“I understand, sir.” Pathanya replied. He had already made his peace with his personal life in case things went wrong later that night.
“That said,” Gephel continued, “this is not Kargil. Here we are going on the offensive and rest-assured, Ansari and I will provide all the support we can muster. If all goes well, you will be in and out within two hours.”
“Understood, sir. We will get the job done.”
“You do that, major! Good hunting.” Gephel shook Pathanya’s hand and then walked off towards his parked Gypsy. In his wake he left Pathanya in silence, staring at the snow glistening on the peaks to the northwest. As he watched the peaks, wondering what lay behind them for him and his team, a pair of Mig-29s thundered across the valley, breaking his reverie. He watched the aircraft disappear across the ridgeline to the south and walked back into the building.
11
The tires of the heavy Tatra trucks crumbled the snowy gravel and halted with a jerk. The hydraulic pumps began elevating the three-tube launcher of the Brahmos supersonic cruise missiles to vertical position. Within a minute the tubes were vertical and locked in place as other equipment and comms came online. The Brahmos system was designed to be autonomous in its operations. A decentralized warfare system. All it needed were targets within a three-hundred kilometer radius of the vehicle in any direction. With a supersonic cruise speed of three times the speed of sound, it was a premier first-strike weapon, and a deadly one at that.
These three launchers had been on the move over the past week and had arrived in the Kashmir valley only the night before. The Pakistanis didn’t have satellites but the Chinese did. And it was to be expected that all Chinese information on Indian forces in the Kashmir valley was being passed on Rawalpindi. As such, the autonomous Brahmos system was a key element in keeping the enemy guessing until it was too late. With readiness-to-launch times less than ten minutes and a flight time of five minutes, the missiles could hit targets before they could react or move.
As the infantry convoy accompanying these launchers moved a safe distance away, the launch crews got to work. Target information was fed down to them from the army’s XIV Corps. To the soldiers guarding the vehicles against any surprise attack by the enemy, the nine manmade pillars stretching monolithically into the deep blue night sky was an eerie sight. There were no lights and all vision was through their night-vision goggles. The infantry force commander had informed all of his men to avoid looking at these tubes when the time came, else they would be instantly blinded. This suited the soldiers perfectly, since their job was not to look at the launchers but to scan outside their security perimeter, kneeling on one leg and with their rifles held up at their shoulders. Every several seconds they heard the mechanical noises of the launcher vehicles as the crews inside kept on working and the minutes ticked past…
“Tower, this is mongol-two, we are rolling.”
The radio squawked in Verma’s earphones as the aircraft began to accelerate down the runway. He removed the headset and put it around his neck. The ERJ-145 rolled down the runway and quickly lifted into the freezing air, climbing away from the night lights of Srinagar. As the small aircraft quickly moved into the air, Verma put on his headset once more to hear the cockpit chatter.
“…Roger, tower. Mongol-two is airborne and entering TAC-1 air control. Out.”
Behind him, the men and women manning their stations got to work. Comms came online and the large airborne radar mounted outside in the form of a beam, went online. The comms chatter increased as the aircraft began establishing its presence over the airspace.
All so familiar… Verma watched the crew at work. When the China war had ended, he had hoped he would never again find himself sending men and women to their deaths in the deadly aerial orchestra of combat. The stress of combat operations against the Chinese had taken their toll on him, both physically and mentally. But fate had other plans in store for him, he reasoned.
First the Chinese. Now the Pakis.
He raised his headset mouthpiece and got up from his seat to face the crew: “All right boys and girls, give me a snappy sit-rep!”
“Pike and lancer flights are airborne and climbing,” the lead radar-systems-operator, or RSO, replied from his console. “Scabbard is on station and holding. Viking-one and — two are departing Agra!”
“Comms?” Verma asked.
“TAC-01 is at op-con ultra,” the comms operator replied. “We are on the grid and green across the board!” Verma nodded and looked further down the line of consoles to the electronic-warfare officer: “what’s the electronic picture?”
“Friendly ECMs are go. ECCM is green. We are radiating at long-range. Friendly radars are up and on the picket line.”
“Threats?”
“Our friends across the border are up as well. Kilo-echo bird is online and radiating!” Verma grunted on that one. He had expected the Pakistanis to be on the alert now. They had been doing so over the past few days and as far as they knew, tonight was no different. A PAF Karakoram-Eagle airborne-radar aircraft had replaced the SAAB aircraft at Gilgit. Known to the Indian electronic-warfare operators as kilo-echo, this aircraft was one of the Chinese-made aircraft based on the AN-12 knockoffs that Beijing liked to peddle to its allies. If anything, the quick replacement of the earlier Swedish SAAB aircraft just two days after its arrival in theater was a clear indication of the electronic intelligence sharing that had been initiated between the Chinese and Pakistani air forces. The Swedish aircraft was not integrated into the Chinese aerial network. The kilo-echo bird, was.
“Any signs of our friends to the west?” Verma asked the EW officer to see if his suspicions could be confirmed.
“No red bird in the air at this time, sir. But I am recovering long wavelength atmospheric scatter corresponding to the kilo-juliet birds.”
“So!” Verma frowned. “Our pals in the 76 ACCR are in theater; just not in the skies at the moment.”
“It would appear so, sir.”
Verma turned his thoughts to the Pakistani problem. Here he had to deal with the most immediate threat to Indian aerial dominance during the punitive strikes against terrorist targets in occupied-Kashmir. This threat centered around the presence of a dozen advanced-model F-16s split between Skardu and Gilgit. Of the two airbases, the bulk of the fighters were at Skardu with only two F-16s seen at Gilgit on defensive patrols. The PAF warfighting concept for this region was clear. The Gilgit based radar aircraft would direct and control the much more forward-based Skardu F-16s plus any additional aircraft flown in from airbases in mainland Pakistan. In theory, they could bring a lot of their forces to bear on the Indians. Reality was different.
Modern air combat is all about temporal-aerial-density. This means that it is less about how many airplanes a nation has and more to do with their ability to concentrate more fighters than their opponent in a given time inside a three-dimensional box in space. If this box is further away from the airbases and consequently the combatant does not have the ability to bring in a lot of aircraft inside this box in a small time, the overall effect of the large number of airplanes is rendered indecisive in the outcome of the air war. Verma understood this doctrine very well and in his mind, the three-dimensional box was spread over Deosai and Skardu. Airbases from Pakistan could allow PAF fighters to fly into this box but they could not do so quickly enough to stop the Indians from completing their strike packages. The PAF was not equipped with long endurance, high capability aircraft other than the very small batch of Block-52 F-16s.