Dragonfire (17 page)

The screen went to black and returned with the Reuters’ satellite feed logo. In the studio Max Harding remained silent for a number of seconds before speaking. ‘Foreign Minister
Song,’ he began, ‘perhaps you could tell us what exactly was going on there.’

The director switched the camera to the feed from Hong Kong, but Jamie Song’s position was empty. The tiny black microphone which had been clipped to his tie dangled on the arm of the
chair and then the link was cut.

Oval Office, White House, Washington, DC

Local time: 0800 Friday 4 May 2007
GMT: 1300 Friday 4 May 2007

‘I know it
runs against every grain of your new foreign policy, Mr President, but if you do not react to this massacre, we should hand back the campaign money for
the next election and retire.’ Ennio Barber, aged thirty-five, was one of John Hastings’s closest personal advisers.

What Tom Bloodworth gave him in diplomatic and military pragmatism, Barber gave him in domestic and electoral advice.

Within hours of the Tibetan massacre being shown worldwide, political opponents had already been on television calling for sanctions against China. Each had a different comparison, yet each
amounted to the same.

It was compared to the Tiananmen Square killings on 4 June 1989, to the slaughter on 20 March 1959 outside the Chinese Transport Centre in Lhasa, and to the 1956 tragedy in Magyarovar, Hungary
when eighty-four unarmed demonstrators were shot down by Communist machine guns. There was an emphasis on the word
Communist
, to show that while the United States had defeated the Soviet
Union in the Cold War, it had yet to contend with China.

‘The relationship with China will sort itself out, Mr President,’ said Ennio Barber. ‘The question facing us now is what message should you, the President, send to the American
people about the atrocities in Tibet.’

With John Hastings and Barber were the National Security Advisor, Tom Bloodworth, and the Secretary of State, Joan Holden.

‘I think we have to be careful not to get ourselves into a media-driven policy,’ said Hastings. ‘I don’t care if we keep our mouths shut for another twenty-four or
forty-eight hours on this. Tom, could you give us a run-down of what we know happened and what is happening now.’

‘The demonstrators were on the corners of Lingyu Shar and Chingdrol Shar Lam,’ said Bloodworth. ‘It’s an area in the south-east corner of Lhasa. Most of them had walked
about three hundred yards from Jokhang where more disturbances were taking place. They were unarmed and, it appears, none of the Tibetan Special Frontier Force, which has so effectively infiltrated
Lhasa, was with them.’

Bloodworth turned on a television set, ran the video disc for a few seconds and paused on the picture of the machine-gun post on the roof. ‘This is a PLA post, put up after the Drapchi
raid, to protect the government offices.’ He paused on the armoured car coming out of the compound to the north. ‘This is the headquarters of the Public Security Bureau, who are a
permanent street security presence in Tibet. In other words the PSB regard the streets of Lhasa as their patch, while the more disciplined PLA are under stricter orders of engagement. The massacre,
Mr President, was carried out by the PSB, against the specific instructions of the PLA.’

‘Which has overall command?’

‘In a situation where the PLA is deployed, it should technically be the army,’ said Bloodworth.

‘So the Chinese might admit to a renegade unit being responsible and we would all be off the hook.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Joan Holden. ‘The Chinese security chief, General Tang Siju, came from the Public Security Bureau. He is one of President Tao’s closest confidants and
he is very unlikely to let his old friends be criticized for killing rebellious Tibetans. China will speak with one voice on this one.’

‘We have satellite surveillance to back up our HUMINT reports stumbling out of Lhasa,’ said Bloodworth. ‘Protests have been going on just about every day since the Drapchi
break-out. Some only a few hundred. The biggest are between three and five thousand people. Many of them are spontaneous, usually sparked off by the police arresting someone. Although supported by
normal Tibetans, most of the demonstrators are monks and nuns. Sera, Drepung, Ganden and Nechung monasteries have been closed. We have unconfirmed reports that twenty monks were gunned down in a
courtyard at Sera while praying. The Shungseb nunnery has been shut down and the military presence in the Jokhang is so intense that it is as good as closed. We believe the protesters who were shot
by the PSB had gone to the government offices after failing to get into the Jokhang.

‘The Chinese have put police or army units in all the major Tibetan parts of the city. The ones we know about are in the Barkor area just south of the Jokhang. There’s a 7.25mm
sand-bagged machine-gun position on the side-street off the south-west corner of the Barkor Square. Two armoured personnel carriers are permanently parked outside the Snowlands Hotel just
north-west of the Jokhang, to ensure that no tourists get out, or see out. The same is at the Holiday Inn, the best hotel in Lhasa, although that is not in such a sensitive area. All communications
are down. There is no television and the Chinese are jamming the BBC and Voice of America as best they can.

‘There’s another machine-gun post along Beijing Lu. The restaurants and cafés along there like Tahi One, the Kirey and Banak Shol hotels are crawling with police. Basically
the whole Tibetan area which runs around the Lingkor circumambulatory path, around Chakpori Hill and the Potala, is affected by riots and repression.’

‘What about tourists?’ asked Hastings.

‘The Chinese were going to fly them out at night. But things never got quiet enough for them to do it, without them becoming witnesses to the crack-down. They’ve been confined to
their hotels and the windows have been shuttered up.’

‘Are there American citizens?’ asked Barber

‘Almost certainly,’ said Bloodworth, glancing over to Holden. ‘Joan, do you want to take this?’

‘Jamie Song personally assured Reece Overhalt in Beijing that no American had been harmed. Song’s view was that it was far better to have a dozen Americans cooped up in a hotel room
for a week than have one arrested on spying charges because he’s been caught with a video camera. As even the PLA found out, the PSB are a law unto themselves, so Overhalt gave Song the
benefit of the doubt and recommended to us that we go along with it.’

‘OK, Tom, go on,’ said Hastings.

‘We estimate that more than ten thousand people have been arrested. Our satellites have picked up the sudden overcrowding of prisons. We’ve photographed Gutsa in the east of the
city, which is a PSB detention centre; Sangyip in the north-east; Utritru – the Chinese call it Wuzhidui – which is usually for common criminals, but is used as an overspill in times of
riots; Sitru, Sizhidui in Chinese, which is for prisoners considered to be a threat to state security; and there’s a new prison less than a mile south of Sitru. This is where the ringleaders
would be taken and where the serious people would be executed and tortured. No one seems to have been taken to Drapchi, not surprisingly – yet this is where 45 per cent of political prisoners
are usually kept.

‘The number of dead is more difficult to ascertain. But given the killing we know about on video, and given that there might have been others, such as the shooting at Sera Monastery, our
analysts put the number of dead so far at around three thousand.’

‘Tell it like that,’ whispered Barber enthusiastically after a few seconds’ silence, and turning to Hastings. ‘Just stroll into the White House press room and blind them
with detail. Not scheduled. Do it as a “drop-by”, when the question is asked.’

‘But we’re getting asked it all the time,’ said Holden.

‘Then I’ll do it as a drop-by at State,’ Hastings suggested. ‘Joan can walk in with me.’

‘But what’s the policy?’ pressed Barber. ‘We can’t tell them what’s happening, without telling them what we’re going to do about it.’

‘Why not?’ said Hastings. ‘There is no American national interest in Tibet. We have no factories there. We do not sell American products there. It does not border any area
which is of vital strategic interest to us. If we don’t intervene in Africa any more, why should we in Tibet?’

‘Because Tibet’s special,’ insisted Barber. ‘Tibet and the Dalai Lama have a special place in the hearts of the American people. If we abandon Tibet after scenes like
this, America will abandon us.’

The red bulb on top of a direct-line telephone on the President’s desk flashed, indicating that a call was coming in to his private office from the National Security Agency. Hastings took
it, but within seconds put the call on hold. ‘Pakistan has launched a major attack on Indian Kashmir,’ he said.

Kargil, Ladakh, India

Local time: 2130 Friday 4 May 2007
GMT: 1600 Friday 4 May 2007

Kargil had a
symbolic place in the hearts of many Indians as the military sector which repulsed the Pakistani attack in 1999. There was actually very little fighting
around the town of Kargil, where the population was ethnically Kashmiri and mostly Muslim. It was the second biggest town in Ladakh, built next to the turbulent Suru River, but had little more than
one long main road with smaller lanes running off it. In the past few years, residents had access to all-day electricity after a huge hydro-electric power station was opened nearby. In the spring
and summer, the hotels were bustling with tourists. Kargil had two attractions: the awesome mountains and the Indian army which gave visitors a taste of being in a war zone. Hamid Khan chose it as
the first community in Kashmir to be liberated from Indian rule.

The roar of shelling began at 2130, battery upon battery of the thirty-year-old American-made M198 155mm howitzers. The guns had a range of twenty kilometres with normal shells and thirty-two
with rocket-assisted ammunition. General Hamid Khan did not want to carry out a symbolic shelling. India had rejected the offer of a referendum. In response, he was going to take Kargil and raise
the Pakistani flag.

The first rounds fell on the bus station, exploding fuel tanks and sending flames leaping into the cold night air. One of the main bridges was hit, withstanding only minutes of sustained
bombardment before it broke, collapsing into the river and cutting off Kargil’s main route to the northeast. The telephone exchange just south of the Baki Bazaar road functioned for ten
minutes, then went down with a direct hit through the roof. The post office, between the bus stand and the Main Bazaar Road, was pulverized by three hits, together with the State Bank of India next
door.

The bombardment lasted through the night, after which Kargil was a scene of burning debris, with barely a building in the centre left unmarked. Just before dawn the shelling suddenly stopped.
There was a lull of a few seconds, then the quiet was shattered by the roar of twenty French-built Mirage ground-attack aircraft crossing the LoC. They flew dangerously low, only a few hundred feet
above the mountain peaks. Using cannon and laser-guided missiles, two aircraft continued the attack on Kargil, ensuring this time that all roads in and out of the town were impassable. Other
aircraft headed along the LoC from the Indian side, hitting anti-aircraft positions and Indian bunkers. West of Kargil, they attacked Dras, the key town west of Kargil on the Srinagar to Leh road,
the key Indian resupply and artillery positions at Baltal, Matayan, the strategic command and control post on Tiger Hill and the Toleling feature north of the Mushkoh River. More aircraft
concentrated on areas just east of Kargil, where India deployed the bigger artillery units of 105mm guns, the massive 155mm Bofors FH-77B howitzers with a range of more than twenty kilometres and
the even longer-range 212mm Pinaka multi-rocket launchers. (These had proved disastrously unreliable in 1999, but were back in action again after being withdrawn and remodelled.) The Pakistani
aircraft laid down a lethal line of fire with a cocktail of weapons around Goma, Batalik, Lamayuru and Chorbatla, then climbed and turned back to home territory.

No sooner had they finished than heavier, more cumbersome and ageing American-built F-16 multi-role combat aircraft came overhead. They were equipped with conventional single-warhead bombs with
radar airburst fuses to increase the damage on structures and buildings. Cluster bombs sowed a lethal path of destruction, their tiny bom-blets throwing out delayed action mines and fragmentation
devices to kill people and slice through light structures such as aircraft and vehicles.

The first Indian aircraft were scrambled out of Ambala, Srinagar, Awantipur and Leh as soon as Indian radar picked up the air attack, but they were too late to engage the Pakistanis in
dogfights, and the pilots did not have permission to cross onto the Pakistani side of the LoC. That had to come from the Prime Minister and he had only just been woken up.

Hamid Khan’s final assault was the riskiest of the operation and began at the height of the bombing raids. A fleet of thirty helicopters, mainly the SA 330 Puma and the Mi-8 HIP C, some
with twenty men, others with just four, swept into Indian-controlled Kashmir, meeting little resistance from ground fire. They were protected by a squadron of the Pakistan and Chinese built Super 7
aircraft as they flew low for the sixteen kilometres from the frontier to Kargil. Each helicopter pilot had a designated landing area, depending on the debris caused by the shelling and air
attacks. Each unit had area to secure. The pilots dropped the men, from a hover, not letting the skids touch the ground, and headed straight back to the LoC.

It was in that narrow window of opportunity that the Indian fighter pilots found and attacked in a withering onslaught, while coming under fire themselves from the Pakistani Super 7s. Of the
thirty helicopters which crossed into Indian territory, only twelve made it back. Three Indian aircraft were lost.

The men on the ground were not mujahedin fighters, but Pakistani soldiers, most of whom expected to be dead within the next few hours. Hand-to-hand fighting with Indian troops began as soon as
they landed. But they secured enough of an area just north of the junction of Hospital Road and the Main Bazaar Road to raise the green flag of Pakistan with its white crescent and single star
above the town’s mosque.