Fenix (19 page)

              “No,” Pathanya shook  his head, “not fair. But life never is. I didn’t
ask
for this assignment but I
did
ask for you. Sorry.” He smiled faintly. Vikram left out a deep breath as though shedding his doubts.

              “Where are we bunked?” He asked after a moment.

              “Two tents down, on the left. Get yourself kitted out and head back here for a briefing on what we are up to.”

              “Yes, sir. Any news on the overall situation?” Vik said as he hefted his rucksack over his shoulders.

“The balloon is about go up within hours.”

“
God!
This war feels like a continuation of the last one!”

Pathanya crossed his arms: “that’s because it
is!
The Pakis are like sharks sensing blood in the water. They think we are weak right now. And so they are pushing their luck. We will push them into their graves instead.”

“
Oh.
Before I forget,” Pathanya said as he stopped midway on his way back to the map-boards, “we are call-sign ‘pathfinder’ on this one.”

“Pathfinder it is, sir.” Vikram smiled and headed off.

A
cross the semi-arid plains west of Lahore, two-dozen launcher vehicles elevated their quad-missile tubes through the camouflage netting laid over them and pointed east, towards India. Each of the four tubes on every vehicle carried the subsonic “Babur” cruise-missiles. Essentially a clone of the American “Tomahawk” missile, the Babur was capable and lethal. The US government had disabled GPS coverage for both India and Pakistan to deter them from war. As a result, the Babur missiles were relegated to relatively inaccurate inertial guidance systems. But considering the short distance between the border and supposed targets inside India, the missiles were accurate enough. And that was all that mattered to the Pakistani army commanders. As the dust settled around the deployed launchers, the war now stood a button push away…

──── 21
────

T
he darkness of the night was shattered with streaks of orange flashes as the Babur missiles left their launchers. Their rectangular flight wings snapped out of the fuselage and locked into place as the air-breathing engines roared to life, propelling them to half the speed-of-sound and…

For those in Lahore, the view was visible from the rooftops as small specks of yellow-light to the east. Most of the civilians still in the city were those that had been unable to leave for various reasons. The did not envy what they knew was to follow now. Many of the elders in town remembered when the Indian forces had reached the outskirts of this city the last time Islamabad went to war with India. And as they stared silently at the specks of light heading towards the Indian border. The streets below them filled with jubilation as thousands of jihadists cheered and fired their rifles into the air: their jihad had begun.

“M
ongol-two-five here. Trip-wire engaged.
Inbounds
,
Inbounds!
”

“How many?” Verma walked over briskly to the
RSO
station. He didn’t have to wait for the answer. The screen in front of the seated operators showed a radar screen pointed west on top and north-south shown along the left-right axis. Small, green dots with altitude and speed information were beginning to populate the screen from about twenty odd locations scattered around Lahore…

Here we go!
Verma went into mental overdrive along with most of his Phalcon
AWACS
crew. His first call was not to the air-force’s western-air-command; they would
already
be getting whatever he was seeing here. And they would be scrambling every available aircraft into the air.

No, Verma’s
main
concern was the inbound missile threats. With impact time measured in minutes, the three army corps deployed between Pathankot to the north and Amritsar to the south were under imminent threat. The Pakistanis were trying to take the steam out of these forces before they struck across the border… 

He spoke into his comms: “mongol-two to picket-fence-actual: I
hope
you are seeing this!”

The response from the ground-based integrated-air-defense commander came over some radio static: “Roger.”

Verma cocked an eyebrow at that cryptic remark. The man was cool-as-a-cucumber under pressure. Even veterans like Verma were not immune to getting excited when missiles were headed straight that them. But that army man on the ground was completely unfazed!

Either he is oblivious to the magnitude of the threat or has balls of steel…
Verma left the defenses on the ground to the army and moved on to more pressing matters: the enemy air-force. “Mongol-two-three, what’s the long-range word?” Mongol-two-three was the
EW
operator whose sole concern was the long-range threats materializing over the horizon. This was accomplished through the use of long-range wavelength radio waves that “bounced” through the atmosphere.

Over the past weeks, the Indian forces had built up a detailed picture of the Pakistani ground-based radar systems deployed across the border and the airborne systems. Consequently, the possibility of nasty surprises was low. But vigilance was the prime rule of the game.  

“Getting crowded,” Verma heard and walked over to the
EW
station. The operator turned over his shoulder and saw Verma standing there before turning to point at the screen: “atmospheric scatter from multiple ground-based systems are filling the skies. Our friends are powering up all their air-defense systems.”

“For all the good it will do them!” Verma patted the operator on the shoulder before moving up the cabin. He checked his watch and did some mental calculations.

All right, time to shift gears…

Verma understood that the war would belong to the side that took the initiative. Both India and Pakistan had dozens of airbases within striking range of each other and had deployed advanced ground-based air-defenses.
Both
sides had the
same
advantages. So the
real
advantage boiled down to individual weapon-systems, training, and attrition reserves.

This
air war was not going to be a chess game. It was slated to be a raw slugfest.

“Picket-fence is engaging.”

Verma turned to the
RSO
station monitoring the inbound Babur missiles: “those missiles across yet?”        

“
Negative!
Picket-Fence is engaging
over
the border!”

Verma grunted.
Yup.
That fell in line with the ground commander’s aggressiveness. The Babur missiles hadn’t crossed the border yet. But the Indian commander controlling the line of aerostat radars and Akash surface-to-air missile batteries protecting Potgam’s forces on the ground was an aggressive bastard. He had his forces deployed in such a manner so that they were practically
leaning
over
the border. It allowed him to strike quicker and harder.

Verma approved all of this, of course. A lot of lessons had been learnt by the Indian military the hard way during the war in Tibet. A major lesson had been the ability to detect and destroy large, saturation missile-strikes by the enemy. The institutional defensive mindset had been shed in light of the sobering losses encountered at the hands of Chinese missiles. The effects of these lessons were visible tonight as contact after contact on the radar screen disappeared from view as the Akash missiles began intercepting targets… 

“
Leaks!
” The
RSO
shouted. “We have missiles breaking through picket-fence!” Just over a dozen of the Babur missiles moved past the line of air-defenses as the Akash missile batteries cycled to reload.

Verma noted this before the ground commander chimed-in matter-of-factly: “picket-fence here, we have airspace penetration by enemy missiles. I am all
out
. Over to you, mongol-two.”

Yeah, no shit, genius!
Verma noted sourly and turned to his comms people: “get any flight of aircraft with an air-to-air payload in the vicinity of the missiles and vector them in to
take out
the remaining missiles!”

“Wilco!”

“Mongol-two-five here. Inbound tag-three-seven has disappeared off screen! I…I think it has
struck
! Tag-three-one is off screen as well. The missiles are
hitting
their targets!” 

Shit!
Verma turned to the comms officer as the latter spoke into his headset: “dagger-two,
break
pattern and
engage
low-altitude targets on bearing two-one-five! Mongol-two has the ball! Vectors to follow!”

“W
ilco. Dagger is moving to intercept.” Wing-commander Naresh Grewal looked to his port side to see the other three
LCA
“Tejas” fighters in a echelon-left deployment. The pilots were all equipped with the helmet-mounted night-optics that rendered the world around them in shades of green and black. The cloud cover below reflected the moonlight and was enhanced in their views as a white-colored floor. 

“Dagger-actual to all dagger birds, you heard the man. Follow me!”

Grewal flipped his delta-winged interceptor to starboard and dived through the clouds below, followed by his three other pilots. His visibility disappeared and the slick clouds engulfed the cockpit glass from all sides. The aircraft vibrated in the turbulence. All four aircraft broke under the clouds, facing a dark-green landscape below punctuated with a several unnaturally enhanced white light-balls. Grewal pulled the aircraft level and scanned the northwestern skies for white blobs of light moving against the dark background. Of that he found
many!
Army and air-force helicopters were flying all over the place…

“
Damn!
Dagger-leader,” his radio squawked, “how the
hell
are we supposed to
I-D
the missiles amongst all this?”

Grewal frantically looked left and right as they thundered on. “Roger, -two! Keep your eyes peeled for light-balls moving fast and low, then close in for
I-D
from the six-o-clock
before
engaging! Last thing we need is to be shooting at our own guys out here!”

“Wilco.”

The radio chimed again: “mongol-two here: enemy missiles just passed
under
you! What the
hell
is going on out there, dagger?!” 

Goddamn it!
Grewal growled and enabled the transmit: “mongol-two: I have
dozens
of inbounds showing up here on my night-optics! Somebody needs to pass the message to those army pilots to land their birds or else we are likely to hit our own guys! I need a vector!”

“One-three-five, relative!”

Grewal ignored the curt response from Verma. He flipped his aircraft and brought it about on a easterly heading and dived for the deck. Two of the Babur missile’s engine exhausts showed up on his night-optics as white balls of light…

“Dagger-actual has visual on
two
inbounds heading south in general direction of Bathinda!”

“Dagger-three has visual on
one
inbound heading
east!
”

“Dagger-four also has visual on
one
inbound!”

Grewal added it up in his head. The numbers came up short. What happened to the other missiles?

Shit! No time.
He enabled the infrared guidance on his R-73 heat-seeking missile. It had no difficulty locking on to that massive thermal plume from the Babur missiles in front of him. The enemy missiles were chugging along at a cruising speed, oblivious to the threat materializing to their rear. Grewal heard the audio tone of missile-lock and depressed the launch button on his control stick. The shower of white blanketed his vision abruptly as the R-73 leapt off the rails and fell lower, matching the altitude of the Babur missiles. Two seconds later it exploded behind one of them in a ball of orange-yellow flame, shredding the target into fragments. The fragments struck the farmland below in a shower of sparks as Grewal’s
LCA
thundered overhead.

As he banked, he saw his wingman destroying the other Babur missile before pulling above the exploding fireball. The underneath of his
LCA
was momentarily lit up in the glow of the explosion. Grewal rubbed his eyes with his gloved fingers whilst climbing up towards the clouds. His radio squawked: “dagger-three here: we splashed two more targets! No more inbounds to be seen. Over.”

“Roger. Good job, gentlemen!” Grewal shook his head and cleared his vision before lowering his night-optics again. “Formate with me and return to altitude! We are burning up a lot of fuel down here!”

“Wilco.”

Hel then changed frequencies: “mongol-two, we splashed
four
enemy missiles and are awaiting vectors. Over.”

“Negative on vectors, dagger. We count
eight
missile strikes against friendly ground units. No more targets to intercept.” Grewal tightened his grip around the control-stick. Despite their efforts, eight missiles had broken through to their targets and struck. Only god knew how many lives had been lost…

The radio chimed in after several seconds of silence: “dagger, what’s your combat status?”

“All green, mongol-two. Dagger is
still
in the fight.” Grewal checked the fuel and weapons indicators.
Yup. All green.

“Roger. Move to vector three-five at ten-thousand feet and hold station.” The four
LCA
s broke through the cloud cover and were once again staring at the starlit skies above. Grewal could now see numerous sets of lights showing up on the horizon. A
lot
of friendly combat aircraft were collecting in the skies around him.

“Dagger requesting sit-rep, mongol-two.” He was not one to sit in the dark while the war lit up around his ears. He needed to know what the threat picture was. The onboard radar on the
LCA
was meant to seek and destroy, not scan the skies like a flashlight in the dark.
That
was Verma’s job.

“Sitrep is fluid, dagger. Will advise momentarily.”

“
Yeah.
I guess we will just twiddle our thumbs in the meantime then!” Grewal added after disabling the voice transmit.

“M
ongol-two-three here, two long-range
mobile
radar sources detected on bearing two-five-two and three-one-five magnetic! Airborne. And coming over the horizon.”