Baaz

by Anuja Chauhan

  ‘Okay,’ he replies in the same steady voice. ‘If you don’t want me to, I won’t.’

  She shakes him hard.

  ‘You report back to duty and go up in the air and kill as many Pakistanis as you can! You hear me?’

  Mrs Pomfret makes troubled tut-tutting sounds at this bloodthirsty speech and tries to hug the girl, but Juhi shakes her off and moves away, wrapping her arms around her body, shaking with fury.

  ‘Just get them, Baaz.’ Her voice is shrill. ‘Promise me!’

  As the older women watch, distressed, Ishaan nods at Juhi, his young face growing resolute, his grey eyes hardening.

  ‘Mujhe Jezu, kaale sangta yeh chedu?’ Mrs Carvalho looks suddenly haggard behind her jauntily applied make-up. ‘Is this some melodrama going on over here? You’re both talking like foo—’

  ‘I promise.’ For once Ishaan Faujdaar forgets his impeccable officer-and-a-gentleman manners and rudely cuts off a senior officer’s wife mid-speech. Then he places a hand over Juhi’s trembling one and adds, his voice unusually grim, ‘I’ll get them, Juhi. I really will.’

  • • •

  Squadron Leader Bilawal Hussain’s father, a retired lieutenant colonel from the British Indian Army, often told his son that there are only two types of officers in any army: Come-ons and Go-ons. Come-ons are the officers who stride ahead of their troop towards the enemy lines, every now and then turning around to exhort their men to ‘come on, come on!’ while Go-ons are like the officers who lag behind their men, prodding them forward from the rear, urging them to ‘go on, go on’.

  Bilawal has been raised by the old soldier to be a Come-on, and that is why he now finds himself, yet again, in a situation where he has to persuade a bunch of doubting, pessimistic people to follow his lead.

  He is a tall, dark and brown-bearded man, an ace pilot who cut his eye-teeth during the 1965 war against India. He is a proud recipient of the Sitara-e-Jurat, Pakistan’s third-highest gallantry award. He has no religious beliefs as such, believing more in basic human goodness than in anything he’s ever read in the Quran. He is twenty-eight years old, a fan of West Indian all-rounder Gary Sobers and famed Indian tragedy queen Meena Kumari. He is also the second-in-command of the Sabrejet Squadron at Tezgaon and a very frustrated man.

  ‘Sir, our runway is beyond repair, to be sure, but the good news is that our jets are unharmed. We have here seven Sabres, fully fuelled and equipped, with skilled pilots on standby, itching to fly them up and strike a blow for Pak sarzameen! All I ask for is a chance to use them.’

  His boss looks at him irritably. He has no great affection for Bilawal. It’s a pain in the arse having a junior officer who has won so many medals for valour.

  ‘Bilawal, don’t rabbit on like a goddamn Byronic hero,’ his boss snaps. ‘Those Sabres are grounded. They might as well not exist.’

  Bilawal sticks out his jaw mutinously.

  ‘We could get them airborne.’

  ‘How?’ demands his commanding officer. ‘The runway’s as pitted as a golf ball with smallpox.’

  Bilawal Hussain hesitates, his lean cheeks flushing. ‘Sir … with your permission, I have a little idea.’

  The CO throws up his hands. ‘We’ve already tried your little idea! We carted the wretched Sabres to this dump just like you wanted us to! But the Muktis figured out our location and gave it away to the Indians, and they bombed our ass off yesterday! We’re running low on AA ammo! I don’t think anybody will point fingers at us if we throw in the towel now.’

  But to Bilawal, this is unthinkable. He has lost two of his closest friends in dogfights with the Gnats. Several of his course mates have been injured. He has to get back into the sky and even the score.

  ‘We got them good day-before-yesterday,’ he says doggedly. ‘Three kills in all. Two Hunters, and I’m pretty sure that MiG didn’t make it back in one piece! It put the josh back into our lads.’ He leans in, his gaze intense. ‘We can still destroy them, sir!’ Then he hesitates – the time has come to mention a particularly wild scheme that has been cooking in his head for a while now. ‘Sir, there’s a pretty good four-lane road right behind the airfield, the one that links us to the national highway. We could take off on that…’

  ‘The highway!’ The CO looks appalled. ‘Some rubbish East Pakistani highway? That is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard! That road wasn’t built to withstand so much pressure. It’ll crack on the first take-off!’

  Bilawal’s long dark face grows even darker.

  ‘But sir, I’ve already stationed three Sabres there—’

  ‘Enough!’ roars the CO. ‘I’ve had enough of this stupid, glory-hunting crap! We’re closing this place down! Are you my 2-I-C or am I your 2-I-C?’ He glares at his second-in-command, veins bulging terribly inside his temples.

  Bilawal doesn’t reply, choosing to avert his gaze and glare furiously at a spot above his CO’s head.

  They stand there, clearly at an impasse.

  And then, through the carbon-papered window, drifts in the distinct sound of a Bristol Orpheus engine…

  • • •

  It doesn’t take Ishaan long to locate Kurmitola. The sun is out, visibility is good and the water tanki shows up cleanly as he makes a low pass in his Gnat over the coordinates given at briefing.

  The airstrip, painted a dull camouflage green, is easily identifiable from the air. It is thoroughly cratered, a sight so sweet that Ishaan’s heart tightens exultantly in his chest.

  ‘Oh well done, Raka, mere tiger,’ he mutters. ‘Good for you.’

  A repair crew is hard at work over the tarmac, jointing slabs and pouring cement, but even from here, Ishaan can tell that the airstrip will not be repaired before the Indian Army appears on the scene. Further, the AA guns are silent, one more thing for Ishaan to be happy about.

  The mission he’s been given this morning is to assess the damage done by Raka and Chatty yesterday, and this has already been accomplished. Kurmitola is clearly ruined. Ishaan can go back home and make his report. But he is loathe to leave the site of what could be Raka’s last fight so soon.

  ‘Yoo-hoo!’ he crows as he pulls up from his pass over the silent, defeated airfield. ‘Sucks to you, bastards! Take that, Pakis!’

  Somehow, this doesn’t feel as good as it should. There is a savage satisfaction tightening his chest, to be sure, but also a distinctly sour, hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  Determined to make the moment count, Ishaan turns to do a second pass and executes a series of victory rolls directly over the ruined runway. Light and nippy, the Gnat can famously roll faster than any other comparable aircraft, and Ishaan’s manoeuvre is an unmistakable gauntlet thrown down at any other pilot watching.

  ‘Fuck you,’ he yells inside the dizzyingly rolling aircraft. ‘Fuck you, and you, and you!’

  • • •

  Bilawal Hussain rushes to the window and eyes the gleeful Gnat with a mixture of anger and disbelief.

  The cheek of the Indian bastard! Performing victory rolls over our ruined airfield!

  As he watches, AA fire kicks in from down below, but the Gnat seems to be impervious to it. It comes back for a third pass, audaciously, and fires a short burst at the AA gunners.

  Bilawal wheels around and snaps to attention. ‘Permission to take down that johnny, sir!’

  The CO sighs and waves a hand in dismissal. ‘Permission granted.’

  • • •

  The Sabres come out of nowhere. Three of them, gleaming like airborne sharks, sunshine bouncing off their gun-metal grey flanks. A weird adrenalin-fuelled gladness surges through Ishaan at the sight of them.

  ‘Perfect,’ he whispers to himself, stepping on his rudder pedals and starting to weave this way and that. ‘Here we go.’

  The Sabres are still a mile or so away, within missile range but all in his front hemisphere, so not in position to lock missiles on him yet. He heads challengingly towards the lead Sabre, the one in the middle of the formation,
weaving just enough to keep the angles between them changing, frustrating any chance of missile lock.

  But the Sabre refuses to peel away, as it would if it were trying to find a safe position from which to launch missiles. Instead, it bores equally determinedly in towards Shaanu, making him blink and purse his lips in reluctant admiration.

  ‘Ready for a knife-fight, eh?’ he mutters. ‘But I’m here to kill, not get killed, you bastard.’

  He will have to play it smart. He is low on juice already, having done all those passes over the airfield, while these blokes are fully fuelled and daisy fresh.

  As the four fast-moving Fighters flash together into a head-on merge, all four break. Ishaan and Bilawal pull into tight, twisting turns, each trying to get behind the other. The other two Sabres go wider – an obviously calculated tactical move.

  Ishaan is pulling hard, five Gs … now six Gs, perilously close to the Gnat’s rated maximum; and as his vision blurs, he indistinctly registers a smoke trail as a Sidewinder shoots out at him. The missile doesn’t track; he is probably too close, and the angles are changing too fast as he pulls Gs. But it feels good. Since Tinka left, since Maddy vanished, since Chimman revealed himself to be a total asshole, since Raka got injured, this is the best Ishaan has ever felt.

  Inside the lead Sabre, Squadron Leader Bilawal Hussain is pulling equally hard, intent on getting behind the upstart Gnat. He recognizes the pilot’s aggressive style, and is as sure as can be that it is the same cheeky upstart who distracted the AA gunners on the day Tezgaon was cratered. The Indians got lucky that day, but Bilawal is determined to squash this bastard today. The stretch of highway he and the other two Sabres lifted off from has shattered from the impact of their take-off. Bilawal is not even sure he’ll be able to land back on it safely. He pops his manoeuvring slats open, sets his sights on the diminutive Gnat and grimly waits for his gunsight predictor to light up.

  Bilawal’s wingmen have pulled wider, not attempting to close to guns range, their missile seeker heads still looking for the heat sources that are enemy exhausts. ‘I have tone,’ Bilawal’s wingman calls shortly over the R/T, using the American codes the Pakistan Air Force has adopted. ‘Fox Two!’

  Sidewinders hurtle at Ishaan from two different directions. Reflexes on hyper-alert, he breaks to the east, straight at the morning sun.

  ‘Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!’ he chortles as he hurls his aircraft literally straight at the sun. This is a much-discussed Indian tactic, which sometimes works to confuse the heat-seeking sensors of early-model Sidewinders. The missiles lock mindlessly onto the intense hotspot of the sun, in preference to the tiny exhaust of the little Gnat, and go ballistic, speeding past Ishaan’s Gnat, hissing angrily like the snakes for which they are named.

  Bilawal’s Sabre, powerful as it is, cannot quite match the Gnat’s whiplash break, and he has to watch the Gnat dwindle and vanish into the dazzling brightness of the sun. He closes his manoeuvring slats, to maintain speed. Has the Indian gone home?

  For a few moments, all is quiet above Kurmitola. The Sabres circle, scanning the skies like gliding eagles. Bilawal’s Number 2 and 3 formate back on him. Time seems to stand still. The sky glimmers golden, shot through with streaks of pigeon-blood red.

  And then Ishaan Faujdaar comes screaming out of the sun, releasing one short 30mm cannon burst and then another into Sabres 2 and 3. Both are mortal hits, sending them spinning and plummeting out of the sky.

  Bilawal is dumbfounded. Blinking rapidly, loathe to believe what he is seeing, he struggles to get behind this devilishly accurate Indian. The good part, he tells himself, is that the bugger’s almost certainly run out of ammo – the Gnats carry only about three seconds’ worth of shells. This is the perfect time to get him.

  Ishaan’s slashing attack has carried him well below Bilawal’s Sabre. Bilawal plunges after him, satisfyingly on the Gnat’s tail for the first time in this combat. He frames the Gnat in his sights, hears the missile tone change and then lets the Sidewinder go.

  It shoots out in a blaze of heat and slams, sweet and straight, into the tail of Ishaan’s Gnat.

  ‘Gotcha!’ Bilawal’s voice is hoarse with triumph. ‘Take that, you bastard!’

  The Gnat starts to plummet, looping crazily as it tries to recover. Inside the bucking plane, Ishaan curses, wrestling with the controls, hanging practically upside down as he tries to turn his nose back onto the Sabre.

  But it’s no use. He’s all out of ammo now, dangerously low on fuel – his Bingo lights have been on for several moments – and the aircraft is only just responding to the controls. The Plexiglas of his cockpit is starred and cracked in a dozen places, and he can barely see out of it. The Gnat is lurching in a sick, random, non-rhythmic fashion, and he will probably lose control completely before long.

  The Doors start to play inside Ishaan’s head.

  ‘Unborn living, living dead,

  Bullet strikes the helmet’s head.

  And it’s all over for the unknown soldier.

  Aanhaaa!’

  ‘Chutiya bloody song,’ he mutters, shaking his head like a puppy that’s got water into its ears.

  There is only one last thing he can do.

  For Maddy. For Raka. For Juhi.

  He pulls back on the stick, the gain in G almost making him black out. The lead Sabre is behind him, pulling up to follow, but cannot match the Gnat’s pull-up.

  With a blood-curdling yell that would’ve frozen Bilawal’s blood solid if he could’ve heard it, Ishaan drags one last wing-over out of his doomed Gnat.

  Bilawal feels the heat before he sees it. Imperfectly controlled but still lethally, the belly of the Gnat crashes against the canopy of his Sabre, shattering it into a hailstorm of fragments and leaving him exposed to the blast of the bitterly cold air.

  ‘Taraan!’ gasps Bilawal. He has heard of aerial ramming, a technique employed by Soviet pilots during the Second World War, but he’s always thought of it as a demented, vodka-fuelled fantasy. It is a last-ditch manoeuvre, frankly suicidal, using your whole plane as a weapon against another in the sky. He has never seen anybody do it before, and here is this cocky Indian, half his size, taraaning the shit out of him!

  Bilawal cannot breathe, the blast of air at hundreds of knots pinning him back in his seat, but in the few seconds of consciousness left to him is ready to return the compliment. Two can play at this game. If the Indian wants to end it like a pair of drunk drivers banging their trucks together on the Lahore–Rawalpindi highway, Bilawal is more than willing to give him a run for his money. He’s done for anyway, at least he’ll take the bastard down with him.

  An image of his two beautiful young daughters, dressed as Little Bo Peep and Little Miss Muffet for a fancy dress competition, rises before his eyes. He closes his eyes – he can barely keep them open against the roaring slipstream, but he savours the memory for a moment – and when he opens them again, just a crack, they are pitiless. With hands and arms already stiff from the icy air blasting through his broken cockpit, he points the Sabre higher. Then he slams his throttle forward and smashes his nose straight into the belly of that goddamned bhinbhinaoing Gnat.

  TWELVE

  The hospital ward is quiet, the only audible sound in the still of the night the chirruping of crickets outside and the beeping of monitors within. It is a cold, sterile, tubelight-lit space, the faces of the occupants seeming to reflect the green of the curtains and linen.

  Here, on bed number four, flanked by a JCO with a badly shattered femur and a young major half eaten away by frostbite, lies Flying Officer Rakesh Aggarwal, stretched out almost at attention, dressed in the Military Hospital’s regulation-issue striped pyjamas, his brave moustache meticulously trimmed and curled, his chubby, cheerful face curiously still and defenceless.

  Slumped on a metal armchair beside him is Juhi, pale and exhausted, too emotionally wrung out to do more than hold her husband’s hand and listen without really listening to the conversation in the co
rridor outside, where the relatives of various patients are huddled together on a row of wooden benches.

  ‘Bauji, the leg will have to be cut off for sure.’ The voice belongs to the JCO’s elder brother. ‘Bata rahe hain ki the whole femur is khokla, khattam, finished! I’ve seen the X-ray, some pieces of the bone are so small you could use them as toothpicks.’

  ‘But Munna won’t let them cut it off,’ replies a thin, anguished voice. It is the JCO’s father. ‘Keeps asking for his gun and saying ki if those AMC butchers come near him, he’ll blow their heads off.’

  ‘They’ll sniff him some chloroform and pass him out,’ says the first voice calmingly. ‘Otherwise the poison will spread, you understand. The wound’s got infected – if they don’t cut it off, he’ll die.’

  ‘He’s dead already!’ the father cries out with violent grief. ‘Such a fit, handsome lad, newly married, so good at volleyball. His mother shouldn’t have let him play langdi taang – it was a bad bad omen!’

  ‘At least he’s already married,’ his elder son points out practically. ‘You have a tidy dowry all safe and invested, and a good daughter-in-law. And now he will get a gas agency also – the gourmint will give. He won’t have to work again his whole life.’

  ‘Finished,’ says the father bitterly. ‘It’s all finished! Mera Munna, my boy, my pride and joy, can a bunch of gas cylinders compensate for several strong grandsons? Who will take forward the family’s name now?’

  The brisk, rallying voice of the matron-on-duty floats into the ward.

  ‘Arrey, he’s only lost one leg. Middle wicket intact hai uska! Don’t lose hope! Take him home, his wife will manage it all very nicely, I promise you.’

  ‘I’m your son too, you know,’ the elder son says quietly.

  ‘Chup kar!’ replies his father aggrievedly. ‘Pretending to be so sad, but inside your heart, big big laddoos of joy are bursting! You were always jealous of Munna – brave, intelligent, handso—’

  ‘Is this any way to talk?’ the matron interrupts in disgust. ‘Shame on you, uncle! This fellow is your son too, and your other son’s elder brother!’