The two Indian Su-30 crews to enter southern Bhutan had caught the Chinese pilots at a disadvantage. Instead of waiting for a clean beyond-visual-range annihilation of the J-10s as they climbed out of the valley, the Su-30 flight-leader had decided to mix it up with them at low altitude in order to break their attack runs. The airport below was already ablaze and flames were lighting up the valley in an orange glow. Within the thin walls of the valley, the J-10 had serious limitations in maneuverability. Not so for the Su-30MKIs which were far better suited for this job…
The flight leader had already dispatched one J-10 and its unfortunate pilot within seconds of entering the fray.
The Chinese pilot never knew what hit him. And as the flaming debris of that aircraft hit the ground, the two Su-30s had swept over the airport and were already mixing it with other three J-10s. Their attack on Paru had been halted. Their struggle to make it home alive had begun.
The Su-30 flight-leader flipped his aircraft to the starboard, pulled back on the stick and switching to guns, laced the sky ahead of him with cannon rounds. Most of these found their mark and another J-10’s engine smoked out and the aircraft flew into the valley north of Paru, a dead man’s control on the hands.
“Smack-down!” the flight-leader sent out over the comms as he saw his prey exploding into a fireball within the alpine trees below.
“Two down! Two-to-go! Do you have a visual?”
“Uh, roger that, leader,” his wingman replied. “I see two bandits bugging out to the north and gaining altitude!”
“Huge mistake! Wouldn’t you agree?” the flight-leader concluded.
There was a slight chuckle over the radio.
“Roger that boss! I have visual. I have acquisition,” the wingman depressed the launch button and felt the R-77s falling away, “and I have engaged!”
The two R-77s streaked away trailing a smoke exhaust, tail-chasing the two J-10s on afterburner at ten kilometers…
The results were predictable. Favorable kinetics was available to the Indian attacker. Two near-simultaneous fireballs announced the destruction of the two fleeing Chinese aircraft. The flight-leader was not impressed with the PLAAF pilots and their poor visual-combat skills.
Amateurs!
“Okay. White-Knight-Leader declares the skies over southern Bhutan as all clear. Now let’s go find ourselves that lone Sierra-Uniform bird to the north!”
The two aircraft punched afterburners and accelerating north just as four No. 7 Squadron Mirage-2000s established DCA patrol over Paru. The gap in Indian air-defenses over Bhutan had now been closed. But with heavy losses in aircraft, personnel and facilities, the damage was done.
He had been lucky.
Saxena realized that this was the gist of it. It had taken quite some time before the pain in his ears had subsided. Blood had poured out of one ear due to shrapnel wounds. Scratches and burns were everywhere on his body. He had even vomited after the pressure waves from numerous explosions had ripped through the body. He was still somewhat nauseous from it.
And yet, he was luckier than most around him…
Saxena sat on an abandoned ammunition crate near the main terminal entrance of the airport. What was left of the terminal, that is. An army corpsman was tending to his shrapnel wound near the ear.
Other soldiers had arrived from Haa-Dzong and were laying the dead bodies on the side of the road, waiting for the trucks to take them south. As he sat there, he watched the seventeenth body being brought out and laid in a line. Some more were even worse off: their bodies not being recoverable from the debris just yet.
He sighed and looked back up at the smoking wreckage that was Paru airport at the moment. The fires had died away because of the cold and the lack of combustibles left untouched. But the debris was still spewing smoke all around.
“That should do it for now,” the corpsman said.
Saxena nodded to him in silence and the army medic walked away towards the stretchers laid out nearby where another wounded paratrooper had been laid down, one of his legs blown away and the blanket laid over him red with blood near the knees. He was dosed with painkillers and couldn’t feel anything. Saxena looked at him, squinted and then looked back again at the smoldering remains of the terminal building.
Time to get back to work…
He stood up, walking past the road now crowded with army soldiers. There were no soldiers inside the airport though. They had been ordered to stay away until the ordinance disposal teams had swept it. They had been working on for an hour now and were almost done.
“Heck of a mess, old boy!” a voice said from behind.
Saxena turned to back to see an army Lieutenant-Colonel accompanied by two fully armed soldiers walking up to him, leaving their AXE utility vehicle by the road. The officer was wearing his standard army disruptive-pattern camouflage uniform. His name tag said: ‘Fernandez’. Saxena snapped off a salute, jerking loose some of the dust off his uniform with the sudden motion.
“Sir!”
“Easy there, son!” Fernandez said. He glanced at the collapsed terminal and the smoking wreck that was the control tower. He whistled softly.
“Hell of a bombardment you guys went through. Casualties?”
Saxena looked around at the screams and the mumbled pain of the soldiers all around.
“Considerable, sir. We… uh, lost a lot of the air-force personnel trying to evacuate as much of the supplies and logistical equipment on the tarmac as we could before the attack. My F-A-C team has suffered near total fatalities,” Saxena choked as he completed that last bit.
Fernandez patted the young officer on his back.
“Nasty business, son! But this is our job! Your team members did their job as they were trained to do. You did the same,” he said and continued:
“For now, let’s get this business straight. You haven’t met me before. I am the commander of a Pinaka M-B-R-L battery northeast of here. We saw the attack on the airport from our locations. I suggested to General Potgam that I head over here to assess the damage since I was the closest senior officer here at the time. When someone higher up comes along, I will be on my merry way. In the meantime, I am in command. Understood?”
Saxena nodded at him so he continued further:
“Now. This airfield,” Fernandez gestured his hands around, “is my logistics node. I need rockets and I need them yesterday. Ground convoys will make their way up with more supplies and feed my units once they are set up tomorrow. But in the meantime we are airlifting them in. Now that means we need this airport operational right away. That’s where you come in. In effect, I am putting my money on you and your boys to open this place for business once again. And I love to win, Saxena. I really do. So what do you have to say?”
Fernandez stared at the young officer in front of him. Saxena managed to pull his thoughts together and focus quick enough to meet the Lieutenant-Colonel’s eyes. Fernandez saw that and realized Saxena had pulled himself out of the shock.
Time to get to it then!
“Okay, son. You know this airbase better than I do. What say we go and have a look-see in there?” Fernandez suggested.
Saxena walked over to the crate he had been sitting on earlier and picked up a Tavor rifle that he had taken from one of the dead officers from his FAC team. Fernandez was already getting the army personnel organized: