Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) (23 page)

“We can’t afford
not
to get involved,” said Rama. He was busy assembling his bow from its components, slotting the carbon-fibre limbs into the aluminium riser. His lips were pursed pensively amidst his artfully razored chin stubble. “India itself is now in peril, and we have to help defend it or risk losing the main source of our siddhis.”

“It’s not often you hear a Brit say these words,” said Vamana, “but I agree with the Frenchman. We’re in this whether we like it or not, for any number of reasons.”

“The best we can hope for is that our taking part will help bring about a speedy resolution,” said Kurma. “If we end up fighting Pakistani armed forces, as we may well, the battle should be short and decisive.”

“Amen to that,” said Parashurama. “Let’s be the weight that tips the scales firmly in India’s favour.”

You may be asking yourself how I, your humble narrator, am able to relay the foregoing conversation to you in such depth. The answer, obviously, is that I was there. Rama had invited me to come along on the mission, despite objections, most of them from Vamana. The Archer was adamant that I belonged in the Avatars’ company and that, although I was untried in combat, I could nonetheless be an asset to the team.

I wasn’t so convinced of that myself. I was scared out of my wits at the thought of getting involved in actual fighting, with bullets coming my way and enemies hell bent on killing me. If it came to that, I could foresee myself dissolving into a useless, gibbering wreck.

On the other hand, I was Hanuman now, and my place was at Rama’s side. Hadn’t I rescued him and his brother Lakshmana when the demon Ahiravan took them captive and held them in his palace in the underworld? Hadn’t I scoured the Himalayas for the magic herb that would heal Lakshmana after he was gravely wounded in battle? Hadn’t I taken an arrow in the leg because I’d recognised it as one of Rama’s, although it was fired at me in error by his younger brother Bharat? There’s devotion for you, to let yourself be hit by a friend’s arrow rather than jump out of the way.

I knew cognitively that I, which is to say Zak Bramwell, had done none of these things. But Hanuman had, and his identity was superimposed on mine. The two of us coexisted within me, Hanuman’s exploits my exploits as well, his personality tingeing my personality. It was as though I was being haunted by a ghost, and the ghost was me. Does that make any sense? No? How about this, then? It was as though I had been driving along and pulled over to pick up a hitchhiker, and the hitchhiker, who from behind looked like a stranger, turned out to be someone I knew really well. Is that better? This deva business is tricky to explain to anyone who hasn’t become one. Like trying to teach a blind person about colours or a deaf person about music.

At any rate, Rama had vouched for me. He’d insisted on me tagging along, to the point of refusing to go himself unless I did. The Avatars weren’t exactly pleased, Vamana least of all. I wasn’t going to be forgiven any time soon for kicking the Dwarf in the teeth and humiliating him. Rama’s blackmail, however, couldn’t be argued with. His flashy bowmanship made him the Dashavatara’s star player, their MVP after Parashurama. If the Warrior was the
de facto
team leader, the Archer was definitely second-in-command, and what he wanted, he got.

We stepped out of the
Garuda
into the blowsy north Indian heat. A score of air force men lined up on the tarmac to form an honour guard, and we were met formally by a senior officer in full dress uniform with a chestful of ribbons and a heap of gold braid on either shoulder.

“Air Marshal Pradeep Venkatesan, commander in chief of Western Air Command,” he said. “At your service, my lords.”

“No ‘my lords,’” said Parashurama, returning Venkatesan’s crisp salute with an equally crisp one of his own. “Just call us by our Avatar names. What’s happening? Give us a sitrep.”

Venkatesan paused while a MiG-21 roared past on the runway and took off. A pair of pale brown Zebu cows in a pasture by the perimeter fence kept chewing the cud as the jet shot over their heads, unperturbed by the eardrum-shredding cacophony of its turbofans. Elsewhere there was activity, men scurrying urgently to and fro, ground support vehicles trundling between hangars.

“As you can see, we are in a state of high combat readiness. On the instructions of the IAF Chief of Air Staff, I’m sending planes out to patrol the northern border and conduct naked-eye reconnaissance sorties over Kashmir. The Pakistanis are doing much the same on their side, and there have been skirmishes, a few shots fired; so far without loss of life or aircraft, but it is surely only a matter of time. The situation is grave, Lord Parashurama – I apologise; I mean Parashurama. Very grave indeed. Basically we are awaiting orders to scramble all fighters and engage the enemy. The go command could come at any moment.”

“What about on the ground?”

“Pakistani infantry and armoured divisions are massing along the Kashmiri Line of Control. UN peacekeepers have been recalled from the region, which is seldom a good sign. If the UN packs up its bags and goes home, you had better be ready for trouble. Furthermore, I have it on good authority that Pakistan is boosting its troop numbers all along its border with us. The sabre is being rattled like there’s no tomorrow – and there may well
be
no tomorrow, unless we are very careful, or very lucky, or both. Now, while the war drums beat ever louder, how may I be of assistance to you?”

“Well, the
Garuda
could do with refuelling.”

“I shall get my ground crew onto it right away.”

“And is there somewhere we could hang out? Rest up and get some chow?”

“My private quarters are at your disposal,” said Venkatesan. “They are not far from the mess, where you will find the cafeteria more than adequate to your needs.”

My stomach growled. I was looking forward to some nosh.

But then...

“Air marshal! Air marshal!”

A junior office came sprinting across the tarmac from a nearby building. He skidded to a halt, fired off a nanosecond-long salute, then said breathlessly, “Reports just in, sir. Pakistani forces have crossed the Line of Control.”

“Where, corporal?”

“At three points, sir. The Haji Pir Pass, along the Sialkot-Jammu Road, and along the Indus Valley.”

“
Madar chod
!” Venkatesan swore.
²

“There may also be an incursion across the Siachen Glacier. That hasn’t been confirmed.”

“But it’s likely. The glacier’s always been a grey area. No man’s land.” The air marshal removed his beret and ran a hand over his thinning, slicked-back hair. “Very well. War it is, then. Parashurama, esteemed Avatars, I’m afraid we are hearing the call to arms. You may still rest and refresh yourselves, if you require, but...”

“No,” said Parashurama. “We’re here to help, so help we will. Gas up the
Garuda
and contact your superiors to find out where we’re best deployed.”

“It would be my honour. You heard the man, corporal. What are you standing around with your mouth open for? Get on the phone to Western Air Command. Hop to it!”

The subordinate scurried off. Venkatesan settled his beret back on his head.

“Such a sorry business,” he said with a mournful frown. “I pray that it will go no further than it did the last few times. Stay conventional, I mean. Not escalate.”

“We’re all hoping that,” said Parashurama. “And if the Dashavatara have any say in it, it won’t.”

Venkatesan’s amber eyes studied us, and I could tell what he was thinking.

We were devas. We were hardly what you might call
conventional
.

If we were introduced into the theatre of conflict, wasn’t that in itself an escalation? Facing gods, wouldn’t the Pakistanis feel perfectly justified in raising their retaliation to the next level?

¹
Secret Origin:
Krishna was a Syrian by birth, name of Abdulrahman Ghazzawi. He was raised in abject poverty in a tiny village outside the city of Homs and won a scholarship to study at the Technological Institute of Agriculture at the Damascus University. He returned home with the knowhow and the zeal to expand his family’s smallholding into a thriving cattle farm specialising in both dairy products and biogas production. Then the Trinity came calling, seeking not just a cowherd to be their Krishna but an
educated
cowherd, one with an evident passion for bettering himself and the world.

²
It means
motherfucker
, in case you don’t know or can’t guess.

27. THE BATTLE OF SIACHEN GLACIER

I
’M NOT GOING
to go into a full précis and analysis of the Fifth Indo-Pakistan War here.
¹
Nor am I going to go into the rights and wrongs of it. I’m not a historian, and this isn’t an impartial account of events. This is one man’s first-hand experience, an insider’s view. You want all the facts and figures, the stats and data, the timeline? Look it up. Better yet, write your own book.
I’d
read it.

I’ll stick with telling you what I know, which is this. India’s Chiefs of Staff decided the Dashavatara could do most good up at the Siachen Glacier, which is situated in the eastern Karakoram range of the Himalayas and is the highest-altitude, arse-freezingest place I have ever been or ever want to be.

Their reasons for despatching the Avatars there were twofold.

First, it was the most porous part of the border between the two sections of divided Kashmir. It lay beyond the point where the rigidly demarcated Line of Control petered out, and both India and Pakistan laid claim to it but neither was really happy about maintaining a presence there, on account of the inhospitable terrain, thin air, treacherously steep mountain slopes, year-round arctic conditions, and general inaccessibility. The temperature in Siachen can drop to minus fifty Celsius. Who’d want to occupy that sort of territory for any meaningful length of time? So both powers planted outposts and just sort of pretended they controlled it, while neither did. And since Siachen was relatively unmilitarised compared with the rest of the Line of Control, the Dashavatara would have more or less free rein to confront the enemy in whatever way suited them best.

The second reason was that details about the Pakistani incursion across the glacier were vague, based on interception of phone chatter among local civilians about troops being sighted on the move, heading north to south. The Indians didn’t quite know what they were facing, how many soldiers, if any, the Pakistanis had mobilised. A platoon? A regiment? A whole division? More? Reconnaissance was tricky, so the rumours could not be substantiated. Blizzards and dense cloud cover could baffle even the highest-spec synthetic aperture radar satellite imaging system, and there were countless valleys and gorges where men could successfully conceal themselves from overflying spy planes. There could be thousands of Pakistani infantry flooding into Siachen, or just a trickle of dozens. Banking on it being the latter, the Chiefs of Staff felt that the Dashavatara, whose aptitude for widescale battlefield combat was as yet undetermined, belonged where the fighting was likely to be least intensive.

It was a tryout, in other words. They were breaking the Dashavatara in, sending them where the least harm would be done if things went arse over tit and their battle prowess did not match up to expectations. The Siachen Glacier lacked the strategic importance of the other three invasion points, so if for some reason the Avatars failed to hold it, no matter.

Which may sound a bit callous and cavalier, but to be fair to the Indian military, they were dealing with a completely new and unproven tactical element. They were well versed in their Cold Start doctrine, aimed at rapidly responding to any Pakistani offensive through a series of carefully coordinated counterstrikes. Nothing in the doctrine, however, made provision for the involvement of super-powered individuals. The Chiefs of Staff were drawing up plans on the hoof, integrating the Avatars into their asset structure as best they could.

The
Garuda
alighted halfway along the glacier, at the forwardmost point of India’s nominal zone of occupation. Its spherical wheels crunched deep into the layer of snow covering the ice. We were in a flat-bottomed valley, chains of ragged peaks on either side. We stepped out of the aircraft and were immediately hit by the arid, numbing cold of the place; the oxygen-poor air literally took your breath away.