“We will see,” Basu noted neutrally. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves! This government hasn’t really followed up on any past provocations either. So I won’t be betting money this time either.”
“Except,” Basu’s colleague added, “the nuclear threshold has been crossed this time. We will have to act or stand to invite further such strikes! There has to some line in the sand, no?
Basu terminated the meeting shortly afterwards. He made a mental note to meet again after his meeting with the Prime Minister. He was still lost in his thoughts, trying to figure out a game, the rules of which he did not yet comprehend…
Was this a new game?
Or just the old one with different rules?
He needed some advice on matters his department did not specialize in. Especially when it involved the military. Fortunately, he knew a man who did. An old friend with whom Basu and others had worked closely three years ago. He walked outside his office and asked his assistant to get him Lt-colonel Ansari at SOCOM.
3
The crowd of civilians waiting to be airlifted out of northern Mumbai were pushed away by the wall of dust moved up by the approach of an air-force Mi-26 helicopter. People held on to their belongings as the dust cloud enveloped the grassy fields and the blades of the massive helicopter threatened to uproot trees and people from their feet. One member of the forward-deployed ground teams, dressed in a protective NBC suit down, brought his hands up above his head and made a cross as the helicopter’s wheels touched into the grass and hard terrain and compressed under the massive weight.
The loud whine of the massive turbine engines began to lower. The ground crews moved up and began walking towards the ramp of the helicopter which was now opening. One of the army officers dressed in his NBC suit also ran up to the side of the helicopter just as the crew-chief opened the side door. The army captain was to the point as he spoke through his suit’s mask:
“Can you take some of these civilians out of here on your return flight?”
The crew-chief waved for him to hold and ran up to the cockpit where the pilot and co-pilot were seated. The pilot unstrapped himself and walked back to the side door. He saw that other army personnel were already unstrapping the BMP vehicle that they had airlifted in the cavernous interiors of the helicopter.
“What’s the problem here?” he asked the army officer as he jumped on to the flattened grass. He was taken aback by the sight of the mask-wearing army officer in front of him. A voice in his head asked him: has it gone that bad here?
“Sir,” the army man replied, “we have civilians caught out here and no mode of transport for them to be evacuated on! The roads are all clogged with water or traffic! Can you take some of them with you on the flight to Pune?”
The pilot, was the commanding officer of the air-force’s “Featherweights” squadron that operated these massive helicopters. Over the decades, the attrition on the handful of available helicopters had been significant. Of the four available birds, one had been lost during operations in Bhutan and two others had been removed from the roster for no longer being airworthy; a result of heavy operations.
The pilot looked back at the helicopter. This was his last bird available. It would not survive this hazardous operation. But under the circumstances, he was at a loss to find a better way for the last bird of his squadron to go…
“Get them aboard as soon as the NBC recon vehicle has been offloaded and mobilized!” He then turned to his crew-chief: “Get the civilians on board. As many as you can! And as fast as you can! No mad dashes! In double file and up from the ramp!”
The crew-chief nodded in the affirmative so the pilot nodded to the army officer. The latter man turned and ran to his men guarding the perimeter around the mass of civilians. Once back in the cockpit, the pilot looked at his co-pilot and sighed:
“Call up Pune and tell them we have landed with the cargo and are disgorging. Also tell them to be prepared with DE-CON teams pending our return. We are taking as many civvies out of here as we can!”
As the co-pilot began speaking on the comms, the pilot went back into the cargo cabin behind him and saw the armored NBC recon vehicle based roll off the ramp, leaving the helicopter’s fuselage visibly relaxed. A few moments later the first of the civilians began lining up at the back of the helicopter to begin boarding. The relief was visible on their faces and in their eyes. It was a tragic sight to see so many people being displaced from their homes this day…
“Sir,” the co-pilot said, causing the pilot to turn around.
“What?”
“Ops wants to know how many civilians can we get out of here and how many more will need evac!”
Thousands, probably! The pilot let out a muffled curse. He finally recollected his composure: “tell them we will need to make dozens of trips if we are to get all these people to the safe zones before the fallout hits this area!”
Goddamn it!
Air-Commodore Verma vented his frustration as he overheard the communications from the Mi-26 crew on the ground near the fallout areas. He turned away from the banks of radios lining his operations center at the air-force base in Pune. It wasn’t the first time he felt out of place during his tenure at command.
You know what you look like? A fifty-three year old man well past his prime still wearing his green flight-suit and standing alongside men and women half his age as they run about making your orders into reality. Time to act like it, old boy!
Verma sighed and resigned himself to the operations at hand. He had ordered pilots to their near-certain deaths during the war against the Chinese air-force. Back then he had done so from the operations cabin of a Phalcon airborne-warning-and-control aircraft. Although those decisions had been difficult to bear afterwards, at the time they had presented a clear option to him to achieve his goals.
This job today, was far more insidious.
The enemy here was unfathomable: nuclear fallout. He could not go out and touch it, or kill it. The only option was to get out of its way. But without resources in hand, would he be forced to give the order he knew his pilots expected him to?
His basic problem was the lack of helicopters to airlift so many people out of isolated areas in northern Mumbai within a few hours. That was when the first of the radiation fallout was predicted to start getting to dangerous levels. It was a simple problem of numbers: X number of helicopters needed for Y number of people to be airlifted out in Z hours. Since he could not provide X, so he had to give up on either Y or Z.
Neither of which appealed to him as an acceptable option. He wasn’t going to be the one leaving innocent people on the ground. At the same time, he could not willingly expose both the civilians and his pilots to get everybody out. Something had to give.
He walked over to the wooden table in the conference room of the operations center where dozens of large maps had been laid out. Most of them dealt with the geography of the Mumbai region. Other documents were satellite-based color-contour projections of current fallout patterns and projected ones at one-hour intervals. The room was abuzz with both army and air-force people running back and forth in near-chaos conditions. Lohegaon airbase in Pune was the obvious choice for running an operation of this magnitude. Pune because it housed the Army’s Southern Command which was responsible for the entire southern swathe of the Indian subcontinent, and Lohegaon because it was a large hub of air-force activity in the region alongside Nagpur airbase further west. Nagpur would have been Verma’s first choice but that location was where his superiors had made their “strategic” operations center. And as strange or even bizarre as that sounded, Pune was now the “forward” operations center.