Fenix (32 page)

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“W
hat am I about to do?”

Haider had repeatedly asked himself the same question for the past day. He rubbed his hands on his face. He still had no clear answer to it. He sighed and looked to the side of the table to see some picture frames laying on the floor. He pushed his chair back and picked up one of them, blowing the dust off it. It was the picture of a young child who had once stayed here in this apartment…

             
Where are you now?
A voice asked him.
Did you make it out of here in time? You probably did. Inshallah.

              The picture of the boy seemed to speak to him as though the boy himself was standing in the room. Perhaps a manifestation of his conscience? He looked at the boy as though he were real.

             
Forgive me for what I must do to your house and that of so many others in this great city of ours. Perhaps Allah will understand that we did it for the safety of your generation against the Hindu threat to our way of life. Perhaps he will have mercy on those of us who shouldered this grave responsibility.

              He put the picture back on a wall shelf and adjusted it so that it looked as it should. The boy reminded Haider of his own kids. His family were on a truck convoy heading to the Afghanistan border via Peshawar along with other families of senior Pak army commanders.

              Will I see them again?
Haider thought.
Do I deserve to?

              I doubt it.
 

              He frowned and his eyes narrowed. He turned and picked up his sidearm and helmet stacked on the table and stormed out of the room. The chaotic noises enveloped him. The serene thoughts were gone. Time to get the job done.

              “Akram!” He shouted over the chatter in his operations center and waved the major over. Akram had been conferring on the map table with the colonels and majors commanding the surviving units around the city. The officers all turned to see Haider and saluted from where they were. Haider returned the salute but did not bother walking over to the table. He knew that these unit commanders had their own evacuation plans to enact. Haider’s plan was to withdraw his forces out of the city within the shortest possible timeframe, leaving only the jihadists to fight blissfully until the end. They had one final role to play before they went to meet Allah, and it was to provide the Pak army time to evacuate from the city.

              “Akram,” Haider said as he held the man’s arm and took him aside, “it is
imperative
that we coordinate
all
of our forces and pull back uniformly. The jihadists mustn’t expect
a thing!
If they do, they will drop their weapons and run, and the Indians will overrun all our retreating columns. It will be a massacre!”

              “I understand, sir.” Akram said grimly. “The battalion and brigade commanders have been notified to that effect. And the 6
TH
Armored Division northwest of the city are notified to expect our columns withdrawing from Lahore.”  

              Haider nodded. “Good. What about our special cargo?”

              “Captain Saadat and his men are setting it up near the field-hospital. They just need the go ahead.”

              “Excellent.” Haider looked at his wristwatch: “time to start moving, then. Let’s go.”

              “Yes sir.” Akram turned to face the room: “everyone: time for us to leave. Let’s go! Let’s go!”

              As Haider watched, the room became an instant flurry of personnel and equipment. The radiomen started packing up their equipment and antennae. The battlefield computers were shut down and closed. The maps on the table were rolled and swept off. Within minutes, the room was already semi-vacant. Haider put his helmet on and snapped on the chin buckle. Akram walked over after slapping a full magazine into his M-4 rifle. Haider slipped his sidearm in his thigh holster and nodded to Akram, who led the way out. Haider followed him out along with his bodyguards.    

              Outside, a slight fog hovered above the streets. The sky above was turning dark blue and the topmost floors of the buildings were reflecting the red-yellow sunlight. In the street below, dozens of army trucks and vehicles roared as they drove past, leaving dust hovering in the air. Haider took all this in as he stepped out of the building.

              The rumble of Indian artillery to the south reminded him that this city was nearly surrounded. Only the western and northwestern roads remained in Pakistani hands. And the 6
TH
Armored division to the north was manning them. This unit would receive Haider’s columns as they pulled out.

              “
Sir!
This way!”

              Haider turned to see Akram waving to him across the road. He looked both ways and then ran across, following Akram as he led them down the street. They found the field-hospital next to what
used
to be a civilian emergency care-center. Parked ambulances occupied the streets and wounded and bloodied soldiers were being loaded on them. The wounded soldiers were being hurriedly evacuated under Haider’s orders. It was a poignant sight as the tar of the road had blood spots everywhere. Haider’s only solace was that he wasn’t leaving these men behind.

Away from these ambulances, three of Brigadier Minhas’s “ambulances” were parked. Heavily-armed soldiers stood guard nearby as Haider and Akram walked up. They found Saadat kneeling beside the nuclear device inside one of the vehicles. He got up and saluted.

Haider quickly returned the salute: “all set?”

“Yes sir,” Saadat said as he stroked his beard. “The brigadier’s men set this up and sent us the remote-detonation codes. We can detonate via the Chinese
SATCOM
link.”

Haider exhaled as he glanced at the nuclear device and then nodded, first to himself and then to Saadat: “Good job, captain.” He then turned to Akram: “Are we ready to leave?”

“Ready when you are, sir.”

Haider jumped off the bed of the truck and back on to the road just as the rumble of jet engines spread through the area. All soldiers and officers instinctively looked up. Of course they saw nothing in the dark-blue skies. No contrails. No silhouettes. Nothing. But the sounds were
very
familiar to each and every one of them. Haider turned to say something to Akram just as the first thunderous explosion ripped through the air and the shockwave knocked them down behind a wall of dust…

When he woke up, Haider found himself covered with dust. The painful ringing in his ears would not stop. He saw that he was sprawled across the road next to an overturned ambulance. Soldiers ran past, helping the wounded. He saw one soldier in front of him screaming as his legs lay crushed under the overturned ambulance. But Haider couldn’t hear the screams over the ringing in his ears. It was a surreal feeling. All these years of waging war against the Hindus from behind the desk and he had
never
imagined them fighting back like this. He had underestimated their rage. And here and now was the price for his mistake…

“Sir!” He heard that noise and recognized it. Akram ran over and was kneeling beside him: “are you all right?”

Akram helped Haider up on to a sitting position and looked around for his helmet. It had fallen a few meters away and the chin-strap was ripped. Akram handed Haider took it shakily.

“What…?” he said and then shook his head forcefully to clear the headache. “What happened? Who got hit?”

Akram helped Haider to stand up: “Indian bombers dropped some precision munitions from high-altitude against our former command-center. We were
lucky
to leave when we did!”

Haider looked at Akram if he were crazy. He had been
inside
that building just a few minutes ago. He had known that it was possible that the Indians would triangulate his location based on all the comms chatter emanating from it. But he had expected that to take longer than it had. Perhaps he
really
did have nine lives?

“Major, let’s go. We have tested our luck enough!”

Akram nodded and motioned Haider to follow him towards the parked trucks forming the medical convoy. They would follow the ambulances leaving this place and hope that the Indians would let the convoy leave on humanitarian grounds. Abusing the Geneva conventions was not new to Haider. In fact, he relied upon them for survival against a vastly more powerful enemy. And today was no different.

As the convoy pulled off, they passed the street where his former command-center had been. Now it was enveloped in a dust cloud and the debris of collapsed buildings filled the street. Haider saw two M113s buried in the concrete. One of them was burning furiously. Soldiers were still pulling their comrades out of the rubble…

Haider shook his head and thanked Allah for his luck. It was every man for himself now as they abandoned Lahore. He leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes as the trucks finally pulled clear of the street and began rolling past the few civilians watching them from the roadside. Haider didn’t want to see their faces. Not now. It would only make more difficult what was to inevitably follow by his orders.

G
rewal looked to the side of his cockpit and saw the city’s eastern and southern outskirts enveloped by pillars of smoke. Fireballs were erupting below. With his target-designation pod hanging underneath the belly of his
LCA
, he could see buildings collapsing under fire from Indian tanks.

              But over the past twenty minutes, he had been seeing a dramatic turn of events. By all indications, it was clear that the Pakistani defenders were withdrawing. Under other circumstances it would have been joyous news to him. But it didn’t add up. The Pakistanis and their jihadi compatriots had been fiercly defending Lahore, inflicting heavy casualties on the Indian forces outside the city. And while it was true that the Indians had worked their way around the city, Lahore’s defenders had
not
been beaten. They could have kept this fight up for a few more days. So why were they withdrawing?

              Grewal and Ramesh had been on station as escort for a flight of Mirage-2000s from No. 7 Squadron on bomb-truck duty. Two single-seat Mirages were dropping laser-guided-bombs under the guidance of a third two-seater Mirage with a laser-designation-pod, similar to the one he carried. Grewal and Ramesh were standing away from the area and were operating north of the city at high altitude, watching for
PAF
interceptors.

              But the skies were clear. The radar confirmed that the
PAF
was not in the skies around Lahore this morning. Their capability to do so had been sapped by heavy-handed Indian counter-air operations. The aerial battle for Lahore had ended in India’s favor within the first few days of the war.

              But Grewal had that feeling in the pit of his stomach telling him to expect the worst…

              “Tinder-two: good hit. Switching designation to that northern building with the ack-ack battery on top. Tinder-three: you are up.”   

              “Confirm, Tinder-leader. I have the ball.”

              The radio chatter was keeping Grewal aware of what the Mirage boys were up to. The morning sunlight was glimmering off the wings of the Mirages as they banked to the side, a thousand feet below him.

He moved the lens of the target designator on to a convoy of vehicles heading north. He confirmed that it was a convoy of ambulances based on the medical crosses painted on top of the trucks. He wasn’t going to strike an ambulance convoy. He wasn’t
that
desperate for ground targets.

“A
ny news?” Haider asked Akram as the latter sat with the radiomen in the back of the vehicle.

              Akram shook his head in dismissal: “nothing yet.”

              Haider’s heartbeats increased. He nodded and then looked forward to see the ambulances driving in front. They were driving through the northwestern outskirts and the sounds of the fighting had fallen behind. They were passing through roads being kept clear by the military-police. The civilians were being shuffled to the side in hordes to make way for the military vehicles to pass. Even so, the chaos and confusion on the faces of the civilians was palatable.

              Haider wondered if they were far enough away yet. Technically, they were almost out of the lethal zone. But not out of the zone enough so that when the explosion
did
occur, the shockwave would rip through their convoy like a hot knife through butter. No, they had to drive further out of the city. Another few kilometers.

              Which was just fine to him, of course. The more time they took to get away, the more time Hussein had to call off this monstrous order. Maybe the battle for Rahim Yar Khan and the last stand of the Pak army units there would be enough to finally sap the Indian momentum. Maybe this order will be rendered irrelevant by a call for a ceasefire.