by Jeff Edwards
The young captain was breathing heavily, as though he had been running. He brought his palms together below his chin, and bowed his head quickly. “Namaste, Sri Minister. I apologize for the interruption, but General Singh requests your presence in the Operations Room as soon as possible, and we couldn’t reach you by telephone.”
Nehru had ignored the plaintive bleating of the phone’s call-waiting signal. It was well outside of working hours on Saturday evening, and after half a day of slogging through mind-numbing paperwork, he was trying to enjoy ten minutes of conversation with his favorite nephew.
He covered the mouthpiece of the receiver with one hand. “Well don’t just stand there,” he snapped. “What is so bloody urgent?”
The young officer had to pause for a half second to catch his breath. “Reports are just coming in,” he said. “Missile strikes…”
Nehru hung up the phone, all thoughts of his nephew gone from his mind. “Missile strikes? Where? Are you trying to tell me that we’re under attack?”
The captain nodded. “Yes, Sri Minister. So far, the only known target is Geku, a small village in the Himalayas. Based on first-look analysis, approximately a hundred cruise missiles from an unidentified launch point in South Western China.”
Nehru was stunned. China? That made no sense at all. It was crazy.
“There has to be some kind of mistake,” he said. “Some sort of radar error, or a garbled report.”
“I don’t think so, sir,” the officer said. “We’ve got satellite imagery. It looks like the entire village has been destroyed. There are no signs of survivors.”
Defense Minister Nehru glared at the young officer. “Why would the Chinese attack a flyspeck of a village on our side of the mountains? Was there some kind of provocation?”
The captain shook his head. “No provocation that we’re aware of, sir. And nothing of strategic value in the area of the village, as far as we’ve been able to tell.”
“Then why are the Chinese attacking us?”
“I’m sorry, Minister,” the captain said. “We don’t know. General Singh requests…”
Nehru nodded quickly and gestured toward the door. “Yes. Fine. Tell General Singh I’m on my way. And inform him that I want a full defense staff briefing in ten minutes.”
“Yes, sir,” the captain said. He did an abrupt about-face and strode toward the door.
Nehru reached for the phone on his desk. He had to call the Prime Minister immediately. His fingers stopped before they touched the receiver. “Captain!”
The young officer paused in the doorway and looked over his shoulder. “Yes, Minister?”
“Tell General Singh to order a full military alert. Mobilize all air, sea, and ground forces. Maximum readiness.”
His voice became quieter, but it took on an edge of steel. “If what you are saying is true, the Chinese have committed an unprovoked act of war against Republic of India,” he said. “I don’t know what those fools are up to. But if they want a fight, they’re going to get one.”
CHAPTER 10
FLIGHT LEAD
INAS 303 SQUADRON — BLACK PANTHERS
BAY OF BENGAL (WEST OF ANDAMAN ISLANDS)
SUNDAY; 23 NOVEMBER
0512 hours (5:12 AM)
TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’
In hindsight, no one would ever know what made Lieutenant Ajit Chopra pull the trigger. The pilot’s motives, whatever they might have been, died with him when Chopra’s Indian Navy MiG-29K was blasted out of the sky over the Bay of Bengal.
In the days and weeks following the First Battle of Bengal, swarms of investigative journalists would try repeatedly to link Chopra’s actions with the previous evening’s missile strike on the village of Geku. Given the pilot’s relative youth and the legendarily all-eclipsing power of young hearts, more than one media pundit would speculate that Chopra had met and perhaps fallen in love with one of the young village women who had been killed in the barrage.
Internet rumors began to spring up, identifying Lieutenant Chopra’s lost beloved as a poor but beautiful girl named Mira. The tragic love story of Ajit and Mira would become the modern web’s equivalent of Romeo and Juliette, forwarded in thousands—and then hundreds of thousands—of heart-rending emails by uncounted numbers of breathless romantics.
Internet legends tend to grow in the telling, and the compelling tale of doomed young Indian lovers was no exception. Increasingly elaborate email threads offered careful descriptions of Mira’s death scene as a murderous Chinese missile shrieked down from the heavens to blow her family’s small (but well kept) home into oblivion. Similarly florid descriptions told of Agit’s exquisite emotional agony as he turned his Russian-built jet fighter toward a ship of the Chinese Navy, and wreaked teary-eyed revenge upon the godless warmongers who had slaughtered his beloved Mira.
Despite the polished elegance of many repeated tellings, not one shred of evidence would ever be found to support the story. No proof of Mira’s existence would ever be documented, and no verifiable link (emotional or otherwise) would ever be established between Lieutenant Ajit Chopra and the bombed-out village of Geku.
From post mission analysis and reconstruction, all that’s known for certain is this: on the morning of Sunday, 23 November, Lieutenant Chopra was flight lead for a group of four MiG-29s, operating from the Indian aircraft carrier INS Vikrant. At 5:12 AM (local time), apparently acting without orders, Chopra turned his fighter onto an approach vector toward the Chinese guided missile destroyer Zhuhai. Approximately ten seconds later, the young Indian pilot armed and launched two Kh-35U ‘Switchblade’ anti-ship cruise missiles toward the Chinese warship. Both missiles functioned perfectly, following subsonic flight paths all the way to their target.
The reaction of the Chinese crew was fast, but not fast enough. The Zhuhai’s Type 360S E/F-band Doppler radar identified the incoming missiles at approximately 17 kilometers, somewhere near the outer edge of the system’s threat detection envelope.
Like most of his shipmates, the senior weapons officer aboard the Zhuhai had spent much of his career training for combat engagements at sea. But, training and simulations aside, the Chinese officer had never actually participated in live combat actions. He had never fired weapons at a real enemy target, and he had certainly never been on the receiving end of such an attack. When the incoming missile warning appeared on his screen, the weapons officer hesitated for a quick handful of seconds while his brain came to grips with the completely unanticipated idea that this was not a simulation; someone was really trying to kill him.
The man shook his head sharply and then jabbed the button that directed the destroyer’s ZJK-4 Thomson-CSF combat management system to engage. The combat management system instantly activated the HQ-7 short-range air defense system, and the eight-cell missile launcher spun to starboard to point toward the inbound threat.
The Chinese weapons officer’s hesitation was brief. Given the circumstances, it was also completely understandable. He did not live to regret the error.
Nicknamed Harpoonskis for their similarity to the American AGM-84 Boeing Harpoon, the Switchblade cruise missiles skimmed above the wave tops at Mach 0.8, or roughly 274.6 meters per second. Each tipped with a 145 kilogram warhead in a shaped-charge configuration, the two missiles were moving at 80% of the speed of sound when they slammed into the starboard side of the Zhuhai.
Like the trick of a street conjurer, the Chinese destroyer vanished behind a wall of black smoke and fire. When the smoke had cleared, all that remained of the warship was a spreading oil slick, punctuated by scattered pieces of flaming wreckage.
What happened next might best be described as chaos.
The Indian Navy communications net was instantly flooded with radio chatter as every pilot, action officer, and comms officer in the area began talking at once, trying to find out what in the hell was going on. If Lieutenant Chopra’s voice was among the babble, it was lost amid the anger and confusion of his shipmates.
; The Zhuhai’s escort vessels, the guided missile frigates Ma'anshan and Wenzhou, did not wait for an explanation. They opened fire on Lieutenant Ajit Chopra’s Mig-29K and the other three planes in his flight.
In a matter of seconds, the sky above the Bay of Bengal was a snarl of crisscrossing exhaust trails, as Chinese surface-to-air missiles climbed toward the Indian Navy MiGs, and the Indian pilots unleashed their own Switchblade anti-ship cruise missiles.
By the time the first missiles struck their targets, another flight of MiGs was launching from the deck of INS Vikrant.
The entire engagement lasted less than twenty minutes. When it was done, all three warships of the Chinese surface action group were on their way to the bottom of the bay. Seven aircraft of the Indian Navy were destroyed, and three others were able to limp back to their carrier with varying degrees of damage. The sea was littered with the bodies of dead and injured Sailors.
The First Battle of Bengal was over. The true carnage was yet to come.
CHAPTER 11
WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM
WASHINGTON, DC
SATURDAY; 22 NOVEMBER
6:21 PM EST
President Dalton Wainright trailed a Secret Service agent through the door into the Situation Room. As the president walked to his traditional seat at the head of the long mahogany table, the agent stepped deftly aside, taking up a position in the corner to the right of the door, where he could survey the entire length of the room without moving.
In the past, when the primary display screens had depended on ceiling-mounted LCD projectors, the Situation Room had been kept in semi-darkness. But the projector screens were gone now, replaced by six large flat screen televisions along the side walls, and an enormous flat screen master display covering the entire wall opposite the president’s chair. With the projectors gone, there was no reason to dim the lights, so the room was well lit.
Although President Wainright would not admit it to anyone—including himself—he would have preferred the semi-darkness of the old days. It wasn’t the mystique of the old lighting scheme that he missed; it was the anonymity, the false but reassuring sense of invisibility that sometimes comes from watching a movie in the cozy gloom of a public theater.
Dalton was not at all comfortable in his job. He was certainly not the first holder of the office to experience that particular feeling, but his own brand of discomfort didn’t stem from the traditional source. More than one politician had spent an entire career angling for the Oval Office, only to discover that the job was too large, too challenging, and too thankless to reward the effort.
That wasn’t the case for Dalton. Like most people who dabble in politics, he had sometimes flirted with dreams of the presidency, but those had been idle fantasies. He had never harbored any thought of trying to make them real, and he was not a bit surprised to find out that the presidency was completely out of his depth.
He had been quite happy as the Junior Senator from Maine, content in the belief that his political career had reached its peak. The invitation to join Frank Chandler’s dark horse bid for the presidency had come as a surprise. Dalton had accepted the role of vice-presidential running mate, not because he believed that Chandler could win the election, but because it seemed like a logical way to bring his career in politics to a close.
With the possible exception of Frank himself, no one had been more shocked than Dalton when their Republican opponent’s campaign had disintegrated in the wake of a well-publicized sex scandal. The resulting backlash in public opinion had propelled Frank Chandler into the Oval Office, with a rather dazed Dalton Wainright clinging to his coattails.
Now Frank was gone too, driven out of office by the public uproar after the fiasco in Kamchatka and the missile attack on Pearl Harbor. His departure had made Dalton Wainwright only the second vice-president in American history to ascend to the Oval Office through the resignation of a sitting president.
During his tenure in the Senate, a Washington Post reporter had once described Dalton as ‘competent and dedicated, but undistinguished.’ Under the undimmed lights of the White House Situation Room, Dalton wondered if even that scrap of left-handed praise might be an overstatement of his abilities. Despite his lack of flamboyance, he’d been qualified for his seat in the Senate. He’d known what he was doing, and he had been equal to the challenge.
The presidency was another matter. He could still lay claim to the words ‘dedicated’ and ‘undistinguished,’ but he had serious doubts that he was competent to hold the highest office in the land.
According to protocol, the half dozen people gathered around the long table were standing at attention. Dalton waved for them to take their seats, as he settled into his own chair.
The Sit Room Duty Officer, a hard-faced Air Force Colonel with steel-rimmed glasses, remained standing near the far end of the table. He nodded briskly toward his commander-in-chief. “Good evening, Mr. President.”
Dalton opened the blue-jacketed briefing folder on the table in front of him, and glanced up to meet the colonel’s eyes. He returned the man’s nod with an equally abrupt gesture. “Proceed.”
The Duty Officer pointed a slender remote toward the enormous screen opposite Dalton’s chair. The blue background and presidential seal vanished from the wall-sized display, replaced by a regional map of Asia, overlaid with hundreds of cryptic-looking tactical symbols. The six smaller flat screens along the walls were instantly populated with images of ships, fighter aircraft, submarines, helicopters, and missile systems.
The Sit Room Duty Officer turned toward the master display, and thumbed a button that turned the remote into a laser pointer. The red dot of the laser came to rest in the body of water to the east of India, the Bay of Bengal, where a jumble of colored symbols seemed to indicate a concentration of ships and aircraft.
“Mr. President,” the officer said, “the conflict between China and India is escalating rapidly. Both sides are mobilizing military assets across the board, and both countries have clearly demonstrated that they are willing to engage in direct combat action.”
Secretary of Defense Mary O’Neil-Broerman spoke up. “The situation over there is going to hell in a hand basket, sir.”
“I can see that,” Dalton said. “I want to know why.”
He instantly regretted the sharp tone in his voice. He had a tendency to become brusque when he was unsure of himself, and right now he was very unsure of himself.
Since the day he’d inherited the presidency, he’d begun every day with a simple prayer, or perhaps it was just a plea to the universe, since it wasn’t directed toward any particular deity. Please do not let anything happen today that I can’t handle.
So far, he’d managed to muddle through without disaster—largely because Frank Chandler had left him with a staff of capable people who were skilled at helping him navigate difficult situations. But he’d also been lucky. Fate had not yet thrown him a problem that was beyond the scope of his abilities.
Dalton’s string of good fortune couldn’t last forever. He knew that. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. He would run into some challenge or some catastrophe that was too big for him. Then the people of the United States would find out how horribly things can go wrong when the guy sitting in the big chair is not up to the job.
“Mr. President, we can only partially answer that question,” the Sit Room Duty Officer said. “The trigger seems to have been that train wreck in Tibet on Tuesday, the rocket attack on the Qinghai Railroad. The Chinese began calling it an act of terrorism before the smoke had even cleared. They apparently traced the terrorists to the Village of Geku, on the Indian side of the Himalayas. The People’s Liberation Army retaliated with a massive cruise missile strike that pretty much wiped the village off the map.”
“That can’t be right,” the president said. “The Chinese are not stupid, and that’s too much of an overreaction. You don’t retaliate for a localized act of terrorism by launching a large scale missile attack against an
other country.”
The Secretary of Defense leaned forward in her chair. “With all due respect, Mr. President, that’s not necessarily true. The U.S. has done it more than once. The first example that comes to mind is August of 1998, when President Clinton ordered the launch of Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles at targets in Afghanistan and the Sudan. It was in retaliation for the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. We simultaneously launched about 75 cruise missiles against countries on two different continents.”
The National Security Advisor, Gregory Brenthoven, shook his head. “Granted that your basic premise is true, but your example is not exactly parallel to the current mess in Asia.”
He turned his gaze toward the president. “When former President Clinton gave the order to launch, he knew that both Afghanistan and the Republic of Sudan were a nice comfortable distance from the United States. About six or seven thousand miles. President Clinton also knew that neither country had the firepower or the logistics to bring the fight back to American shores. In other words, the risk of escalating to all-out war was just about zero.”
Brenthoven gestured toward the big map of Asia on the master display. “That’s not the case with this China-India thing, sir. China didn’t launch their missiles against some third-world country on the other side of the planet. They provoked a major military competitor, a nuclear power no less, sitting right on their own southern border. And that doesn’t make any sense. As you said, Mr. President, the Chinese are not stupid. If somebody punches India in the nose, you can bet your last dollar that India is going to come out of the corner swinging with both fists. The Chinese know that. But they did it anyway.”
The president looked at the map. “Why would they do that? Why would they take such a stupid risk?”
