“Sir!” Akram said in surprise. “What are you doing?”
“It’s too late, Akram!” Haider shouted. “They know we are here! Send the convoy on the road and follow me! We will use the trucks as decoy and make our way into the hills!”
Akram understood his commander’s intention instantly. He muttered an expletive and patted on the side of the truck cabin, ordering the driver to drive on. But the soldiers around them were no fools. Once they saw what the two senior officers were doing, they also began abandoning the trucks…
“You fools!” Haider shouted as he clicked the safety off his rifle and pointed it at the driver who was panicking in front of him. “Get back into the truck and start driving!”
“Sir!” Akram shouted as he watched Haider point the rifle at his own soldiers. “What are you…!”
Akram’s shout was interrupted mid-sentence as a Nag anti-tank missile slammed into the rearmost ambulance in the convoy. The vehicle exploded into fragments. The shockwave ripped through the area and sent everyone around tumbling.
When Haider regained his composure, he found himself thrown into one of the wooden tables they had been using for breakfast just minutes before. As his vision moved alternatively between blurred and clear, he saw the rearmost truck in his five truck convoy burning and spewing black smoke. Cannon rounds were exploding within the other trucks as Indian LCH gunships streaked overhead, spewing flames from their chin-turrets…
He got himself up, only to have to take cover behind a small mud wall as another line of cannon rounds punctured the ground and headed towards two of his officers returning fire from their rifles. Both men were shredded by the impact of the cannon fire and died with agonizing shrieks in their throats. Further away, on the other side of the road, a single Dhruv helicopter landed and he saw Indian special-forces soldiers disembarking. The helicopter lifted again within seconds and flew off. He saw the Indian soldiers making their way to the trucks and knew time was running out.
Haider removed his sidearm from his thigh holster just as a few more of his surviving soldiers took up similar positions behind the same wall. They pointed their rifles over the top of the wall. Haider looked to see where Akram was but didn’t see him anywhere. Maybe he had been killed, he reasoned. In any case, it was too late now to matter.
He looked at the handful of remaining soldiers under his command: “kill these infidels invading our country! Show no mercy!”
The group opened fire just as the Indian soldiers took cover behind the trucks. The Pakistani defenders were returning a fusillade from behind the mud walls. The pathfinders, on the other hand, returned fire in single rounds or bursts. Within a few seconds, two of the five Pakistani soldiers fell backwards from bullet impacts to their heads. Haider scrambled to pick up the rifle of one of the dead soldiers and then considered making a break for it into the trees. But the gurgle of a dying soldier next to him, drowning in his own blood from a gunshot to the neck, convinced him otherwise…
By the time he picked up the rifle with the intention to return fire, two more of his defenders lay collapsed over the mud walls. And an explosion from an under-barrel rifle grenade against the outer side of the wall sent him and his last surviving colleague diving for the ground as concrete debris fell all around them. Haider put his arms above his head to protect himself from the falling concrete.
As the dust cleared, he heard clear chatter in Hindi as well as the moaning of his colleague. That moaning stopped with the crack of a single rifle round from one of the Indian soldiers. And that meant only one thing. As he rolled over in the debris, he saw silhouetted against the grey skies above, the camouflaged face of an Indian special-forces man wearing a boonie-hat.
As Haider squinted against the daylight, the special-forces man knelt down and smiled: “well, well, well! Look what I found!”
Haider watched in horror as the man stood up again and reversed his rifle butt: “oh, I have waited a long time to do this, you son of a bitch!”
“No!”
The rifle-butt came down on his stomach with enough force that Haider’s view instantly went dark.
The pathfinders turned away as Jagat landed the Dhruv in the farmland south of the road. The gunships continued to patrol near the hills. The grass and dust was being whipped around. Pathanya walked over to where Vikram and two others were standing. Haider lay on the ground, unconscious. He had been moved up against the tire of one of the trucks and his arms had been tied behind his back.
“We missing anything, Vik?” Pathanya looked around.
Vikram shook his head. “Negative. No others left alive. At least no one we care much for.”
“Fair enough,” Pathanya said and pressed the transmit button: “panther-actual, we have the target individual and are inbound.”
“Roger. Make it snappy. Out.”
Pathanya waved to the pathfinders: “we are egressing.” He patted Vikram on the shoulder: “Vik, you carry the asshole here. I have the rear.”
Vikram shifted his rifle over to his back and then leaned down to hoist Haider’s body over his shoulder. Pathanya picked up his rifle and hoisted it at shoulder level and moved backwards in short steps as they fell back to the helicopter. Vikram ran over to the side of the cabin and the crew-chief helped pull Haider’s body inside. Vikram then took position with his rifle. That was Pathanya’s cue to fall back. Within moments the pathfinders were all aboard.
Jagat powered up the helicopter engines. The Dhruv lifted off from the grassy farmland and turned east, leaving behind the charred remains of the truck convoy as well as the bodies of the soldiers and officers in Haider’s entourage. Within minutes the echo of the rotors dissipated away and calmness returned to the area.
In the gentle hills west of Lahore, Kamidalla and four other pathfinders patrolled the tree-line overlooking open farmland. Parked in the grass near the trees, was the other Dhruv, “panther-two”. Its flight crew were also walking in the grass near the cockpit whilst the calm winds moved the rotor blades ever so gently. A mist was hanging in the trees, greatly reducing visibility and increasing concealment.
Kamidalla looked at his wristwatch and then back at the blue skies above. They had a few minutes before their part of the mission went into play.
After what felt like several long minutes, the skies above finally filled with the droning noise of aircraft engines. Kamidalla head it first and ran out into the clearing beyond the trees. Staring up, he hoped to see the air-force C-130J that would be bringing their packaged fuel to allow the six helicopters to refuel and get back to Indian soil…
He waved over the radioman. The latter ran over and handed him the speaker: “pathfinder-three to angel-one, over.” Kamidalla and the four other pathfinders of team-two looked to the skies.
“There!” One of the pathfinders was the first to spot the low-flying C-130J as it flew past the hilltops.
The radio came to life: “angel-one reads you five-by-five, pathfinder. Suggest you mark red smoke to indicate the D-Z. Over.”
“Roger, angel-one. Standby!” Kamidalla made the hand signals to one of the other pathfinders in the tree-line. That man tossed the smoke grenade on a parabolic trajectory into the middle of the open field. Within seconds the red smoke was ballooning out of the grass…