Fenix (11 page)

              Pathanya looked around and didn’t feel he had to say anything. These men were highly-trained, elite operators who had been selected for their intelligence. They knew what they had to do and how to do it. As such, Pathanya’s role as team leader was more unusual than a typical light-infantry unit. His job was only to lay out the plan of action and the next objective. He didn’t have to worry about the smaller details.

              Gephel walked into the room a few seconds later and saw the equipment and weapons laid out over the lobby. He turned to Pathanya with a smile: “What have you done to my dinner room?”

              “Apologies, sir. We will clean it up again.”

Gephel smiled:              “You won’t have the time.”

              “When do we leave?” Pathanya asked as activity in the room came to a sudden standstill.

              “Tonight.” Gephel responded. “Twelve hours from now, the gears start to rotate. The trucks outside will take you and your team to the airbase at nineteen-hundred hours. Dust off will depend on other elements doing their job so it is likely to vary. But rest-assured, you will
not
be returning to this location once you leave here, this evening. So make sure your personal belongings are stowed into those same trucks outside. Colonel Ansari is already at operations and I will be joining him soon. I just wanted to wish you all luck and good hunting!” Gephel turned to Pathanya: “walk with me.”

              The two men walked into the courtyard facing the snow-capped Himalayas around them. The rare sunlight cut through the clouds and illuminated the Leh valley. Gephel turned to Pathanya: “make sure your men get a good rest today. Mandatory sleep for everyone. They have a long and freezing night ahead of them. Understood?”

              “Understood, sir.”

              “Good.” Gephel then stiffened his back: “remember the extremely sensitive nature of this mission. Out beyond those lines,” he gestured to the northern peaks with his arm, “you and your team are going to be isolated and surrounded. This is
not
Bhutan, major. At least
there
you had the sympathetic population on your side and Warlord and his heavy firepower supporting your every move. Out here, expect to get shot from all sides and from everyone who can hold a gun. We all know what happened to Kalia and his men during the Kargil war.”

              “I understand, sir.” Pathanya replied. He had already made his peace with his personal life in case things went wrong later that night.

              “That said,” Gephel continued, “this is
not
Kargil. Here we are going on the offensive and rest-assured, Ansari and I will provide all the support we can muster. If all goes well, you will be in and out within two hours.”

              “Understood, sir. We will get the job done.”

              “You do that, major! Good hunting.” Gephel shook Pathanya’s hand and then walked off towards his parked Gypsy. In his wake he left Pathanya in silence, staring at the snow glistening on the peaks to the northwest. As he watched the peaks, wondering what lay behind them for him and his team, a pair of Mig-29s thundered across the valley, breaking his reverie. He watched the aircraft disappear across the ridgeline to the south and walked back into the building. 

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────

T
he tires of the heavy Tatra trucks crumbled the snowy gravel and halted with a jerk. The hydraulic pumps began elevating the three-tube launcher of the Brahmos supersonic cruise missiles to vertical position. Within a minute the tubes were vertical and locked in place as other equipment and comms came online. The Brahmos system was designed to be autonomous in its operations. A decentralized warfare system. All it needed were targets within a three-hundred kilometer radius of the vehicle in any direction. With a supersonic cruise speed of three times the speed of sound, it was a premier first-strike weapon, and a deadly one at that.

              These three launchers had been on the move over the past week and had arrived in the Kashmir valley only the night before. The Pakistanis didn’t have satellites but the Chinese did. And it was to be expected that all Chinese information on Indian forces in the Kashmir valley was being passed on Rawalpindi. As such, the autonomous Brahmos system was a key element in keeping the enemy guessing until it was too late. With readiness-to-launch times less than ten minutes and a flight time of five minutes, the missiles could hit targets before they could react or move.

              As the infantry convoy accompanying these launchers moved a safe distance away, the launch crews got to work. Target information was fed down to them from the army’s XIV Corps. To the soldiers guarding the vehicles against any surprise attack by the enemy, the nine manmade pillars stretching monolithically into the deep blue night sky was an eerie sight. There were no lights and all vision was through their night-vision goggles. The infantry force commander had informed all of his men to avoid looking at these tubes when the time came, else they would be instantly blinded. This suited the soldiers perfectly, since their job was not to look at the launchers but to scan outside their security perimeter, kneeling on one leg and with their rifles held up at their shoulders. Every several seconds they heard the mechanical noises of the launcher vehicles as the crews inside kept on working and the minutes ticked past…

“T
ower, this is mongol-two, we are rolling.”

The radio squawked in Verma’s earphones as the aircraft began to accelerate down the runway. He removed the headset and put it around his neck. The ERJ-145 rolled down the runway and quickly lifted into the freezing air, climbing away from the night lights of Srinagar. As the small aircraft quickly moved into the air, Verma put on his headset once more to hear the cockpit chatter.

              “…Roger, tower. Mongol-two is airborne and entering
TAC-1
air control. Out.”

              Behind him, the men and women manning their stations got to work. Comms came online and the large airborne radar mounted outside in the form of a beam, went online. The comms chatter increased as the aircraft began establishing its presence over the airspace.

             
All so familiar…
Verma watched the crew at work. When the China war had ended, he had hoped he would never again find himself sending men and women to their deaths in the deadly aerial orchestra of combat. The stress of combat operations against the Chinese had taken their toll on him, both physically and mentally. But fate had other plans in store for him, he reasoned.
  

              First the Chinese. Now the Pakis.

              He raised his headset mouthpiece and got up from his seat to face the crew: “All right boys and girls, give me a snappy sit-rep!”

              “Pike and lancer flights are airborne and climbing,” the lead radar-systems-operator, or
RSO
, replied from his console. “Scabbard is on station and holding. Viking-one and –two are departing Agra!”

              “Comms?” Verma asked.

              “
TAC-01
is at op-con ultra,” the comms operator replied. “We are
on
the grid and
green
across the board!” Verma nodded and looked further down the line of consoles to the electronic-warfare officer: “what’s the electronic picture?”   

              “Friendly
ECM
s are go.
ECCM
is green. We are radiating at long-range. Friendly radars are up and on the picket line.”

              “Threats?”

              “Our friends across the border are up as well. Kilo-echo bird is online and radiating!” Verma grunted on that one. He had expected the Pakistanis to be on the alert now. They had been doing so over the past few days and as far as they knew, tonight was no different. A
PAF
Karakoram-Eagle airborne-radar aircraft had replaced the
SAAB
aircraft at Gilgit. Known to the Indian electronic-warfare operators as kilo-echo, this aircraft was one of the Chinese-made aircraft based on the AN-12 knockoffs that Beijing liked to peddle to its allies. If anything, the quick replacement of the earlier Swedish
SAAB
aircraft just two days after its arrival in theater was a clear indication of the electronic intelligence sharing that had been initiated between the Chinese and Pakistani air forces. The Swedish aircraft was not integrated into the Chinese aerial network. The kilo-echo bird, was.

              “Any signs of our friends to the west?” Verma asked the
EW
officer to see if his suspicions could be confirmed.

              “No red bird in the air at this time, sir. But I am recovering long wavelength atmospheric scatter corresponding to the kilo-juliet birds.”

              “So!” Verma frowned. “Our pals in the
76 ACCR
are in theater; just not in the skies at the moment.”

              “It would appear so, sir.”

              Verma turned his thoughts to the Pakistani problem. Here he had to deal with the most immediate threat to Indian aerial dominance during the punitive strikes against terrorist targets in occupied-Kashmir. This threat centered around the presence of a dozen advanced-model F-16s split between Skardu and Gilgit. Of the two airbases, the bulk of the fighters were at Skardu with only two F-16s seen at Gilgit on defensive patrols. The
PAF
warfighting concept for this region was clear. The Gilgit based radar aircraft would direct and control the much more forward-based Skardu F-16s plus any additional aircraft flown in from airbases in mainland Pakistan. In theory, they could bring a lot of their forces to bear on the Indians. Reality was different.

              Modern air combat is all about temporal-aerial-density. This means that it is less about how many airplanes a nation has and more to do with their ability to concentrate more fighters than their opponent in a given time inside a three-dimensional box in space. If this box is further away from the airbases and consequently the combatant does not have the ability to bring in a lot of aircraft inside this box in a small time, the overall effect of the large number of airplanes is rendered indecisive in the outcome of the air war. Verma understood this doctrine very well and in his mind, the three-dimensional box was spread over Deosai and Skardu. Airbases from Pakistan could allow PAF fighters to fly into this box but they could not do so quickly enough to stop the Indians from completing their strike packages. The PAF was not equipped with long endurance, high capability aircraft other than the very small batch of Block-52 F-16s.

              On the Indian side, however, the long-range bruiser was the Su-30MKI. This Flanker derivative had long range and endurance. Other fighters deploying from nearby bases at Leh, Srinagar and so on also meant that aircraft such as the Mirage-2000s and upgraded Mig-29s could and would join the fray as required. And in-flight refueling tanker support was available for those aircraft that needed them to get home.

              All in all, the
PAF
was a defensive force whose only strategic objective was to retain control of their own skies. They weren’t going anywhere else beyond it and they knew it. The deployment of a good chunk of their newer F-16s to Skardu and Gilgit was as much about deterrence as it was about defenses.

             
Well, we will see how that holds up!
Verma looked at his wristwatch. It was time.

T
he valley became backlit with orange-white glow as the first of the Block-III Brahmos missiles leapt out of the tubes into the cold night sky. The nine-meter long missiles climbed straight up on an expanding tower of flame and smoke and then slapped to their side using their maneuvering thrusters before accelerating to the north. They climbed above the Himalayan peaks around them. A few seconds later they ejected their booster rockets and the air-breathing ramjet engines roared to life. As the smoking boosters fell to the rocks below on ballistic trajectories, the first three Brahmos missiles created a vapor cone in front of their noses and broke through it just before reaching the line of control. They crossed into Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir trailing supersonic shockwaves that shook the mountains…

O
n board the Pakistani Karakoram-Eagle airborne-radar aircraft, the sudden arrival of the Brahmos missiles on the radar screens sent a wave of chaotic comms chatter as Verma’s counterpart in this aircraft attempted to make sense of what was happening. They had two F-16s up on patrol near Skardu and these were ordered to punch afterburners and move into position to try and intercept the incoming cruise missiles. But the Brahmos missile launches were timed for precision alongside the input from the Indian airborne-radar aircraft. And the two Pakistani pilots became aware of this fact as they dived from position and had to reverse back on their flight path. They were facing the missiles coming straight at them at three times the speed of sound. Coupled with their own high speed, the closure rate was enormously high. And as such, there was no time for the two pilots to engage anything successfully. The two
AMRAAM
missiles they fired flew past their intended targets at a relative velocity of four times the speed of sound.

              For their part, the three missiles were heading to their targets oblivious of the Pakistani attempts to stop them. They made it over their target area before a shot could be fired. These Block-III missiles had the ability for steep dives built in, which they put to use as they swept past the massive peaks surrounding Skardu airbase. The missiles passed the peaks and snap-dived into their targets: the Skardu runway.

              At such high impact velocities, they slapped into the concrete of the runway at three precisely measured locations equidistant along its length. The inverted cones of smoke, dust and concrete thrown into the air rose up for a split second before the large warheads on the missiles exploded and the symmetrical cones were blown apart by a wall of flames…

              Within minutes, the smoke began to slowly take shape in the form of mushroom clouds as the thunder rippled through the valley, echoing for several minutes across the peaks. The shockwave from the massive explosions also ripped apart one of the two F-16s that had been sitting on the operational readiness platform at the end of the runway.

              As ground crews began to rush to the site of the strike, the word was passed up the command line: Skardu airbase was shut down.

To the pilots of the two F-16s flying overhead, this was clear as day and they didn’t need any confirmation from command. However it
did
complicate their lives substantially. It took the leader of the two-man flight only a few seconds to realize what had happened: their main force of backup was now stuck on the ground. This meant there would be no support around for a while until aircraft from Pakistan and from Gilgit could come down to lend a hand. As they scanned the skies above the southern peaks, they began to realize just how lonely they were out there…

              “Pike and lancer leaders, weapons-free! Weapons-free!”

              Wing-commander Oberoi smiled within his mask as he heard Verma’s message. As commander for the No. 28 Squadron, he had been rearing to get into the fight. His squadron had been flying well south of the maximum detection range of the kilo-echo. He flipped the comms: “pike-leader to all pike elements: punch tanks and move to contact on my mark!
Three
…
two
…
one
…
mark!
”

              The eight Mig-29s comprising pike punched their two external wing drop-tanks in unison and accelerated with afterburners to the north. They now outnumbered the enemy four-to-one inside Verma’s aerial kill-box. The Indians had just acquired a much higher aerial-density in the skies above Skardu.

And Oberoi and his Mig-29 drivers intended to make it count.    

“B
andits turning…heading south. Closure rate at fifteen hundred.”

              “Pike copies all.” Oberoi responded to the input from Verma’s boys. He did the mental calculations to determine when the green dotted rectangle on his heads-up-display, or
HUD
, would turn into a solid one. This rectangle pair represented the input from Verma’s airborne radar aircraft and corresponded to the location of the two Pakistani F-16s north of them.