by Jeff Edwards
SATURDAY; 22 NOVEMBER
7:17 PM
TIME ZONE +5 ‘ECHO’
Jampa stood in the open doorway of the shepherd’s house, the soft golden light of the oil lamps at his back, his face turned outward toward the crisp gloom of the evening. He knew that he should close the door; the heat from the little fireplace was escaping past him, into the night. But he stood for a moment longer, enjoying the sting of the cold air against his cheeks and admiring the soothing near-darkness of the moonlit street.
The village of Geku lay spread out before him, an almost haphazard scattering of small houses and buildings under the emerging stars. It was a beautiful place, this frigid little paradise carved into the mountains on the roof of the world. Harsh. Difficult. Sometimes brutal. But always beautiful.
Most of the inhabitants were already settling down for the evening. The people here led full, but uncomplicated lives. Jampa envied them.
Here, on the Indian side of the Himalayas, there was freedom. Not boundless liberty, but at least the locals could go about their daily lives without fear that their homes would be raided by truckloads of Chinese soldiers. Their schools and their temples would not be burned, or crushed under the boot heels of an occupying nation.
Jampa felt his eyes drawn toward the east, where his own country was hidden behind the rising peaks of the mountains. The Chinese called it the Tibet Autonomous Region, which was a typical trick of communist propaganda. There was no autonomy for the people of Jampa’s homeland. There was no freedom for them. Not for more than half a century, since the ironically-named People’s Liberation Army had surged across the Jinsha River in 1950, to seize control of Tibet.
It had taken the Chinese invaders only thirteen days to conquer the vastly-outnumbered Tibetan defenders. Thirteen days, for one of the most ancient sovereign nations on the earth to become just another oppressed province in the Chinese empire.
Of course, the Chinese were somewhat more subtle about things these days, at least to outward appearances. The brute force of China’s military occupation was giving way to something more devious. The Qinghai railway was hauling in trainloads of Han Chinese, to claim and settle the land, forcing the native people into an artificial minority. If no one stopped this unnatural migration, the Tibetan people could be squeezed out of existence in just a few decades.
The ghost of a smile crossed Jampa’s lips. He had stopped it, for a while at least. He, and Nima, and Sonam had stopped the accursed train. They had blown the mechanical beast right off its tracks.
The smile faded as Jampa remembered staring into the eyes of the young PLA soldier, just before pulling the trigger of the stolen Chinese rocket launcher. The scene flooded into his mind again, the roiling ball of flame, the black smoke, the shriek of rending metal as the wounded train tore itself apart.
Jampa hadn’t wanted to kill the young soldier. He hadn’t wanted to kill anyone. He had only wanted to destroy the train, to stop the never-ceasing influx of Chinese invaders.
He felt a stab of regret, but it was quickly driven out of his thoughts by the memory of another fire. The smoke rising from the ruins of his little school in Amchok Bora. The faces of Dukar, and Chopa, and his other young students as the villagers had pulled their charred forms from the burning wreck of the school.
Jampa had been a teacher, back then. An educated man. A man of science in a land where academic learning was far too rare.
The villagers in Amchok Bora had treated him with respect. He had been regarded as a man of wisdom and enlightenment.
Jampa did not feel enlightened now. He felt angry, and tired. If there truly had been any wisdom within him, it had long since fled, replaced by a single purpose—to free his land from the Chinese oppressors.
He wondered where Sonam was now. He felt guilty about leaving his wounded team member behind after the attack on the train. He hoped—for Sonam’s sake—that the young freedom fighter had died from his bullet wounds before the Chinese had gotten their hands on him.
Jampa had a brief image of what the ruthless bastards might do to make Sonam talk. His shudder was amplified by a shiver from the cold evening air.
The shiver was followed by a yawn, and then another one. Jampa tried to push all thoughts of Sonam’s capture from his mind. Nothing could be done to help Sonam now. Either the man was already dead, or the Chinese had him in one of their interrogation cells. Either way, coming to Sonam’s aid was far beyond the resources of Jampa, or anyone else in the Gingara organization.
Jampa yawned again, and made another attempt to force his thoughts away from the fate of Sonam. There was time for a bit of reading before bed. Tomorrow, perhaps he and Nima could begin planning their next strike against the oppressors.
He started to swing the door closed, and then paused with it still half open. What was that noise?
Jampa tilted his head, and struggled to concentrate on the sound that hovered at the lower edge of his hearing. The noise started softly, but grew louder rapidly. It reminded him of an odd combination of an arrow in flight, and the hissing of a kettle just coming to a boil.
The sound, strange as it was, did not seem completely unfamiliar. He had heard that sound before, or something very much like it.
The memory of the rocket attack on the Qinghai railway flickered through his brain again. He saw himself swing the fiberglass tube of the Chinese rocket launcher up onto his right shoulder. Felt the firing trigger retract under the pressure of his squeezing finger. Heard the whistling hiss of the exhaust gasses as the anti-tank rocket had leapt from the launch tube and streaked toward the side of the nearest railroad car.
The growing hiss in the air… It was almost exactly the same sound, but louder. Much louder. It was…
Jampa’s thought was interrupted by an enormous dark shape that flashed past the half-open doorway, hurtling down the street toward the center of the village. The air current from the big thing’s passage washed over Jampa with a warm chemical stench that reminded him somehow of burning kerosene.
The thing, whatever it was, flew about chest-high above the ground. In its wake trailed the strange whistling-hiss, the noise now grown to a painful volume.
Was it some kind of rocket? It couldn’t be. It was too large. Nearly the size of a telephone pole.
Jampa was thrown sideways as the unknown flying thing reached the center of the village and detonated, splitting the night air with fire and a growing circle of destruction.
Jampa lay on the floor, his half-stunned brain trying to process the idea that the impossibly large thing was some kind of rocket after all. His eardrums were ringing from the aftermath of the explosion, but he could still hear the roar of the fireball and the screams of people thrown out of their beds by this deadly and unexpected assault.
He could hear something else, too. More of the whistling-hisses. Not just one of them. Many.
That was crazy. Who would fire missiles at a tiny Indian village? Who would bother? Who would waste that kind of expensive military hardware on a little town that most people had never even heard of?
And suddenly, Jampa knew the answer. He understood it with a clarity born of his years as a teacher, and a man of science.
He climbed painfully to his feet, and staggered to the doorway. The door hung drunkenly from a single unbroken hinge.
Two more dark telephone pole shapes streaked past the little house, each followed a second or two later by more explosions and more screams.
This was his fault. Death was coming to the village of Geku, and it was all Jampa’s fault.
The idea had been so simple. So obvious. Strike at Chinese targets on the Tibetan side of the mountains, and then retreat across the border into India. The Chinese government wouldn’t dare follow a handful of insignificant insurgents into the legal territory of another major nation.
And many of the locals in the northern Indian provinces were sympathetic to the cause of Tibetan liberation. The Indian villagers would gladly give sanctuary to Jampa, and Nima, and their
fellow brethren of Gingara.
The plan had always worked, until now. The Chinese counterstrikes had always stopped at the Indian border.
What was so different this time? Something had changed. Something major. Jampa had no idea what sort of political shift had occurred, but it was clear that the old rules were suddenly and irrevocably gone.
Whatever the cause of the change in tactics had been, this unfolding catastrophe was almost certainly in retaliation for Jampa’s rocket strike on that accursed train.
Another shockwave slammed Jampa against the doorframe. His head bounced off the wooden upright with a bone-jarring whack.
His knees buckled. He was sliding to the floor when the next Chinese cruise missile darted out of the gathering gloom, and crashed through the wall of the shepherd’s little house.
Jampa was less than two meters from the warhead when it erupted. He saw no more, heard no more, was no more.
And the man who had fired the first shot of the coming war was no longer there to witness the barrage of missiles that continued to fall from the sky.
CHAPTER 9
MINISTRY OF DEFENSE
SOUTH BLOCK SECRETARIAT BUILDING
NEW DELHI, INDIA
SATURDAY; 22 NOVEMBER
7:32 PM
TIME ZONE +5 ‘ECHO’
Indian Defense Minister Sanjay Nehru was on the phone when the door to his office flew open. The heavy door swung rapidly on its well-oiled hinges, bounced off the burnished oak wainscoting, and nearly swung closed again before the unannounced visitor stopped it with an outstretched hand.
Nehru’s eyes jerked toward the door in surprise. He was not accustomed to having people barge into his office without invitation. When Nehru got a look at the intruder, his shock transformed instantly to annoyance. It was that junior captain assigned as an aide to General Singh. What was the young idiot’s name? Kumar? Katari? Something like that.
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.
