The PM let out a breath and looked at the floor before turning back to face the man clearly not interested in what he had to say: “The point, General, is that Mumbai isn’t Kargil and nuclear weapons are nuclear weapons. There is a threshold and it has been crossed. Now what happens is clearly beyond the hands of civilians leaders on either side. On our side you have shown me where my authority stands. But the Indians,” the PM waved his hands out of the eastward facing window, “…are not going to take this laying down. Once they find out where the trail of bread crumbs leads, they will come for us.”
“Indeed?” Hussein said, half amused by what he considered as a civilian playing at things clearly above his head. “And how will they do that? Unlike 2008, the perpetrators for the strike on Mumbai are already dead. LET leaders have already staked the claim on the attack. Its yet another deadly terrorist attack and nothing more. They may lash out at us for action and you, my dear friend, will deliver on the back and forth between Islamabad and New-Delhi. But nothing will come off it. And Mumbai will still become deserted as an economic hub. And the rest of the Indian economy will follow soon enough. After that, the Indians will have far greater local worries to deal with as their country falters!”
The PM grunted, amused at the confidence on display in front of him. “It’s all cut and dried, eh?”
“Unlike you and your fellow politicians,” Hussein said as he put on his reading glasses, “my senior commanders and I work in actual deliverables, not promised ones to a raging mob. Our work is precise and surgical.”
“Precise and surgical, General?” the PM said as he opened the door of the office while Hussein picked up the papers from his desk. “So was Kargil!” the PM slammed the door as he walked out.
The Kargil war… Hussein thought. The PM was right on that score. Several factors had played into Pakistan’s defeat in 1999. Least of which was the underestimation of the Indian response to the occupation of the mountains around Kargil by Pakistan. Despite the overt Pakistani nuclear threat laid out by General Musharraf, New-Delhi had not stopped in its campaign to take back the peaks. Instead, it had counter-deployed its own nuclear-tipped missiles, forcing a nuclear standoff while the conventional war raged, ultimately to Pakistan’s defeat.
The way Hussein looked at it, the problem during that war was the very clear and direct involvement of Pakistan in the fighting. And nothing galvanized the Indian public more than the specter of Pakistan claiming Indian land through military action. In his view, Musharraf and his Generals had a reasonably laid out plan, but it’s fatal flaw was the direct involvement of Pakistani troops and general presence. Such a target was what the Indians could aim their guns at.
But that error has been rectified, hasn’t it?
If very clear ‘non-state’ actors were doing the dirty work, Islamabad could keep its hands clean and point to the mess with sympathy. After all, it was a victim of the war on terror too…
Now the plan required a very visible ‘defensive’ mobilization of Pakistani military to thwart an ‘unnecessarily wanton and aggressive’ New-Delhi from pursuing foolish military plans. Hussein understood that the game was about time. A month or two and the initial Indian fury would lose steam, as it always did. If he and his men could weather the storm that was sure to follow in the days to come, they would come out ahead.
And wouldn’t that be a damn nice change? Hussein thought as he removed his glasses and cleaned the lenses with a small cloth.
6
Malhotra sat up on the couch and rolled his legs on to the floor, letting out a deep breath. He rolled his head up to see Sinha standing near the couch, his body silhouetted against the lights in the small break room of the operations center. But he did see the navy officer smiling.
“Don’t you have better things to be doing than waking old men from their beloved sleep!” Malhotra said and then yawned. Sinha walked over to the small kitchen area in the room and picked up two cups of tea from the various kettles lined up there. Malhotra saw that unlike himself, his colleague was immaculately dressed in his crisply ironed navy coat down to the golden stripes rank insignia.
Damn navy! He thought with a muffled grunt. Do they always have to be so stereotypically immaculate?
He got up and grabbed his own coat lined up on the headrest of the couch as Sinha walked over with two cups.
“Sorry to wake you up from your beauty sleep,” Sinha said with a crooked smile, “But things have been happening that need your attention rather quickly.”
“Good or bad?” Malhotra sipped his tea. Sinha cocked his eyebrows: “Considering things, I am not sure what ‘good’ would mean or even look like.”
So true… Malhotra thought as the hot drink began having its effect, though his eyes probably would still be bloodshot from the long and extremely busy day.
“Anyway,” Sinha walked over to the table where his papers were stacked. He put down the cup and removed a couple of files marked with red and black stripes along its borders. He handed it to Malhotra.
“What’s this?” Malhotra opened the files and saw the title at the top of the page: OVERHEAD IMAGERY REQUESTS, AIR HEADQUARTERS, PRIORITY ZULU. He glanced further down to see that the request came directly from the top brass of the air-force. Further down the page were a list of latitude and longitude coordinates for about one dozen locations. From the rough grids memorized to Malhotra now from the China war, he recognized some of the locations…
“Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir?” He said.
Sinha nodded. “Sounds like the balloon is about to go up.” Malhotra re-read the tasking orders and timelines. “And it looks like your boys in Kashmir are going to go clean up the house across the line-of-control.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Malhotra said as he reached the last page of the file and then looked up: “Where’s the rest of this stuff?”
“That’s all they deemed for us to know,” Sinha noted dryly. Malhotra sighed and made a mental note to try and call up Air-chief-marshal Bhosale to find out more about these locations. He tossed the closed file back on the table.
“What’s our readiness for this?” Malhotra pointed to the file on the table. “Keeping our commitment to the disaster management teams in Mumbai?” Both men collected their files and papers and prepared to head back into the operations room.
“Two birds,” Sinha noted. “RISATs.”
“Okay,” Sinha said as he reached the door for the operations center and turned to wait for his colleague to catch up to him. “Send out tasking orders for the two birds and let’s find out what is at those coordinates.”
“Yes sir,” Sinha replied as Malhotra opened the door. The silence of the sound-proof break room was instantly flooded by the buzz and chatter of the operations center. Sinha walked out and Malhotra followed behind him, rubbing his eyes to try and stay awake.
Ansari sat up straight in his seat as the aircraft shuddered after touching down on the concrete runway. The turboprop engines groaned at full power as the air-force AN-32 transport began to slow. Several seconds later the aircraft was rolling off the runway and headed towards the military tarmac. Ansari saw his fellow passengers getting ready to exit the aircraft. There were the soldiers coming back to their units deployed in Kashmir, the odd government employees and even several Ladakh civilians. All were sitting in the forward cargo cabin of the aircraft, communicating to each other above the din of the engine noise through shouts.