“Yes, they are. I should ask them how they managed to pull that off,” the Colonel commanding the local army battalion replied as he removed his night-vision goggles. Ansari laughed at that.
“Indeed! Probably whacked some Chinese outfit along the way, I bet!”
The twelve darkened figures were slowly clambering down the high snow-covered peaks of the Himalayas as they entered Indian Territory.
Ansari smiled at the sight. They had been right about Gephel and his teams all along. Here were twelve men coming back after weeks of operations in the arctic cold weather of Tibet. These men were the bearers of cold hard information about the Chinese in Tibet. It was Ansari’s job to debrief the team, make sure they had good food and to make sure this operation was closed out permanently.
Kongra-La sits at the tip of northern Sikkim and is approached after moving up the magnificent valleys of the north-south running Yumtang River. Ansari’s team had arrived at the village on board a Mi-17 that had taken off from a small army helipad at Mangan, north of Gangtok and flown northwards up the Yumtang valley which gradually increased in altitude from four-thousand feet right up to sixteen-thousand feet above sea-level.
The peaks surrounding Kongra-La were all above eighteen-thousand feet. Gephel’s team had walked through these peaks on their way into the plains of Tibet months ago as all other passes were sealed off by the PLA. They had walked through the most brutally cold winds and rocky terrain before entering the Tibetan plateau.
There was no food to be salvaged in the barren terrain of Tibet just north from these mountains until the fertile Gyantse valley, which was extremely well populated by PLA units at any given time. As a result, all food items had to be carried along by the team members. So the teams had to be extracted frequently in order to resupply and rearm them. And since all of the travel was on foot, most of the time inside Tibet teams was spent on the ingress and egress to the target rather than the target area itself.
Couldn’t be helped back then…
And now it is no longer needed!
Ansari thought and sighed.
Now that the two countries were officially at war, all bets were off on such operations. Indian SOCOM teams were already in Tibet. But Gephel and his team were black as far as operations were concerned. Ansari wanted this thing done and dusted so that he could return back to his parent unit and do some good in the actual war.
He grunted at that.
Actual war. That’s a good one. Try telling that to Gephel and his boys. They have been in a brutal war for months…
As he watched Gephel and his men approaching the base of the snow-covered peak, he thought about Colonel Younghusband and his small group of officers and soldiers who had travelled across these very peaks back in the beginning of the previous century. It was when Great Britai had attempted to bring Tibet under its sphere of influence.
That attempt north of Kongra-La had failed as a result of political resistance by the Tibetan officials despite the undeniable truth of military imbalance. Their stubbornness had seen Lord Curzon, then viceroy to India, dispatching a larger force of men under the command of Brigadier Macdonald and a political mission under Colonel Younghusband to try and force the issue by force. It was back then that the rabble of Tibetan peasant-soldiers who stood opposite the Gorkha and Sikh Battalions under Macdonald, were soundly defeated and massacred on the road to Lhasa.
And here we are today, facing one of the world’s largest land armies across the same terrain…
The bottom line today was that the Chinese were bringing down Divisions from the staging area in Gyantse towards the Chumbi valley on the Indian border.
And they had to be stopped.
Ansari thought about that as he walked towards the line of men trudging into the base camp of the army battalion. Each member of the team had beards by now and looked completely exhausted. But they had a smile on their faces.
So. Some PLA squad did get whacked on their way home.
Home?
They were home before they came down south.
Ansari ordered other soldiers nearby to assist the team members to get back into civilization, in a manner of speaking. He walked over and patted Gephel on the back. The bearded man turned around and smiled.
“Ansari! What are you doing here?” Gephel said joyfully.
“You didn’t think I would be here?”
“I thought we had lost you to the big-wigs in New-Delhi,” Gephel said. And then took a deep breath. “But it’s nice to see you again, my friend. It’s good to smell the scent of freedom out here, even if the mountains all look the same from both sides of the border.”
Ansari nodded in silence. He didn’t know whether that was true or not, but he knew Gephel had indeed seen it from both sides…
As the other team members disappeared into the camp, Ngawang walked over to Gephel and Ansari.
“I wonder what that chap General Macdonald would have thought if he had to face us instead of the peasants he massacred!”
Ansari laughed at that and neither Gephel nor Ngawang knew why. He explained after a few seconds of uncontrolled laughter:
“Just a while ago I was thinking about the same thing. I will say this though: all he had to do was face those Tibetan peasants armed with bloody matchlocks while he used field artillery and crack mountain troops. He still ended up needing a Brigade of men and thousands more people maintaining a threadbare logistical artery on a three hundred kilometer march to Lhasa. Your people ask us now why we didn’t go into Tibet in 1950 when the Chinese invaded. Guess what: back then the Chinese army was a two-hundred-fifty Division force. We couldn’t even spare a Brigade back then from the other requirements of the nation to help create an expeditionary force. But that was fifty years ago. Now things are different,” Ansari concluded. His two Tibetan charges nodded in silence.
“Perhaps,” the battalion commander noted. “But we still have less than a Brigade guarding these northern passes. When Lef-tenant-General Suman decides to divert some units to help me protect these northern passes better, I might feel better about our adventures into Tibet!”
The Colonel emphatically waved towards the darkened peaks north of his camp. Ansari, dismissed that line of thought:
“I don’t think you have to worry about these peaks, sir. We are monitoring the Chinese pretty closely on this. They are aiming for the killing blow to our military ability, not land grab. The last thing they want is unnecessary diversion of resources for tracts of land they cannot maintain in the long run. These peaks are natural watersheds, and will remain unchallenged.”
“This is not working,” Feng said quietly.
Chen nodded silently as both men watched the large sized screen inside the operations center showing the ongoing battle between four J-11Bs and four J-8IIs from the 32ND Fighter Division and a mixture of Indian Su-30s and Mirage-2000s from Srinagar and Avantipur airbases.
Losses had been registered on both sides as the BVR engagement had disintegrated into a melee at close range. On both sides the battle was being watched by AWACS aircraft.
Two Indian aircraft including one Mirage-2000 and one Su-30 had been destroyed so far. In return, all four J-8IIs had been lost during the initial stages of the BVR engagement while the J-11Bs had suffered two losses. The last two J-11B pilots were currently trying desperately to disengage from the battle by pulling closer to the Aksai Chin sector where the few handful of surviving S-300 batteries could provide cover…