Liu exhaled loudly and slumped back in his chair:
“Now that is utterly insane, Yongju. And you should know better! If we negotiate now we will do so from a position of weakness. The Indians will know that the only reason we want to talk is because our forces in the valley are surrounded and on the verge of defeat!”
“So?” Yongju shouted back. “It’s true! And the sooner we accept it the sooner we save ourselves the even bigger embarrassment of two Divisions surrendering to the Indians! Our people will not accept such a defeat!”
“And which is exactly why I say we must use nuclear weapons in the valley now!” Liu said, beginning to show frustration. “It is better for us to lose two Divisions in exchange for an entire Indian Army Corps than for us to lose them as prisoners of war! You want the Indians to march them through their streets like they did with the Pakistanis in 1971 or the Russians did with the Germans? Can you imagine the national shame?”
“Don’t try to confuse this with national shame!” Yongju replied. “You cannot simply extinguish the lives of my men with arguments based on empty rhetoric. Negotiations are different from surrendering. We are far from surrendering. And the Indians know it!”
“Liu,” Peng said, “our men deserve better from us than this. And Yongju is right: as long as the two Divisions hold ground, we have not really lost anything substantial.”
“Except Bhutan,” Liu said quietly, but caught Peng’s ear.
“Yes, Bhutan is lost. But we never meant to capture Bhutan in its entirety, did we? It served to bog down Indian troops in the hopes of detracting what has unfortunately still come to pass in the Chumbi valley.”
“I hope,” Liu said menacingly, “you realize that if you go ahead with this negotiated surrender, our people will not forgive us in a thousand years!”
“They will learn to, Liu. But only in time.” Peng said and leaned forward to press the phone intercom on the table.
“Get me Minister Bogdanov at the Russian Foreign Ministry.”
The Chomolhari peak stood majestically on the eastern end of the valley, its snowcapped slopes shining in the afternoon sunlight. Small puffs of white clouds broke over its ridges against the blue sky with perfect serenity…
Colonel Thomas sat on the ground, his back resting on his backpack as it lay on the gravel. He stared in silence at the beauty of the Himalayas east of the valley. The clouds were drifting over the Chomolhari as a dark speck in the blue sky glistened in the sunlight and darted north. It flew across Thomas’s vision silently but he recognized it for what it was: a jet fighter streaking over Bhutan.
Then he saw more specks glistening in the sky, this time heading south and others heading north as they merged into each other. It was all so utterly silent from where he was. There were a couple of small puffs of spiral clouds dropped by some of the jets.
Flares!
Thomas realized he was now a mute witness to yet another desperate aerial battle being fought between the two sides of this war…
He sighed, and used his rifle lying on the mud nearby to lift himself up. The other paratroopers nearby got up as well, seeing their Colonel getting ready to move to another position. Thomas squinted as he saw a small flash of light over the Chomolhari and witnessed a pencil-thin trail of smoke diving behind it. One of the jets had just gone down. By now there were several such dirty brown-black lines of smoke in the sky as young pilots from both sides were losing their lives over the Bhutanese peaks.
Thomas looked down and checked his palm as he moved his fingers to regain blood circulation and then looked to his left to the source of the radiated heat he had been feeling. A PLA truck was burning furiously and flames leapt out from it with a distinct rumbling noise. Thomas brought his hands to face the fire and enjoyed the heat as he saw his paratroopers moving out in a column past the destroyed PLA vehicles on the road to Gyantse.
They were moving to a different position now. They had to do this every few hours to prevent the Chinese from pinning down the two Indian Battalions in the sector. They would hit each attempt by the 43RD Division of the PLA 15TH Airborne Corps to reopen the route to the south. Thomas and his men were beating back each such assault using extensive air support from IAF fighters. It was the only way they could hold off these increasingly desperate assaults to break through. And the PLAAF was doing its best to take that air support away, as he now saw happening east of the Chomolhari.
Thomas cursed as the winds changed and the soot from the blazing truck flew over him, entering his eyes. He rubbed it with his gloved finger, grabbed his backpack from the ground and began walking behind the last of his men as they headed off to the northeast…
Colonel-General Wencang stepped out of the staff car at the airport and met Chen and Feng standing near the parked Tu-154. Chen saw him approaching and handed Feng his papers and nodded to him to move out. Feng glanced at Wencang and moved out towards the stairs leading into the aircraft.
“Come to see me off?” Chen said with a smile and extended his hand.
“You are not that important yet in my book!” Wencang said with a smile and shook his old comrade’s hands. Chen felt that something was up.
Don’t say it.
“Take care of yourself, my friend.” Wencang said soberly, still grasping Chen’s hand. “We are far too old to go around pretending to be young. This whole mess will be over soon enough. Don’t let the bastard Indians get you so close to the end!”
“They won’t. Besides,” Chen said, “we are only going as far away as Chongqing, so it’s not exactly the battlefield. What’s the word?”
Wencang sighed and looked at the sunlight breaking through the cloudy skies over Beijing.
“Yongju and Peng managed to push the case for negotiating a ceasefire despite Liu’s arguments. Liu of course is not happy about a thing. And his position carries a lot of support both within the committee and outside. Yongju and Peng are on thin ice right now and they know it. If the Indians can be persuaded to take the offer on hand, we will be ending this mess once and for all.”
“And if they don’t?” Chen asked, his forehead wrinkled from concern.
“Then we will find out exactly how thin the ice really is,” Wencang said as he glanced around the airport, mostly deserted except for the Chinese airline aircraft parked further away.
“Anything we can do?” Chen asked, crossing his arms.
“Nothing useful. We disgraced ourselves in front of the committee, remember? The only reason we are still alive is because they need us. But that does not mean they look to us for strategic advice. I am going back to doing what I do best: running the air-force headquarters. You take care of what’s left of our men over Tibet. I will keep you informed on what’s going on here in Beijing.”
Chen nodded and walked away to the parked Tu-154 as the pilots started spooling up the engines. Wencang stood by his staff car and watched Chen trot up the stairs past the salutes of the soldiers and disappeared inside. Wencang continued leaning on the door of the car as he watched the ground-crews remove the stairs. Soon the aircraft was rolling past the car on its way to the runway.
This will get over soon enough… Wencang thought.