One way or another.
“They want to do what?” Chakri said into his phone from his office.
“You heard me the first time,” Ravoof said calmly from his office in the external affairs ministry. “I can’t believe it either. But I just got off the phone with Tiwari in Moscow. Bogdanov called him up to say that Beijing wants to initiate some ‘lower-level’ conversations to try and end this mess. The Russians seem to think they are sincere about it this time.”
“As they damn well should be!” Chakri noted with a smile. “We have them defeated out there in the Chumbi valley. And this confirms that they know it!”
“So how do we want to proceed on this?” Ravoof asked, unable to conceal his excitement. “I am going to be briefing the P-M in an hour once Tiwari has more details for me. But I thought I will give you a heads up on what that meeting is going to be about.”
“Thank you,” Chakri said. He appreciated the heads-up. He knew he needed time to digest this before heading over to meet the NSA and then the Prime-Minister.
“Ravoof,” he said after a few seconds, “let’s keep this low for now. We don’t want the media gaining even a whiff of this until we know what we are getting into. We don’t want this leaking out to the world just yet. Beijing might be forced to backtrack into their hole if they are publicly humiliated with this news. I can only imagine what is happening in Beijing right now and how delicate the deal might be from their end.”
“I agree,” Ravoof said.
“I am also putting a call to the service chiefs to see what they have to say about this,” Chakri concluded and terminated the call with the Foreign-Minister. He was already lost in thought as he put down the phone.
What on earth would we even talk about with Beijing?
Lieutenant-General Suman yawned for what seemed to him like the thousandth time. Unlike all other wars that India had fought in nearly seventy years, this war had been truly waged on a near continuous level over the last two weeks. With little or no time for rest and always on the move for fear of Chinese missile attacks, Suman was realizing the limits of his own body’s endurance.
But for all that, his corner of the war was going well.
The XXXIII Corps had broken the PLA 55TH Division in the southern part of the valley into several isolated segments as operation Chimera entered its final phases. The PLA 11TH Division had been pushed away from its sister force and was now effectively separated by the full force of the 2ND Mountain Division in between them. And north of the 11TH were the two Indian airborne battalions under Colonel Thomas.
The 2ND Mountain Division brigades had moved west to east from Sikkim and one of its battalions had even reached the eastern slopes of the Chomolhari on the Bhutanese border. There they had been met by a small recon group from Potgam’s Joint-Force-Bhutan. That had effectively sealed the fate for the PLA 55TH Division.
With each passing hour the soldiers in that unfortunate unit were being pummeled with heavy artillery. The 55TH Division had now been reduced to a few thousand battered men in small groups surrounded from all sides.
As we were once, sixty years ago…
Suman clenched his fists and broke the pencil in his hand in two as he thought about that. He and most other senior officers were old enough to remember growing up as kids learning of the defeat at Namka Chu and the Chip-Chap river valley back in 1962. More than fifty years later, there was little in the way of sympathy that Suman could now bring to bear.
He leaned back in his chair, exhaled and tried to close his eyes for a brief moment of rest.
Five minutes. Just five minutes! He told himself as his eyelids became heavy. The door to his office slammed open as his staff officers walked in. He immediately awakened and watched with bloodshot eyes as his Deputy-Army Commander walked in front of the other officers.
“What the hell is this? What happened?” Suman asked worriedly.
“So the chaps up in the 71ST Mountain heard this over their comms,” the Lieutenant-General handed Suman a print-out with a smile. Suman took it and glanced over the usual comms security data down to the relevant part:
“To the Indian field commander, we hereby accept your offer to surrender honorably under the following conditions. Firstly, my officers and soldiers are to be treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. Secondly, my wounded are to be provided medical attention and our medical convoys are to be allowed passage. If these conditions are met, then given the incapacitated state of the division commander, I am authorized to surrender what remains of my force within the valley. This channel may be used to communicate with me and my staff directly. -deputy commander, 55TH Division, People’s Liberation Army”
Suman grunted and then looked up at the smiling officers in the room around him.
“Well then, I think we should tell our boys to go ahead to accept the good General’s offer right away, don’t you think?”
“They did what?” General Liu thundered and stood up from his chair hard enough to trip it over behind him. As the chair fell with a thud, it froze everybody in the room while Dianrong moved to pick it up. General Yongju, who had just announced to the room what he had heard from his Chengdu region commander regarding the surrender of the 55TH Division, stood where he was with the paper in his hand. He was visibly shaken by Liu’s thunderous response.
“General Liu,” Peng started to say, but Liu cut him off:
“They surrendered? They surrendered to the Indians? How dare they?!”
“The deputy-commander did what was in the interest of saving the lives of the men still alive,” Yongju replied,
“That was not his call to make!” Liu shouted loud enough so that the room echoed his voice a bit. “He has singlehandedly brought shame to this country through his actions!”
To that Liu received silence in the room and as he looked around, none of the army commanders met his gaze. He saw defeat in their eyes and in his own stomach he felt a pit of rage…
“We need to negotiate an end to this war as soon as possible!” the Foreign-Minister added urgently.
“No!” Liu shouted. “We will do what we should have done a long time back!” He looked over to Dianrong, standing by the wall behind his seat.
“Colonel Dianrong! Get me the commanders for the Tibet based DF-21 Brigades right now!”
“General, what are you doing?” Peng shouted at Liu as Dianrong picked up the phone on a table nearby. Liu turned away from the Colonel to look Peng straight in the face:
“Making sure that the Indians are not able to enjoy this moment of glory that you all have handed them on a silver platter! I will finish what you all could not!”
DAY 15
“What the hell?” the Group-Captain said as the live-SAR feed of a Chinese DF-21C medium-range ballistic-missile battery in northern Tibet on the wall screens was replaced with flickering static.