She struggled to stand but couldn’t. Maria and Milly hurried to her and helped her to her feet.
“Home, I want the fuck to go home.”
Maria nodded. “Sure, Nancy, we’ll help you get home. Might be better if we drive you. I know, I know, it’s only a little over a mile and a half. But it’ll be better. No trouble. That’s what friends are for, Nancy. We’ll help you however you want us to.”
“Home,” Nancy said. There was a pleading in it they hadn’t heard before. Not a sober tone, but closer to it.
They helped Nancy down the steps and to her car in the parking lot. Maria pointed to the back seat of the three-year-old Chevy and they eased her in where she promptly slid down with her face on the seat cushion.
Maria pointed to Milly to follow them in her car. Nancy’s keys were still in the ignition.
9
Lieutenant Farooq Yuahya Khan stood behind a wooden frame building in this Nepalese town of twenty thousand and looked down the street two hundred yards at the police station. It was the last hold out of any organized opposition. He and his platoon of sixty Pakistan paratroopers had dropped in on the town at dawn the preceding day. They knew exactly where the town’s small military garrison was.
They caught most of the men in their bunks, killed half of them, and took forty prisoners. In rapid order they had captured the telephone center, the city administration building, and the town’s only hospital/medical center.
He and his men had flown in Chinese transport planes from Pakistan near the border and refueled in China. Then they flew in here two days ago, jumped, and lost only one man with a broken leg on the drop. They quickly quashed most of the opposition.
Now he gave hand signals and thirty Chinese-made rifles opened up on the police station from two sides. There was little return fire. He signaled again and his two best grenade men sprinted from cover to cover, then with increased support fire, they plunged across the wide street and slammed against the side of the police station. A red star shell broke high over the station. It was the signal to throw in grenades. Each man threw six grenades through three different windows and probably into six rooms.
Firing from inside the police station trailed off and then stopped. At once Lieutenant Khan ordered two squads to rush the station with a frontal charge using full-assault fire.
A few return rounds came from the station but not many. The soldiers kicked in the front door and threw in grenades; when the shrapnel stopped whizzing past them, soldiers jolted through the door and into the front and rear of the building.
In five minutes it was all over. The Pakistan lieutenant had no long-range radio, but a sergeant came out the front door and gave the move up signal, and an all-clear sign.
Lieutenant Khan worked down the street to the police station and hurried inside. There were more than a dozen dead Nepal police. He had them hauled out and put on the sidewalk for relatives to claim. He found two working radios. One a shortwave set was tuned to an Indian station in New Delhi, which was only two hundred miles to the southwest.
The broadcast was in English, and Khan could understand most of it. He sat quickly in a chair and he knew his face must be pale as he heard the news for the first time.
There is no estimate of the dead and mortally wounded, and critically sick in the city of Biratnagar, Nepal. The only authority CCN could contact was a corporal in the city’s police who was twenty miles into the countryside at the time of the bombing. The nuclear bomb exploded over Biratnagar the day before yesterday at dawn. At the same time the Pakistani and Chinese troops launched their invasion of the tiny Himalayan nation of Nepal. The corporal said, on a personal ham radio he carried with him, that the city is in total ruin. Most of it simply disintegrated in the fire ball. The rest of the buildings were flattened by the tremendous explosive force of the bomb. It could have been a twenty-megaton bomb, or one of forty megatons.
The corporal said the total devastation reaches out more than fifteen miles each way from the city center. He said the winds swirled and changed with the explosion and may have carried deadly radiation into several more population centers in this essentially flat land in the southwestern section of the nation.
Lieutenant Khan turned off the radio. He would have it taken to his headquarters in the old army fort at the edge of town. The buildings had cooking facilities, quantities of food, and places for his men not on patrol to sleep. More men were promised, but none had parachuted in. He had no way to contact his superiors or those of the Chinese. He looked at his map again and frowned.
The town he now occupied was only fifty-five miles in a direct line from the nuclear-bombed city. He wondered which direction the winds blew. Was there a chance they would blow to the west and slightly north? If so, his town of Dhangadhi would be right in their path.
He had not questioned his orders to parachute into Nepal from the Chinese planes. He did not question the Pakistani Army leaders when the officers were told of the attack on Nepal. There was no reason given, no justification. He wondered about the alliance with China to go into Nepal. It was a small nation. Why did China need help to take it over? He knew that China had almost three million men under arms. They could take the small nation quickly by themselves. Why would they want an ally?
There were all sorts of rumors in the Pakistan Army, especially with the officers who knew more of the plans. The enlisted men were told nothing of the attack or the alliance. Some thought that China had its eyes on Afghanistan. The feeling was that while China had many resources, it was short on good oil reserves. Others said that Afghanistan was not a prize package for conquest. It had no oil reserves at all if that was China’s ploy. The nearest good oil nation was Iran, Pakistan’s neighbor to the south who had ninety million barrels of oil reserve, nearly four times the reserves that China itself had. Yes, Iran could be the eventual target. But why the thrust into Nepal? Was it only a ploy to show the world that China had the nuclear bomb and wasn’t afraid to use it? Sounded reasonable.
Lieutenant Khan sat wearily in a chair in the police station while his men organized the place and assigned men there. He thought of his family back in Pakistan. His wife would be worried into a state. His two small sons would wonder where their papa was. He had been a reserve in the Army and working daily at his job as a lawyer. Then the orders came and his unit was mobilized and sent to two weeks of special training and three jumps, then they were loaded into the Chinese transport planes and here they were. His unit had been lucky not to be shot up. He had lost two dead and three wounded. Lucky indeed.
Lieutenant Khan tried the small radio he had, but he knew it would not reach beyond the mountains. His only hope was that it would link up with some Pakistani units nearby.
He drove in a commandeered Nepalese Jeep to the telephone center. There he found most of the phone lines in operation. He called Dipalal, a larger town than his to the north about thirty miles well into the foothills of the mighty Himalayan Mountains. The lines were working.
Soon he was talking with his friend Captain Multan who led the attack on the larger town.
“Yes, almost no opposition. I lost only two dead, three wounded.”
“Why are we here, Captain? You heard about the nuclear bomb attack on that Nepal town?”
“Yes. We didn’t need such an outrageous blow. The Nepalese Army is small and spread out over the entire country. My friend, I don’t know why we are here. Either one of us could have captured Nepal in a week. Now it could be three or four days.”