“Rest assured,” Ansari interjected, “we will figure that out. In the meantime, I want you all to get acquainted with every detail of the target, the terrain and all relevant locations of interest to us. Our RAW friends here are proving very cooperative in helping us orient to the multi-dimensional problem. Use them effectively. Ask questions!”
“And now would be a good time to start,” Basu added with a smile. Pathanya and his men were already spreading out in smaller groups. A few were by the map, others were looking at the profile pictures of Muzammil from the files Basu and his men had brought over. Pathanya walked over to the map, lay his fingers on it and glanced up at the map scale. He frowned.
“Yes, major?” Basu noted the look.
“Sir,” Pathanya turned to face Basu, “putting aside the actual takedown of the target and his entourage, it is going to be near impossible for us to walk in or out for such a distance from the border. Even if we could sneak in undetected, we are going to have every jihadi in Deosai on our heels within an hour after we conduct our strike.” Pathanya looked at Ansari, who in turn looked at Gephel. The latter crossed his arms and nodded: “The thought has occurred to us as well. Rest assured, your team will not be walking into the A-O.”
“Helicopters, sir?” Kamidalla said as he turned away from the map. Gephel nodded. Kamidalla shared a look with Pathanya that said more than they actually needed to. Ansari understood.
“Gentlemen, rest easy,” he said soothingly. “We will find the ingress and egress routes. Count on it. We are not going to send you in without a viable plan here. But as you can expect, all this is being put together faster than we would normally like. Which is why you are all here. Most of you have had extensive combat experience in special-warfare operations against the Chinese in the Himalayas. For all practical purposes, this operation is just more of the same. These new enemies have beards, lack training and battlefield competency, but they make up for it with zeal and determination. But they are no different from any other enemy you have faced before.”
“Sir, what is the timeline on this?” Pathanya asked. “When do we go?”
Ansari crossed his arms, leaned back against the sofa and frowned: “Well, major, that’s the tricky question, isn’t it? Our ingress and egress depends a lot on what the rest of the military does to, shall we say, ‘light-up-the-sky’. When they go, we go. And they may go within hours. So time is a no-shit entity for us right now. Expect to go with little warning.”
“Yes sir.” Pathanya replied, understanding the general operational constraints on this mission. Ansari looked at his wristwatch and nodded to Gephel, who also got up from his seat. The Pathfinders came to attention as the two colonels and Basu left the room. Behind them they left a room full of maps, files and several RAW officers to help Pathanya and his men in putting the meat on the bare bones objective that had now been handed to them.
9
“We have inbounds!”
The young air-force officer sitting at his console didn’t flinch as he noted the two popups on his screen. The onboard computer within the belly of the Indian ERJ-145 airborne-radar aircraft went to work. It classed the inbounds as two southbound fighters and provided the estimated speed and altitude in abbreviations next to the inverted “Vee” on the operator consoles. The officer staring at the screen simply had to read off the data into his comms mouthpiece to relay the same to his boss, overseeing the half dozen people onboard over their shoulders.
“What do we have?” the mission-controller said as he walked up behind the operator, looking at the screen over his right shoulder. The operator moved his eyes to the side panel of the screen to see the radar auto-classification for the aircraft type.
“PAF F-16s, scrambled out of Skardu.”
“Well, that didn’t take them long,” the MC said and then straightened himself. After a second he turned to his right to another operator: “Rambler flight still on station?”
“Roger that, sir!” Rambler was a flight of three Mig-29s of No. 28 Squadron out of Leh.
“How long before they are bingo on fuel?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Good enough,” the MC noted. “Bring them up.”
Rambler had been on station for very little time. But as with all Mig-29s, the Indian ones were very low on endurance. They left a nasty trail of smoke in their wake and had to be refueled often to maintain them on station. The current flight would not be making it home on their own fuel if they decided to go head-to-head with the Pakistani F-16s.
Then next choice would have been a flight of four Mig-21 Bisons out of Pathankot airbase further south. But they were farther away and also less capable than the upgraded Mig-29s relative to the Block-52 F-16s armed with AMRAAMs. And if the long-range missile threat was replaced with combat “in the merge”, commonly known as dog-fighting, the Mig-29s would run circles around the F-16 of any Block model. Despite its fuel-guzzling nature, the Fulcrum was a bruiser of a fighter. Besides, the Bisons would be running into their own fuel and endurance problems. At least the Mog-29s could refuel mid-air…
“Do we have a tanker up here?” The MC asked over his comms, as he carefully made his way further up the cabin. The operators and the consoles inside the Embraer ERJ-145 aircraft took up a lot of space. And the aircraft was small to begin with. The Indian modification to this aircraft had basically taken a standard ERJ-145 and fitted it out with some of the most advanced homegrown radar and electronic-warfare systems. The result was an aircraft bristling with antennae, empennages and bulges. And a cabin that was crowded, to say the least.
“No sir.” A voice on his comms said. “But we do have one on the ground at Srinagar.”
“Then scramble it! Our Fulcrum boys are going to get really thirsty soon enough.”
“Roger!”
The tanker in question was an IL-78 from the No. 78 Mid-Air-Refueling Squadron or MARS. It was the air-force’s only mid-air refueling squadron and was equipped with half a dozen IL-78s. These aircraft were basically modifications of the IL-78 platform that carried Israeli refueling pods. The air-force was extremely short-handed on tankers and it was something that had been glaringly visible for the last decade. But because the situation had not been rectified, the air-force was left very short on tankers. The result was that the controllers onboard the airborne-radar aircraft had to stage-manage the deployment of tankers and decide which aircraft had priority over others for refueling. And not all refueling needs could be met. Those that didn’t get their requirements met were forced to break station and head home, regardless of how bad the threat situation in the skies might be.
The MC made his way into the cockpit cabin where he found the two pilots and the flight engineer scanning the skies. Compared with the cramped, hot and relatively windowless interiors of the main cabin, the cockpit was very comfortable and offered a bright panoramic view of the snowcapped and sunlit Himalayas.