“Sir?” the Major asked as he bent down to the Colonel. Dianrong just shook his head as soldiers brought out bodies of the two pilots and General Liu from the crashed Z-9. Liu’s body was riddled with wounds from the crash and his uniform coat made dark by the blood. The Major sighed as they laid his body on the grass near the parked helicopter and then turned to Dianrong sitting now on the floor of the helicopter’s cabin.
“You were extremely lucky to have made it alive, Colonel.”
Dianrong grunted and then nodded. “This is the kind of luck we can all do without, Major. Keep looking for the chairman. And get me back to the center right away. I need to help figure out who is in charge of this country’s military before the Indians hit us with nuclear warheads!”
“What?” the Major said in utter surprise. He hadn’t been told yet about the planned DF-21 strikes when the Indian pre-emptive strike had happened. But Dianrong had put together the pieces to understand that if the Indians had struck here, they must have struck the launch sites as well. There was no way to know for sure if any of the DF-21 missiles had made their way to the targets until he got back at the center. Dianrong realized the Major was still waiting for an answer so he turned to face the surprised look on the young officer’s face.
“Haven’t you heard, Major? This war went nuclear an hour ago.”
The chaos within the government and military headquarters in Beijing was high. One of the problems with having such a highly focused decision-making body for a nation was that when it was suddenly taken out of the equation, the rest of the structure had no clear area where to go. To make matters worse, the military knew what had just happened to the missile brigades in northern Tibet.
Most of the CMC members were dead. The survivors were in critical condition made worse by their old age. For all intents and purposes they were incapacitated and would probably die despite the efforts of military doctors. The Chinese military had lost a lot of their four-star general rank officers within the CMC and that was causing trouble at the moment…
The problem for Colonel-General Wencang was that there were a lot of other Colonel-Generals in the other services who were trying to do what he was doing right now: get an idea of who’s in charge. The only difference between him and the other officers, however, was that he had been elevated to CMC member when General Jinping had been dismissed as PLAAF commander more than a week ago. The PLA commander, General Yongju, and his deputy were both missing in the aftermath of the missile strike at the NCC. Admiral Huaqing had been executed on orders from Peng for his actions in the Indian Ocean and his successor had not yet been named. That had left the naval forces in a limbo as well. So it wasn’t a surprise to Wencang when he got a call from the National Command Center.
“Wencang here,” he said as he picked up the phone.
“Sir, this is Colonel Dianrong.”
“Colonel, what is going on out there?” Wencang said urgently.
“Generals Yongju and Liu are confirmed dead, sir. So are most of the party officials. The PLA deputy-commander has been killed as well. We still haven’t found the chairman’s helicopter but I have organized a massive search effort. We will find him soon. The vice-chairman is alive but in critical condition at the hospital here!”
Wencang ran his hands over his head in frustration as he listened.
“So why are you calling me, Colonel? Don’t you have your bosses in Qinghe to report to?” He said pointedly. He knew how the deputy-commander for the 2ND Artillery Corps would respond when he was told that Liu was dead and so were the bulk of his DF-21 launchers…
“Sir, you are still the commander-designate of the air-force and still officially on the committee. That puts you above the other deputy-commanders, including the 2ND Artillery Corps,” Dianrong replied plainly.
“Does it now?” Wencang said as he realized the full importance of what that meant.
“Yes sir!” Dianrong continued. “And time is very critical. The Indians are bound to retaliate now that the detonations have taken place in Bhutan!”
“Colonel, the Indians are not the only ones we should be worried about,” Wencang replied bluntly. “Do you understand the full importance of what has happened? We have struck Bhutan with nuclear weapons! How do you think the world will respond to this when the news reaches out?”
There was silence on the other side so Wencang let out a long breath and continued: “Your former commander and the party have opened the flood gates, Colonel. We will be lucky if China survives as a nation, let alone the war in Tibet. Anyway, I want you to inform all other service branches that I am in charge from now till the end of hostilities. I want no more talk about who’s in charge and all military decisions are to be passed through my office. Understand?”
“Yes sir. May I prepare your evacuation from Beijing to the N-C–C?” Dianrong asked calmly.
“No. I am staying here.” Wencang ordered. “The last thing that needs to happen now is for our citizens to see their senior Generals running into underground bunkers. I will stay in Beijing. For now anyway. But keep the center up and running in case we do need it. Anything else?”
“No sir.”
“Good. Get everything set up at your end. I am going to get Lieutenant-General Chen and some others up here to Beijing to help me navigate this country out of the mess we have created!”
The Indian RISAT-1 satellite passed over the Tibetan plateau on yet another pass. The brown-white terrain below was being mapped by its synthetic-aperture-radar as it went over Bhutan along the northeast-southwest orbital path.
It saw the pair of nuclear detonation smoke clouds dissipating away in the direction of the winds over Bhutan. Paru valley was covered with smoke and it was moving southwest from there. The explosion over Barshong was doing something similar and had spread the smoke within the valley but away from the Chomolhari peak and the Chumbi valley thanks to local easterly winds.
The satellite also picked up dozens of large smoke clouds west of Golmud that had almost dissipated away, allowing for effective battle-damage-assessment of the Chinese missile brigades. The imagery was processed and investigated at the Aerospace Command by the attached DIPAC officers.
But as the radar imagery continued to update on the wall-mounted screens in front of him, Air-Vice-Marshal Malhotra put his hands behind his head and let out a long breath…
“You want to strike them inside Tibet?” Chakri asked as Iyer finished outlining his nuclear counter-strike.
“Wait a minute here!” Ravoof added as he understood what Chakri was talking about as well.
“There is no other choice!” Iyer replied. “If you want to stop the 15TH Corps dead in its tracks, then you have to hit them where they are! And they are in Tibet right now; just south of Gyantse, as a matter of fact.”
“We can’t do that!” the PM said as he dismissed Iyer’s assessment. “We will end up killing thousands of Tibetan civilians and undoing everything that has existed between India and Tibet! They will not forgive us for this for generations!”
“If Beijing allows that many Tibetan generations to survive their genocidal activities there to start with,” Chakri added quietly.