Fenix (3 page)

“Full speed ahead! Head straight towards Mumbai! Get us as close as you can!”

As the ship’s engines rumbled back to life and the vibrations made it back to the bridge, Rashid looked at the rest of the men and then to Afridi: “What’s the plan now? They will be waiting for us! There is little hope of carrying out the original mission.”

Afridi grunted in amusement.

“The original mission? The original mission still stands, my friend. But our execution is now much more direct! Prepare the payload!”

Rashid raised his eyebrow in surprise and then nodded. He then motioned to two of his men to follow him down the hatch, leaving Afridi on the bridge with everybody else.

Fifteen minutes later there was no doubt that the Indians were aware that something was going on off the coast of Mumbai. Afridi was the first to spot an Indian coast-guard ship on the horizon, steaming at full speed towards his boat against the hazy backdrop of the Mumbai skyline much further south.

Here they come…
He ran over to the hatch: “Rashid! Are you ready?”

“Almost! Give me five more minutes!” was the reply.

“Five minutes! That’s all we have! Let me know when its set!”

Afridi then walked back to the assistant and saw that the Indian ship was now much closer, given the high closure rate between them. He could see the Indian sailors moving up the bow of the ship to man the mounted machineguns. He also saw what looked like preparations for a boarding party.

A floodlight from the Indian ship switched on and began moving up and down his boat. Afridi nudged the assistant to keep his direct course towards Mumbai, forcing the Indian vessel to move to the side. This time, of course, the Indians were not spending time to talk. A burst of heavy machinegun fire riddled the stern of the boat. Afridi and the others dived to the floor as splinters flew off the ship and tracers flashed by, lighting up the night. The thunderous rattle of the gunfire drowned out all other noises.

When it stopped, Afridi raised his head and saw smoke piling into the bridge from the rear of their boat. The engine had died and they were now adrift. The flashlights from the Indian vessel were shining straight at them, making Afridi wince and bring his arm up to shield his eyes.

“What’s going on up there?” Rashid shouted from the hatch as he climbed up the stairs.

“Stay where you are!” Afridi shouted back and waved him to go back down. “They are preparing to board and kill us. Our time’s up! We are as close as we are going to get. Are you all set?”

Rashid nodded in the affirmative.

Afridi looked at the light from the sky scrapers of Mumbai on the horizon and then smiled. “Good. Do it! Allah-u-Akbar!” Afridi closed his eyes…

…Several seconds later, a flash of white erupted from the Pakistani vessel and engulfed the Indian ship, expanding outwards for a kilometer in radius before rising off the sea underneath a rapidly rising stem of flames. Mumbai was backlit against this rapidly rising ball of nuclear fission. Manmade tsunamis raced towards the Mumbai coast along with a massive cloud of radioactive fallout. 

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T
he satellite moved above the brown-green subcontinent as it headed southwest on its orbit. The camera’s optics silently zoomed on the slowly drifting mushroom cloud over the waters of the Arabian sea, just northwest of Mumbai. As the brown pillar of dust and smoke lazily drifted east, the optics on the satellite zoomed in further on the city. Sea water had flooded the roads and turned them into gridlocks. Panicked people were attempting to make their way through the water as rumors and fears of nuclear fallout spread through the media. The satellite noted all the damage and carnage, but in the serene desolation of space, it was a muted sight.

T
he scene was anything but serene down below. At the operations center for the Indian aerospace command, the nodal agency for the combined Indian space based assets, chaos was taking hold. 

“Tell me what happened!” Air-Marshal Malhotra ordered. As men around him hurried trying to get their assessments put together, Malhotra stared at the large screen in front of him showing the live video feed of what the satellite was seeing from above Mumbai. He looked at the corner of the screen as it showed various orbital parameters of the satellite in question. He saw that the bird overflying Mumbai at the moment was
RISAT-2A
, a recently launched satellite.
RISAT,
or Radar Imaging Satellites, were one of the newer generation series of satellites to be put under the Indian military command following the war with China. They were attrition replacements.

For Malhotra, it was very much a sense of déjà-vu. It was as though he was witnessing the very same acts that had started the bloody war with China. The same opening moves in a game of devastation. When
that
war had started, it had been a younger Malhotra at the helms of the newly formed Indian aerospace forces, operating out of the city of Bangalore, in southern India.

A much younger self…
he rubbed his sleep-deprived eyes.

And so it was. Over the two weeks of conflict that had taken place from the mountains of Ladakh to the cities of Bhutan and the high seas off the Indonesian coasts, space based assets had proven critical. At the time, however, India had been caught flat-footed on the military reality of space in modern war. It lacked redundancy in space assets which meant that
every
loss was crippling to satellite coverage. India had also lacked offensive space weapons such as anti-satellite or
ASAT
weapons…and the Chinese had not.

Malhotra was on point when one of his precious birds had been taken out over northern Tibet by Chinese
ASAT
missiles later in the war. And it had almost cost them everything.

Following the war, Malhotra had enjoyed an extended stay in charge of his beloved space units. Longer than most people in such positions. But he had been the right man with the right operational credentials to expand Indian military presence in space. In the last three years, he had initiated numerous crash programs to enlarge the command to the level where it actually was a full command, operated jointly by all three services. Several launches and deployment of military satellites had been authorized by the government.
RISAT-2A
was one of the products of this expansion program. And of course, he had also been promoted to fit the required rank for anyone commanding this force.

But
that
war with China had been a “legitimate” war.

What the hell is this?
Malhotra wondered as he watched the black-and-white picture on the main screen showing the mushroom cloud losing its shape as it broke over the Indian coast.

“What’s the prevalent wind conditions out there?” He asked one of the weather people sitting at their operations consoles.

“East by north,” was the quick reply.

“Fallout is heading inland,” Malhotra noted dryly.

“And some of it will make it to the northern parts of the city by mid-morning today,” Rear-Admiral Sinha added dryly. Sinha had been deputed here from the Strategic Forces Command, or
STRATFORCOM
, to improve synergy between the two commands. He was also now Malhotra’s deputy-commander. Nuclear fallout patterns and analysis was part of Sinha’s job specialization. Malhotra shook his head. He could not picture himself doing such a job with the objectivity it required.

“What’s the yield we are looking at here?” Malhotra asked Sinha, who focused his stare on the large screen and then glanced at the resolution data visible on the top-left of the video.

“A few kilotons,” he said with finality. Malhotra turned to his comms people and pointed to the screen with his arm:

“Get the folks at
STRATFORCOM
and give them our preliminary imagery analysis. Our boys in Delhi are going to want to get their hands on all of this as soon as they know we have it.” He then turned to see that Sinha had walked closer to the screen and was staring at some location of the screen. “What do I tell Delhi on what we think this is?”

The navy officer turned to face him: “Tell it like it is: nuclear terrorism by our friends in Pakistan.”

P
athanya walked into the officer’s mess building and saw a crowd of his fellow instructors standing by the wall mounted television in the ante room. Pathanya noticed the grim look on their faces and aborted his short walk to the library, to find out what the matter was. He found one of his fellow instructors, Captain Samik Kamidalla, standing with his arms folded near the television.

“Samik, what’s going on?”

Kamidalla turned to see Pathanya walk in and then faced the television again. “Not sure,” he replied with his fingers cupping his chin. “News coming in on all channels. Mumbai has been hit by a tsunami. No warning or anything. People in panic over there.”

Pathanya let out a deep breath as he exhaled in consideration. This was the first he was hearing about this.

Hell of a morning!

“Well, natural disasters aren’t anything new,” he replied with a hand on Kamidalla’s shoulder. “Stuff happens. Let’s find out if any of the boys who have relatives in Mumbai or nearby coastal areas need to take some immediate leave and see what we can do. I…”

“
Oh god!
”

Pathanya and Kamidalla both jerked towards the screen and saw a breaking news report that had just aired a video taken on the ground at Mumbai. The scene showed a brownish-white mushroom cloud dissipating into the morning blue skies north of Mumbai…

“
Shit!
This is no fucking natural disaster! We have been
attacked!
” one of the young Lieutenants in the room exclaimed. Pathanya pushed past the young officers to take a closer look at the television screen.

The room around him was already a hotbed of a dozen simultaneous conversations, ranging from panicked first reactions, to anger, sadness and shock based exclamations. Kamidalla let loose his own choice expletives under his breath, just loud enough for Pathanya to turn his head on. He muted the television and turned to Kamidalla:

“Forget the fucking vacations! Scramble everybody for war! Headquarters is probably still running around like a headless chicken but we need to get prepared by the time they are. Time to get ahead of this!”

Kamidalla nodded and then turned to the group of young officers behind him: “
Quiet!”
It was loud enough that his veins showed up on his forehead. “Pull yourselves together! You are officers, for god’s sake!
Army
officers! Act like it! This shit…” he pointed to the television screen showing the mushroom cloud, “is just the start. We will find out who did this and we
will
kill them. When the time comes, the army is going to look to us to slit the enemy’s throats. So put your personal stuff away,
right now!
”

The room was now completely silent. Pathanya switched off the television and turned to face the group.

“Gentlemen, let’s face the facts. This is, in all probability, a terrorist strike. If we were under a full-up attack, we wouldn’t be here in this mess hall five hours after the fact. The only reason we haven’t been briefed about this is because this has just happened. That said, expect the unexpected, gentlemen. We are the tip of the spear that will be shoved through the bodies of whoever did this insidious attack. So get yourselves in that mode. I want everybody ready with their equipment within the hour!
Dismissed!
”

As the young officers saluted and left the room soberly, and Kamidalla started to do the same, Pathanya grabbed the man by his shoulder, motioning him to stay behind. He waited till the last of the officers had left the room. He then looked his friend in the eye:

“Regardless of what we tell these boys, Samik, this situation is not going to stay in control. We can take a bet on who’s responsible for this attack but my money is on our Pakistani friends. You can’t just get nuclear weapons anywhere except in Pakistan. The government will figure this out sooner or later, and what happens after is anybody’s guess. God knows what they are thinking at this very moment!”

Kamidalla nodded in agreement. He then smiled wickedly: “Well, don’t know about you, sir, but this will be my
first
war! And
damn
it to
hell
if I am going to be sitting in Mizoram when the balloon goes up. I am going to go find the old man about this.”

Pathanya looked at the man neutrally and then nodded. Kamidalla walked out of the room, leaving Pathanya to his thoughts. He sighed as he switched on the television again to see the consistent videos showing the mushroom cloud north of Mumbai.

Kamidalla’s enthusiasm for getting his feet wet did not seem unnatural to him. He had been the same when he had been tagged to lead his recon team into Bhutan during the war with China. He had even beamed with pride when they had given his team the codename
Spear
. But he had been younger then, and not so much in years as in experience. His days in Bhutan during the war had tempered his enthusiasm more so than his colleagues here, many of whom had been forced to sit on the Pakistan border during the war, straining at the leash, but unreleased for combat against China. This younger crowd had not yet tasted the horror of modern, high-intensity war against a determined enemy.

He had both seen and tasted it. And it wasn’t pretty. The fact that only four members of his original team had survived the war was testament to that fact. His enthusiasm for war had died alongside his men in the mountains of Bhutan…

So what does that mean exactly?
An inner voice spoke to him.
Time to turn in your spurs and leave? Bullshit. Why the hell did you return, anyway?

The army’s
SOCOM
was going to need his services and he knew it. He was one of the experienced combat leaders in their toolkit to be used for whatever this crisis required. For all of Kamidalla’s enthusiasm and competency, he had not been bloodied by war. Pathanya had.
Literally…
he reminded himself as his thought went to the scars on his leg. It was time to pull himself out of whatever was holding himself back. His face changed from neutrality to one of grim determination as he saw the latest videos showing convoys of army trucks making their way into Mumbai. Their drivers were kitted out with full nuclear-biological-chemical, or
NBC
, suits. He had prayed to god that he would not have to see such scenes in his lifetime.

Isn’t that what my men died to prevent?

He balled his hands into a fist and walked out of the room into the now-bustling corridors, leaving the television running as it was.

“T
his has Lashkar-e-Taiba’s hands all over it.”

“That simple?” Basu said as he lit his cigarette and took clicked the lighter off. He looked around at the men in the room as he puffed on his cigarette from behind his desk. Almost all of the men here were about his age. Most were even balding, as he had started to in the last few years.

              “You disagree?” One of the older men said from his seat at the couch.

              “Not really,” Basu said after consideration. “Just that I expected Makki’s boys to be smarter.”

              “You are
disappointed
that they only managed to kill what looks like a few thousand people?
And
irradiated northern Mumbai?” The old man said with emotion bristling in his voice. Basu ignored the anger in the room. As director of the Research and Analysis Wing, or
RAW
, as India’s premier external intelligence agency was known, his job required objectivity and detachment. His colleagues in the room were struggling with it, though. He decided not to poke that emotion further for now.

              “So we are pinning this one on Makki then? Why?” Basu asked as he changed gears and put a mental note to later investigate his own thoughts on the matter. “Just because this looks like the result of a similar terrorist attack in 2008? Isn’t that too convenient?”