The reply was immediate and clear:
“Consider it done. I will direct the air-force to transport one of our UAV units from the western border to replace your losses. They should be there as soon as I can arrange it. And we should be getting the latest update on the Chinese 13TH Group Army movements north of the border from the Aerospace Command boys soon enough. What else?” Yadav asked.
“I am going to request emergency transfer of additional artillery units to this sector to replace my losses there but only after I can get a full assessment done. It will take a few hours. Most of the other stuff is housecleaning on my end. I will get back to you with the strike plans and an ETA from the 862 Missile Regiment once I have the target list completed. For now I need to go. I have a hundred fires to fight over here,” Suman responded. Yadav decided to get out of his way.
“Very well. Suman, we will not have a repeat of 1962 this time around. Get your army ready to fight. I want that Chinese Army stopped at the border and for our boys to take the offensive into Tibet just as soon as you can arrange it!”
The small puffs of smoke left the rolling rubber as Khurana’s Mig-29 touched down on the main runway and rolled down its length before slowing down. Half a minute later the aircraft was rolling onto the taxiway to the hardened shelters. Khurana looked left and right through the cockpit glass as he followed the small Gypsy utility vehicle with striped yellow-black stripes on it that was guiding him and his aircraft through the section of the taxiway cleared of debris. The view on either side was not pretty…
The base was in full blackout mode, but he could see the flames leaping out of the various smoldering buildings near the main tarmac. His was the first of three Fulcrums to be returning back to Leh from Avantipur after the missile attacks. The rest of No. 28 Squadron was to stay at Avantipur for the time being. But Leh needed its own cover. Besides, the “The First Supersonics” Squadron had no intention of staying at Avantipur for a minute longer than necessary.
The Mig-29 was not exactly a high endurance fighter compared with the Su-30. Despite the upgrades over the years that had increased range for the aircraft, there was no way that a decent sized patrol could be maintained constantly over Ladakh if they were based as far away as Avantipur. Bottom line was that Leh airbase needed to be recovered from the smoke and fire and returned to service when the first offensive Indian airstrikes of the war began in the morning…
This first flight of three aircraft was here to determine the level of the damage to the airfield and its ability to launch fighter operations. Khurana and the squadron commander were among the pilots returning now. Khurana saw from his cockpit glass the second Mig-29 touching down behind him while the third circled overhead. Several thousand feet above them, the first Barrier-Combat-Air-Patrol, or BARCAP, was forming up. Made up of three Fulcrums from the same squadron, they were now taking position as the air-force began returning to the skies throughout the region.
But all of that didn’t change the reality on the ground as Khurana saw it. He realized that this first landing had been directed under the control of an ad-hoc ATC since the original ATC building was now smoldering rubble. That was bad news as it affected the ability of large number of larger aircrafts to operate effectively from the airbase.
A few minutes later Khurana was shutting down the engines as the aircraft came to a stop inside one of the undamaged hardened shelters. He was happy to see that most of the airmen around him from his original ground-crew had survived the attacks. He did notice however, that some faces were missing from the group. He and the squadron commander had been notified by the base commander of the losses in personnel and the list of names was not exactly short. Additionally, the No. 114 “Siachen Pioneers” helicopter squadron based on the same base had lost two of its Cheetah helicopters on the ground during the attack. These two helicopters had been down for maintenance at the time and could not have been evacuated.
As Khurana jumped off the cockpit and walked out of the shelter, he felt the bitter cold winds blowing outside. He decided to zip up the winter jacket he was now wearing over his flight-suit. A few minutes later the base commander pulled up near the shelter. He had picked up Khurana’s squadron commander beforehand and the trio drove away towards the base operations center. Within the hour, planning began for the squadron’s role in the large offensive air campaign scheduled to begin in a few hours’ time.
The mission now had a code name: Operation Phoenix.
The Chinese weren’t sitting around, either. Feng was back where he thought he belonged, commanding operationally deployed units at war. It had taken them the better part of two months to do it, but they had achieved the bureaucratically impossible: the Lanzhou-Chengdu unified MRAF was operational.
Wencang had delivered as he had promised, and Jinping had signed off on it. So now Chen was commander of the unified MRAF for the ongoing operations. And Feng was his operations officer at Chengdu. Feng had brought down his staff from Lanzhou and merged them with the Chengdu staff for conformity during the last month and right now they were working fluidly.
Feng had to oversee the deployment of units at the larger levels and leave the war-fighting aspect to the unit commanders. He wasn’t too comfortable with some of the commanders, but that was something Chen and Wencang had been unable to change in such a relatively short period of time. Most of the guilty ones were too politically well dug in.
For now, Feng was more concerned with the strategic layout of the PLAAF against the IAF. And his main concern was the vulnerability of their Tibetan airbases to Indian attacks. His list of counter-measures to Wencang two months ago had covered this in detail. And Wencang had delivered on most of them. As a result, aircraft such as the Su-27/30 had not been deployed to the potentially vulnerable airbases in southern Tibet. Neither had the H-6 tankers and cruise-missile carrier aircraft done so. The only aircraft that were really forward deployed were the JH-7s, J-8IIs and a few J-10 detachments.
The war for the PLAAF had already begun. The cruise-missile barrage had done its job and now the manned fighters would do theirs. From all indications coming in, the cruise-missile attacks against Indian airfields had been a fraction of the success they were supposed to have been. The Indians had detected the launches and dispersed in time to take really serious damage. Feng had seen the report on the adjusted satellite orbits of the Indian Aerospace Command and put the picture together in his mind.
Bad luck… he thought.
But luck was as much a reality in war as tanks and missiles, and good commanders learnt to plan for it as well. Feng had certainly done so.
And to a certain extent, the missile attacks had done their job. The main idea had never been to destroy the IAF on the ground. And indeed, the idea itself was ridiculous. The main idea was to push the IAF further south of the border by destroying the infrastructure that gave them the advantage over the PLAAF in Tibet. Now both sides were far from the border and had almost similar aircraft types and numbers over the battlefield.
This is good.
Overall, senior PLAAF commanders down from Wencang to Chen and Feng knew very well that the terrain handed the IAF a clear advantage of operating close to the borders with near sea-level operating conditions. That meant that they could maintain a higher “aerial-density” over the battlefield. Now that this density had been reduced for a day or two, it gave the Chinese a fighting chance in the air war.