LASHKAR (26 page)

The 40 mm GP-25 is a self-cocking, under-barrel grenade launcher that can be fitted on all types of full-sized Assault Kalashnikov rifles. It is a versatile weapon that always found huge favour with the Russian Spetsnaz. There was a fair sprinkling of them present in this region, most of them war booty captured from the Russians during their Afghan misadventure. They were capable of firing a grenade up to a range of 400 metres. They could fire two types of grenades, the VOG-25 fragmentation grenade and the VOG-25 fragmentation ‘frog’ grenade that would airburst at a height of 50 to 150 centimetres above the target and spray the target area below with metal shrapnel. Both types had a 14 second fuse. A trained soldier could fire a grenade every 4 to 6 seconds.

Captain Tony Ahlawat was a lot more than just a trained soldier. Firing rapidly he got three grenades to fly through the early morning air in quick succession as Sami sent off a well-aimed bullet towards the target. The first grenade hit the target just a fraction of a second after the bullet.

Overall, for the Force 22 officers, luck was just middling that morning. Though the sniper rifle did manage to strike the Maulana, because he was busy mingling with the crowd and constantly moving about, it hit him high in the upper right arm. It was nowhere near fatal. The Maulana felt the shock of the bullet strike home and stared at it in horror and disbelief. His hand moved instinctively towards the wound as the excruciating pain followed a microsecond later. His hand had just about managed to reach the wound, when the grenades came into play.

The first grenade overshot the small knot of men and hit the wall of the madrassa behind them just as its 14-second fuse ran out. It was a simple fragmentation one. As it exploded some fragments sprayed into the small crowd, but did not account for anything much beyond some cuts and bruises.

The second grenade landed bang on the head of the man closest to the Maulana. He literally lost his head as the grenade exploded. A satisfyingly large number of fragments also cut into the Maulana. Most of the fragments were quantitatively and qualitatively large enough to dispatch him to his maker although the one that won that honour was the fragment that lacerated his left eye.

The third grenade fired by Tony was a ‘Frog’ or the aerial airburst variety. It detonated approximately sixty-five centimetres above the small cluster of men surrounding the Maulana. It accounted for three more dead and wounded almost everyone present. One of the three who died was the ill-fated Maqbool Zargar. The other two were misguided youth who had just arrived from a peaceful London suburb to further their education in the Maulana’s terror academy.

The two Force 22 men dropped their weapons and raced down from the roof of the building they had chosen to launch the strike. Moving swiftly, but without showing any undue haste, they quickly escaped into the winding, narrow lanes. Their luck held good. Somewhere in a less-populated alley the thin latex gloves came off and found their way into their pockets. They had almost reached the outskirts of the town by the time the police arrived on the scene.

‘Shit! What a bloody mess.’ The Inspector commented when he saw the pile of bodies being sorted out by the ambulance people. ‘Who the hell could be behind this?’

‘Just about anybody, sir. Times are bad.’

‘True. Hmmm…’ The Inspector surveyed the scene with a critical eye. He was an old hand. Even so, by the time they managed to re-construct the crime scene and find the sniper rifle and the grenade launcher Sami and Tony were well clear of the town and heading back for the dune where their wheels awaited them.

Given the number of terror groups that had a free run in Pakistan, it took a while before the police managed to get information of the other killings at Mari, Karachi and Multan and pieced together the fact that this was more than just a gangland killing by some rival group. The state police responded with the usual profusion of checkposts that broke out like a rash along the roads leading in and out of these towns.

Sadly, the search operations lacked a discernible sense of direction.

By the time the local police managed to lock down Bahawalpur, Sami and Tony were already well on their way out. ‘That is the one.’ Tony pointed to a cluster of dunes about 200 metres away. The two men altered course slightly to jog towards it. It took them about ten minutes to recover the motorcycle from the sand. Tony jumped on to the pillion seat as Sami gunned the engine.

‘Go easy, man. It shouldn’t take us more than two hours to get to Akbar.’ Akbar was the designated link-up point. It lay almost plumb south of Fort Abbas.

‘That should be about it,’ Sami said pointing in the direction they had to travel. ‘Hope Akbar is clear.’

Two hours later the two men came to a halt at Akbar. Once there, they went to ground again as they waited for the safety of the night. It would have been madness to try and get across the border in daylight.

‘Wonder how long it will be before those two get here,’ Tony said as they settled down to wait.

‘They should be here soon. Either way we pull out at sunset.’

‘Yup…Wonder how the buggers are doing though…’

Sami opened a packet of food. ‘Knowing them the poor fucker they went after will be six feet under by now.’

Tony smiled gazing in the direction of faraway Multan.

‘Here…’ Sami tossed an absolutely unpalatable ready-to-eat at Tony. ‘Poison yourself.’ The two men munched the rations in silence, washing them down with a swig of water.

‘I’ll take the first watch,’ Sami said after they had eaten. ‘You get some sleep.’

Tony nodded, ‘Sure, we’ll need to be on the ball tonight,’ he replied as he made himself comfortable in the sand.

It was during Tony’s second sentry duty shift that the Pakistan Rangers patrol found them.

0605 hours, 31 October 2005, Multan.

Ibrahim Azhar, the man who had masterminded the hijacking of the Indian Airlines flight from Kathmandu to Delhi to get the leader of his terrorist cell freed from an Indian prison was a zealot of the highest order. He knew beyond doubt that Allah had blessed him when he had set him on the path of jihad.

He was a smart, if brutal and shortsighted leader. Though lacking strategic vision he was a sound tactical man and a firm believer in planning things meticulously. That is why the hijacking operation had gone like clockwork. That, and the fact that Salim’s hidden hand had been guiding him at all times. The hijacking had established him as a hero for dozens of misguided youth who flocked to join the jihad.

‘His one fault is that he follows an unvaried routine when he is home.’ During their briefing the Force 22 Intelligence Officer had read aloud from the file maintained on him by RAW. ‘These days he is home. We have a confirmed sighting of the man as of 2240 hours last night.’

‘In fact, that is the reason why we have picked him out from amongst the twenty of India’s Most Wanted,’ Anbu had added. ‘Immediately after the Fajr prayer the man heads to the park for a morning walk. He has been doing so all these months. No reason why he shouldn’t do it tomorrow.’

Clearly Allah was not watching over Ibrahim Azhar that morning when he stepped out of the mosque and headed to the park behind the house for his morning constitutional. As usual, he was surrounded by four bodyguards who accompanied him as he proceeded at a leisurely pace.

Pradeep Katoch and Vikram Tiwathia had reached the park well before sunrise. They now watched the small entourage coming up to the park and compared the face of the man in the centre of the group with the picture that they carried. ‘It’s him.’ Pradeep gave the thumbs up to Tiwathia – the designated commander for this mission.

The two commandos turned their attention back to the group of men who had now entered the park and were walking briskly down the jogging track that ran along the sides of the park. They had concealed the souped-up Claymore mine in a cluster of rose bushes just ahead of the third tree along the jogging track where it waited patiently to put a fiery end to its target.

*

Named in all probability after the large two-handed Scottish sword invented by Norman A. Macleod, the M18 Claymore antipersonnel mine was first developed and deployed by the Americans. The improved, deadlier M18A1 was developed well in time for use during the Vietnam War. The mine has a plastic casing that is 21 centimetres long, 8 centimetres high and 3 centimetres deep. It stands on two adjustable legs that can be used to balance it in all kinds of terrain and make basic height adjustments. The plastic casing has a steel sheet at the back, 680 grams of plastic explosives and 700 steel balls in the front. When triggered the device fires these steel balls in a 60 degree horizontal arc inflicting deadly damage within 50 metres and is capable of causing injury as far away as 250 metres.

The Claymore is an excellent anti-infiltration device and is very effective in ambushes. During 1969 to 1992 the United States exported over 1.36 million Claymore mines to 28 countries. Cambodia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia were amongst those that benefitted from this largesse. So, in the aftermath of the US support to the Afghani mujahideen it was Pakistan where these mines were readily available. That is why Force 22 had chosen it for this mission.

Today the word Claymore mine is a generic term for any round or rectangular directional fragmentation munitions that can function either in a command-detonated mode or the victim-activated mode. The 1997 Mine Ban Treaty clearly prohibits the use of such mines in the victim-activated mode, since one never knows who or what will trigger it off. However its use in the command-assisted mode is considered acceptable.

Vikram Tiwathia was a God-fearing and law-abiding man. He had a deep respect for the law, even for some of the ones he had never heard about. That possibly is one of the reasons why the beefed-up Claymore deployed by the Force 22 officers was command-activated and not the banned victim-assisted mode type. Another even more appropriate reason was that they needed to ensure it took out the right man and not just the first poor sod who happened to trip over it.

The bodyguards were scanning the faces of the few other early morning walkers in the park with the casual manner of semi-trained people, not mentally involved with their work. Even so they were careful to go through the motions since the man they protected could be bad-tempered and abusive when things did not go his way.

Watching through his binoculars from about three hundred metres away, Tiwathia kept a close eye on the small but prominent white mark he had notched on the trunk of the third tree. The tiny aiming mark was at a height of about seven feet and clearly visible to Tiwathia. It would not be obscured from sight by anyone walking under it. The aiming mark had been placed so as to give enough lead time for the target to be in optimum position when the mine exploded.

Tiwathia involuntarily held his breath as the target closed in on the aiming mark. ‘Now!’ He whispered to himself the minute the target’s body came in line with the white mark and pressed the tiny remote he was holding. An unseen signal leapt out from the remote and raced across the park to the tiny radio receiver attached to the detonator in the beefed-up Claymore mine.

There was a barely audible hiss and a click as the detonator triggered. The mine detonated almost immediately unleashing a hail of shrapnel and pellets along the arc in which the target was located. Almost one thousand pieces of deadly steel bearings saturated the area in front of the Claymore.

From across the park, Katoch and Tiwathia watched the explosion keenly. Katoch swept the fallen target with the sniper scope of his rifle. He was the back-up to take out the target in case he survived the blast. Tiwathia used his binoculars. He raked through the mass of bodies lying across the park.

‘We got him.’

‘Let’s make sure.’

They both scanned the fallen men carefully for another moment. ‘I can see one of the men moving but the mark is definitely down.’

The two men swiftly crept out of the bushes. After a careful look around they rose to their feet and casually merged with the crowd that had started to gather around. The sniper rifle had been abandoned in the bushes, the latex gloves peeled off and returned to their pockets. They stood in the crowd for a few moments. As the crowd increased the two men broke away from it unobtrusively and casually walked out down the bylanes crisscrossing the colony around the park.

As they were about to turn a corner and get out of the line of sight of the park, they stopped. ‘Fire in the hole,’ Tiwathia half whispered to himself as he triggered the tiny remote in his hand once again. The second bomb was placed high in the tree, about fifty feet away from where the Claymore mine had been. It went off with a loud bang and sent everyone scurrying for the outskirts of the park.

‘That should keep the buggers busy for some time,’ Tiwathia grinned at Katoch as they turned and moved off, this time at a much faster pace.

1550 hours, 31 October 2005, Link–Up Point Akbar, Somewhere South of Fort Abbas, Pakistan.

Tony checked his watch again to see if it was time to wake up Sami. He was looking forward to his second share of shut-eye. Like every good soldier he knew that one could never get enough sleep. ‘Tiwathia and Katoch should be here soon. Then we will all get some rest,’ he muttered to himself as his eyes relentlessly scanned the area around. Not that there was anything casual in the manner in which he kept watch. He was a hardcore professional and knew that careless sentries got people killed.

The late afternoon sun had started to throw its redness across the desert sands and the silence around them was almost complete. That is why Tony picked up the sharp metallic sound almost instantly. ‘Get up. There is something out there,’ he hissed as he shook Sami awake. ‘Check out the other side,’ he added as he crawled a little higher up the sand dune to enhance his field of vision.

Sami awoke instantly in the catlike way that Special Forces men the world over do. He picked up his weapon and headed for the opposite dune silently and swiftly. Climbing to the top of the dune Sami immediately spotted the Pakistan Rangers five hundred metres away. Instinctively, he pulled himself back to ensure he was not spotted. Not that there was any real danger of that happening, seeing the manner in which the patrol was advancing.