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“They are hailing us on the radio!” The captain’s assistant shouted.

“Tell them what they want to hear!” Afridi shouted back. “And stick to what we told you to say. One word besides it and your sentence dies with you! Understand?” The assistant nodded in fear and began to respond to the radio hails. All the while the ship continued towards the coast. All they needed to do was to buy time.

“The aircraft is armed!” Rashid said as the aircraft banked around the bow of the ship again, scrutinizing it with its infra-red optics. Afridi saw what Rashid was pointing to: there were a pair of rocket pods underneath each wing of the small patrol aircraft. Each pod carried four fin-stabilized unguided rockets. Enough firepower to sink this vessel without too much trouble…

“Take it easy, now.” Afridi ordered. “Let them keep talking. And keep that launcher stowed away. The more they talk, they closer we get!”

The assistant turned from the radio to face the men behind him: “The Indians are ordering us to shut off our engines and stay where we are. They are ordering us not to come any closer to the coast!”

“How far are we now?” Rashid asked.

“About eighteen kilometers away,” Afridi replied, looking at the GPS tracker in his hands and the paper map laid out on the chart table. He shook his head. “Still too far!”

“No choice then!” Rashid said as he flicked open the optics of his launcher. Afridi realized that his colleague was correct. There was no other option. He turned to the assistant: “You! Do what the Indians are asking.”

Rashid let out a derisive laugh. “Get them complacent! I like it!”

A few minutes later the ship was dead in the water. It rolled and pitched with the waves, helplessly. The flight crew of the Dornier-228 overflew the docile and obedient target, observing them via night-vision goggles. Behind them, the systems operators continued their task of observing the Pakistani ship through the infra-red and near-infrared optical pods. One of them spotted a man on the railing outside the bridge elevating a long tube at them and realized what that was. He shouted the warning to the pilots and zoomed his optics on the tube just as the optics flashed white. Then smoke drifted away from the pipe. The operator zoomed the optical scope back out and saw the rising thermal plume coming up towards them. The pilot banked his aircraft hard and prepared to punch out flares, but he and his crew had been caught completely off guard against such an unexpected anti-air threat. A second later it was already too late.

Afridi saw from inside the bridge as the Anza missile climbed into the Indian aircraft and slammed into its engines just as the pilot had released flares. The explosion tore apart the small aircraft’s starboard wing amidst a flurry of flames. The aircraft splashed into the waves a couple seconds later.

“There is no hiding it now!” Rashid said as he threw the discarded launcher off the ship and walked inside, wiping the smut of the missile exhaust off his face. Afridi turned to the captain’s assistant:

“Full speed ahead! Head straight towards Mumbai! Get us as close as you can!”

As the ship’s engines rumbled back to life and the vibrations made it back to the bridge, Rashid looked at the rest of the men and then to Afridi: “What’s the plan now? They will be waiting for us! There is little hope of carrying out the original mission.”

Afridi grunted in amusement.

“The original mission? The original mission still stands, my friend. But our execution is now much more direct! Prepare the payload!”

Rashid raised his eyebrow in surprise and then nodded. He then motioned to two of his men to follow him down the hatch, leaving Afridi on the bridge with everybody else.

Fifteen minutes later there was no doubt that the Indians were aware that something was going on off the coast of Mumbai. Afridi was the first to spot an Indian coast-guard ship on the horizon, steaming at full speed towards his boat against the hazy backdrop of the Mumbai skyline much further south.

Here they come… He ran over to the hatch: “Rashid! Are you ready?”

“Almost! Give me five more minutes!” was the reply.

“Five minutes! That’s all we have! Let me know when its set!”

Afridi then walked back to the assistant and saw that the Indian ship was now much closer, given the high closure rate between them. He could see the Indian sailors moving up the bow of the ship to man the mounted machineguns. He also saw what looked like preparations for a boarding party.

A floodlight from the Indian ship switched on and began moving up and down his boat. Afridi nudged the assistant to keep his direct course towards Mumbai, forcing the Indian vessel to move to the side. This time, of course, the Indians were not spending time to talk. A burst of heavy machinegun fire riddled the stern of the boat. Afridi and the others dived to the floor as splinters flew off the ship and tracers flashed by, lighting up the night. The thunderous rattle of the gunfire drowned out all other noises.

When it stopped, Afridi raised his head and saw smoke piling into the bridge from the rear of their boat. The engine had died and they were now adrift. The flashlights from the Indian vessel were shining straight at them, making Afridi wince and bring his arm up to shield his eyes.

“What’s going on up there?” Rashid shouted from the hatch as he climbed up the stairs.

“Stay where you are!” Afridi shouted back and waved him to go back down. “They are preparing to board and kill us. Our time’s up! We are as close as we are going to get. Are you all set?”

Rashid nodded in the affirmative.

Afridi looked at the light from the sky scrapers of Mumbai on the horizon and then smiled. “Good. Do it! Allah-u-Akbar!” Afridi closed his eyes…

* * *

…Several seconds later, a flash of white erupted from the Pakistani vessel and engulfed the Indian ship, expanding outwards for a kilometer in radius before rising off the sea underneath a rapidly rising stem of flames. Mumbai was backlit against this rapidly rising ball of nuclear fission. Manmade tsunamis raced towards the Mumbai coast along with a massive cloud of radioactive fallout.

2

The satellite moved above the brown-green subcontinent as it headed southwest on its orbit. The camera’s optics silently zoomed on the slowly drifting mushroom cloud over the waters of the Arabian sea, just northwest of Mumbai. As the brown pillar of dust and smoke lazily drifted east, the optics on the satellite zoomed in further on the city. Sea water had flooded the roads and turned them into gridlocks. Panicked people were attempting to make their way through the water as rumors and fears of nuclear fallout spread through the media. The satellite noted all the damage and carnage, but in the serene desolation of space, it was a muted sight.

* * *

The scene was anything but serene down below. At the operations center for the Indian aerospace command, the nodal agency for the combined Indian space based assets, chaos was taking hold.

“Tell me what happened!” Air-Marshal Malhotra ordered. As men around him hurried trying to get their assessments put together, Malhotra stared at the large screen in front of him showing the live video feed of what the satellite was seeing from above Mumbai. He looked at the corner of the screen as it showed various orbital parameters of the satellite in question. He saw that the bird overflying Mumbai at the moment was RISAT-2A, a recently launched satellite. RISAT, or Radar Imaging Satellites, were one of the newer generation series of satellites to be put under the Indian military command following the war with China. They were attrition replacements.

For Malhotra, it was very much a sense of déjà-vu. It was as though he was witnessing the very same acts that had started the bloody war with China. The same opening moves in a game of devastation. When that war had started, it had been a younger Malhotra at the helms of the newly formed Indian aerospace forces, operating out of the city of Bangalore, in southern India.