ankita had been doing while he had been on the phone with Rao and the PM.
But he saw no point in telling Powell this.
Powell took Anbu’s silence to mean no. ‘Right!’ he answered his own question. ‘Tell you what, colonel, just gimme the parameters and let me hook you to our feed.’
That ate up a few more valuable minutes as Powell used the parameters provided by Ankita to hook Anbu to the satellite feed from the American spy satellite.
In the Force 22 ops room, Anbu watched the gigantic screen in front of him split into two. Soon the American satellite feed filled up one half of the screen and the Cartosat feed occupied the remainder. Barring some difference in aspect and angle, there was not much to choose from between the two in terms of resolution or quality.
‘Right, colonel,’ Powell resumed, ‘if you look closely you will see that we need a full-scale brigade offensive to break through the defensive perimeters, and that’s no use. It will take too long to put together that kind of force level. And even if we are able to get it there, by the time we break through the outer cordons the tanzeem will be long gone.’
‘I agree, Colonel Powell. I was thinking in terms of a precision air strike. We have no assets in that area and little chance of reaching in time.’
‘We have the assets, colonel, but the boss says it’s too risky,’ Powell explained. ‘The compound is in a really lousy location for an airstrike. To complicate matters, the Pakis are running a heavy duty CAP over that area… F-16s… Any air strike that goes in will definitely take heavy losses, so my boss has ruled that we execute a standoff strike. That way we put no men or machines at risk.’
‘What do you guys have in mind?’
‘The locals have two SMERCH regiments not too far away from the target. In fact, even as we speak, both units are on the move and should be within striking range very soon. Are you familiar with the SMERCH, colonel?’
‘Yes, I am!’ Anbu ran through the tech specs of the weapon system in his mind as he replied.
Designated BM-30 or 9K58, the SMERCH (Tornado) 300 mm Soviet multiple rocket launcher comprises a battery of twelve rocket launcher tubes mounted on an 8×8 MAZ-543M chassis. All twelve barrels can be fired singly or simultaneously in as little as 38 seconds and are capable of hitting a target 20 to 70 kilometres away. Designed to defeat manpower, armour, artillery, missile systems and soft-skinned vehicles in a concentration area, a SMERCH regiment comprises twelve launchers which, when fired simultaneously, saturate an area of over 1 square kilometre with a veritable blanket of death. Depending on the target being engaged, the SMERCH can fire High Explosive Fragmentation, Cluster or Anti-Armour sub-munitions.
‘Then you will understand what I am talking about, Colonel Anbu. We will unleash both regiments at one go.’
‘That is all very well, Colonel Powell, but there are three problems with this plan.’
‘Shoot!’
‘The first is that it is possible to live out a SMERCH attack if one is in a well-fortified bunker. We really have no clue about the strength of the building those guys are in. They may have fortified it. So we will not know if all of them have been neutralized.’
‘You’re bang on, colonel. That is why – oh, didn’t I mention – we will give them a couple more salvos of SMERCH as soon as they reload, and send in a few cruise missiles. The missiles will be launched by B-52H bombers operating Beyond Visual Range and targeted precisely on the house, so pretty much everything in and around it is going to be toast. Thereafter, just to be on the safer side, we will have our gunners deliver a series of well-timed Fuel Air Explosive strikes a bit later, just when the survivors down there, if any, are starting to feel a little secure. We have a HIMARS battalion already moving to get within striking range. I am sure you will agree that is going to be more than enough.’
‘Damn right it is,’ Anbu muttered. The HIMARS is a highly mobile artillery rocket system that offers MLRS firepower on a 6×6 all-wheel drive, 5-ton wheeled medium tactical vehicle. HIMARS has the capability to fire any rocket or missile in the MLRS family of munitions; but because it has only one pod per vehicle, it has a much faster deployment time and can deliver either six MLRS rockets or one ATM to a target 35 kilometres away. It can also deliver the longer range ATACMS guided missile, which comprises 950 anti-personnel, anti-material baseball-size M74 sub-munitions to ranges exceeding 165 kilometres. Anbu guessed that in the given scenario they would be using the latter option with FAE sub-munitions.
Anbu shuddered as he tried to visualize the devastation this kind of firepower would wreak on the target. Hardened though he was by years of combat, the mere thought of the diabolical FAE bombs made him cringe.
The FAE bomb is designed to disperse an aerosol cloud filled with fuel over the target area. This aerosol is ignited with an embedded detonator, causing a massive widespread explosion, which in turn causes a rapidly expanding wave front. Due to the massive overpressure, the explosive shockwave flattens everything in proximity of the epicentre an
d causes extensive damage even over the surrounding areas.
‘The FAE will ensure nothing remains alive in that area,’ said Powell, reading Anbu’s thoughts. ‘Neither man nor beast, not even an insect; anything that breathes will die. And just to make doubly sure, we are going to have some Reaper drones standing by to hunt down any survivors.’
‘Sounds good to me.’ Anbu was impressed. The American had thought it through in detail. It was an excellent plan, especially considering the minimal reaction time that had been available to him.
‘It’s as good as it can get in the time and with the resources available in that area, colonel.’ Powell sounded pleased with himself. ‘In any case, when we have got the chance, why settle only for the leaders? Let’s get a bunch of the other shitheads too.’ Anbu could not fault the logic. ‘Now, what did you say the other two problems are?’
‘How do you plan to get all that artillery within range of the target without the Pakis coming to know?’ Anbu paused momentarily, reluctant to offend, but then decided this was no time to be coy. ‘I know they are your allies, but you can see for yourself that they are playing both sides of the fence.’
‘Yeah, I see that and I have been thinking about this issue,’ Powell replied earnestly. The picture on the screen in front of both of them showed how deep the complicity lay. ‘The aircraft, Cruise missiles and HIMARS are cool since they are all going to be beyond detection range throughout the op. But for the SMERCH there is no obvious solution. The Pakis will pick them up sooner or later. We can only hope they waste some time checking with us about the movement and that their chain of command does not permit them to engage targets across the border without clearance from Islamabad.’
‘You are willing to chance that, colonel? Those launchers will be sitting ducks for the F-16s they have up there.’
‘Yeah, right!’ Powell sniggered. ‘If they decide to fuck with us across the border, we will blow their asses away. Have no doubt about that. I’m gonna have some of our own fighters standing by.’
