Pathanya looked at the man neutrally and then nodded. Kamidalla walked out of the room, leaving Pathanya to his thoughts. He sighed as he switched on the television again to see the consistent videos showing the mushroom cloud north of Mumbai.
Kamidalla’s enthusiasm for getting his feet wet did not seem unnatural to him. He had been the same when he had been tagged to lead his recon team into Bhutan during the war with China. He had even beamed with pride when they had given his team the codename Spear. But he had been younger then, and not so much in years as in experience. His days in Bhutan during the war had tempered his enthusiasm more so than his colleagues here, many of whom had been forced to sit on the Pakistan border during the war, straining at the leash, but unreleased for combat against China. This younger crowd had not yet tasted the horror of modern, high-intensity war against a determined enemy.
He had both seen and tasted it. And it wasn’t pretty. The fact that only four members of his original team had survived the war was testament to that fact. His enthusiasm for war had died alongside his men in the mountains of Bhutan…
So what does that mean exactly? An inner voice spoke to him. Time to turn in your spurs and leave? Bullshit. Why the hell did you return, anyway?
The army’s SOCOM was going to need his services and he knew it. He was one of the experienced combat leaders in their toolkit to be used for whatever this crisis required. For all of Kamidalla’s enthusiasm and competency, he had not been bloodied by war. Pathanya had. Literally… he reminded himself as his thought went to the scars on his leg. It was time to pull himself out of whatever was holding himself back. His face changed from neutrality to one of grim determination as he saw the latest videos showing convoys of army trucks making their way into Mumbai. Their drivers were kitted out with full nuclear-biological-chemical, or NBC, suits. He had prayed to god that he would not have to see such scenes in his lifetime.
Isn’t that what my men died to prevent?
He balled his hands into a fist and walked out of the room into the now-bustling corridors, leaving the television running as it was.
“This has Lashkar-e-Taiba’s hands all over it.”
“That simple?” Basu said as he lit his cigarette and took clicked the lighter off. He looked around at the men in the room as he puffed on his cigarette from behind his desk. Almost all of the men here were about his age. Most were even balding, as he had started to in the last few years.
“You disagree?” One of the older men said from his seat at the couch.
“Not really,” Basu said after consideration. “Just that I expected Makki’s boys to be smarter.”
“You are disappointed that they only managed to kill what looks like a few thousand people? And irradiated northern Mumbai?” The old man said with emotion bristling in his voice. Basu ignored the anger in the room. As director of the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW, as India’s premier external intelligence agency was known, his job required objectivity and detachment. His colleagues in the room were struggling with it, though. He decided not to poke that emotion further for now.
“So we are pinning this one on Makki then? Why?” Basu asked as he changed gears and put a mental note to later investigate his own thoughts on the matter. “Just because this looks like the result of a similar terrorist attack in 2008? Isn’t that too convenient?”
“Well,” one of the other senior people replied, “Muzammil is already talking to the media from his hiding hole outside of Lahore and bragging about it. Like he did last time.”
The man on couch grunted: “Those bastards are like leeches, taking credit for the kind of shit that others don’t want to take responsibility for!”
Basu continued to puff his cigarette as he watched the conversation flow in front of him.
“I take it that none of the actual operatives lived to tell the tale?” The man on the couch said again. Basu nodded agreement: “The bastards took down one of our coast-guard aircraft and a patrol vessel that attempted to stop them from reaching Mumbai. The crew of that vessel sacrificed themselves to save the citizens of the city!”
“Shot down an aircraft?” The old man interjected.
“One of the coast-guard patrol aircraft,” the analyst noted from the papers in front of him. “Let’s see… ah, okay. One of the Dornier-228 type aircraft. Coastal-security had vectored them to the inbound vessel to investigate. The aircraft made contact and ordered the vessel to stop its approach. The crew notified their command that the vessel was highly suspicious and asked a coast-guard ship to be deployed to assist in verification. The crew spent fifteen minutes buzzing the boat and collecting video before they were shot down by an onboard shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile…”
“Wait,” the man on the couch said as he leaned forward. “We have the video of the ship firing the missile?”
“They were streaming it to coastal-security ops-center at the time. They have the audio and video of it at naval headquarters at the moment,” the analyst noted and then cleared his throat. “Poignant stuff, the last few moments of that audio.”
“I bet,” Basu noted neutrally. “Continue.”
“Well, the coast-guard ship made it to the vessel while it was still about two-dozen kilometers away from Mumbai harbor. Shots were fired and they disabled the Pakistani boat’s engine, causing it to become dead in the water…”
“And then the cornered LET bastards blew up their cargo prematurely.” Basu concluded and extinguished the cigarette in the tray before continuing: “Gentlemen, the use of the surface-to-air missile gives away the game, if you ask me. There is no way that that Makki or Muzammil could have managed these resources without the support of our usual suspects in the Inter-Services-Intelligence. The question is why the escalation to nuclear weapons? Knowing the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ is important, but also the ‘why’. When we find that out, we can get ahead of the enemy’s future plans.”
The old man on the couch nodded agreement: “Tell the navy and coast-guard brass to keep a tight lid on that audio and video. If the enemy doesn’t know we have the evidence, we can get them to make predetermined moves on their original plan.”
“Agreed,” Basu added. “But bear in mind that the planners for this strike in Pakistan probably know already that their original plan has failed. The detonation of the weapon so far out at sea has still gotten them damage to Mumbai, but not nearly on the scale it would have if they had succeeded as planned. So they will know that we know something about it. Expect the litany of denials and references to the supposed non-state actors to follow.”
“South Block and the Prime Minister’s office is going to be asking us questions very soon,” the man on the couch noted. Basu leaned back in his chair as he thought that over.
“I know…” he added absent mindedly, “…that they are going to want some action plans for us. Let’s look into that as well. Nuclear terrorism is not your usual run of the mill stuff. The government will want to take action on this one. If we have to get Makki’s head on a platter for it, we should have a plan to do that. Let’s get started on that one before we are asked for it.”
“Military options?” the old man asked soberly.
“Why not?” Basu replied, now sitting straighter. “Let’s be prepared for that as well. If we can solidify Rawalpindi’s and Haider’s involvement in this, there is every possibility of an open war.”
The man in the couch grunted: “At least that will make our action plans doable! If we have active military support in our operations, that will remove Makki’s protection cover which he currently enjoys.”