Still, the Council was now discussing how to take its revenge. Dear God, Model thought, let them keep talking until they grew tired and something else took their attention. He wanted out of this meeting, wanted to get back to his people in Gaza and get back to trying to find a way out of the trap they were in. And, please God, don’t let these fools come up with a plan to attack the Americans again.
Gartokh, Eastern Tibet Border
It was time to move. By sheer chance, the Caliphate’s move in Egypt had focused the world’s attention on the Middle East and the “change of government” in Tibet had gone virtually unnoticed. To those that had seen the news, buried at the bottom of the page or at the end of the news bulletins, it was a good thing. Another religious government, another theocracy, had been cut off short, before it too could become a threat to its neighbors. The new government had said all the right things, made all the right actions. They’d declared an end to religious rule, driven the Dalai Lama out of the country and asked the rest of the world to help them build a new, democratic freedom-loving, society. Only the first people to respond had been the Imperial Empire of Japan and China and they’d slammed the door behind them.
Colonel Hu Kai-Lee was moving his division south east, to the border with India. He was up to strength, nominally at least although his trainees had barely reached a rudimentary level of capability. But, he had a division in numbers, probably a regiment in capability.
His first job was going to be to secure the communications lines and the population centers, such as they were. At least, there wasn’t going to be any resistance to worry about. The Tibetans weren’t like the Vietnamese who had created a virtual living hell for the Japanese in Indo-China. There, it was impossible for a unit of less than platoon size to move without vanishing into the jungle as if it had never been. There were stories circulating that whole companies and battalions had marched into the jungle, never to be seen again. No, the Tibetans weren’t the Vietnamese. More the pity.
The column of trucks stopped. The roads in Tibet were hardly world-class, this one was barely more than a stretch of cleared ground between two cliffs. They’d crossed the headwaters of the Indus a day earlier and the so-called roads had become consistently worse since then. Colonel Hu seriously considered ditching his motor transport, in terrain like this his soldiers could move faster on foot than in vehicles. The trouble was, that would leave them cut off from resupply. He lurched forward, the convoy had come to a halt again, another rockslide. Just a few boulders, he could see where thawing snow had split them away and tumbled them down.
At first he’d been suspicious of the falls but they were commonplace here. The Tibetans ignored them because their donkeys could thread around the obstruction when a truck couldn’t. The first few times he’d been stopped, he’d sent out a security guard and cover details while the engineers cleared the rocks. That had succeeded only in wasting time. He’d stopped doing that two days ago, and picked up progress markedly as a result.
One of Hu’s officers had already taken a work detail out to clear the rocks and had been waving his sword to urge his men on. Now Hu saw him suddenly collapse. Instinctively Hu started to count. Thousand-and-one thousand-and-two, thousand an.... The shot echoed around the cliffs, rolling like a clap of thunder. The shooter was much more than half a mile away, the shot had to be 900 meters at least. And now his officer lay dead, shot through the head. Now, they would have to go back to sending out patrols and securing an area before clearing rockfalls. An old poem Hu had read once, written by an Englishman he’d heard, echoed through his mind “ten thousand pounds of education shot down by a ten rupee jezail”. It looked like the Tibetans weren’t quite the ineffective sheep he’d assumed, they were going to fight after all. And that opened up all sorts of entrancing possibilities.
High in the cliffs, overlooking the road, the sniper team had already disengaged. They’d chosen their position well, there were secure, covered escape routes for both the sniper and his spotter, their gray robes blended in with the background perfectly. Even the sun was in the right place to make searching for them hard. It wasn’t surprising though, they’d been fighting skirmishes along the frontier every week for the last eighty years. Even since the Chipanese army had started moving, the Chitral Scouts had been exploring this terrain, meeting up with local tribal leaders and preparing to make the lives of the Chipanese units in Tibet very unpleasant. Now, that process was starting.
South of Lhasa, Tibet
The wreckage was strewn over a wide area, the Mitsubishi Ki-46 had been under partial control at least before the pilot had lost it and crashed. The Ki-46 was an old aircraft, it had once the finest recon aircraft in the world but that time was a quarter of a century in the past. Its piston engines marked it as being a survivor of a departed era, by all rights it should be in a museum.
Yet, oddly, for the role it now fulfilled, the Ki-46 was as good as anything else available and better than most. It flew high enough to get it above rifle and machine-gun fire, it was fast enough to get to an area quickly yet slow enough to look carefully and thoroughly for hostile forces. It was unarmed but it was large enough to carry the radio equipment necessary for calling in airstrikes. Over Indo-China, the Ki-46 had proved an invaluable aircraft looking for the guerrillas that plagued the forces trying to secure the area. They’d hoped it would do the same thing here in Tibet. Yet, they’d been in the country less than a week and already the first one was down.
The Kempeitai man in charge of investigating the shoot-down was speaking. “Definitely hostile. There is evidence of an explosion near the port engine. I think the pilot was trying to bring her in on the starboard engine and almost made it. It looks like the port wing failed at the explosion point and he spun in at the last second.”
“I didn’t think the Tibetans had anti-aircraft guns.”
“They don’t. But this wasn’t a gun. From the metal around the explosion site and its position near the exhaust, I am certain this was a missile, one of the small, shoulder-fired ones. A heat-seeker.’
“You mean this aircraft was shot down by our own forces?”
“Possibly. It could also be an American Redeye or a Triple Alliance Kris. They’re virtually the same missile, the Tripehounds build it under license. I doubt it though, I’ve seen aircraft downed by these missiles during tests and this one looks to me like it was one of ours. We will be interrogating all the antiaircraft crews in the area and accounting for their ammunition. We’re going to take the wreckage back home and do a proper examination there. Its amazing what you can find when you look hard enough. We will find fragments of the missile, with luck we may even get enough to identify it and, if it is ours, find which batch it came from. With luck.
The man from the Kempei-Tai rubbed his face, he and his teams had long days of work in front of them, determining what had brought this aircraft down and accounting for all the missiles held by loyal troops in the area. Even that wouldn’t answer all the questions though, he was uneasily aware that the Empire had sold very large numbers of these shoulder-fired missiles to the Caliphate and those religious maniacs had passed them on to who-knows-who. If it turned out this aircraft had been brought down by one of those missiles, there would be hell to pay.