The radio chimed in Jagat’s ears: “We got runners on the ground below us! Engaging!”
A flash of explosions ripped apart a cluster of trees to Jagat’s left. He turned his head to see the trees burning furiously as leopard-three fired several unguided rockets into them and banked away. Jagat thought he saw several Pakistani soldiers running back to the west, away from the ingress path of the Indian helicopters. Leopard-three’s gunner kept them occupied with bursts of cannon fire, to which they responded with inaccurate small arms fire. Jagat saw the tracers heading into the sky in completely wrong directions…
“Looks like they are thoroughly confused!” Jagat’s co-pilot noted as they crested the ridge past the Pakistani frontlines.
“But it won’t last,” Jagat said as they dived past the ridges and into Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir. “We hit them with superior firepower and a larger force. They are still in shock at the hole we hammered past their positions. Once they figure things out, we will run into organized and heavy resistance. Let’s just hope we can get out before that happens.” He looked at the moving-map-display and the old-fashioned paper maps fitted into the translucent cover pocket on his thigh. “What’s our E-T-A to the D-Z?”
“Um… approximately ten minutes.”
“Good. Spread the word to our operators in the back.” Jagat realized that he had not heard any chatter from any of the four air-force LCH crews or his other two panther crews.
Good… he thought. Panther and leopard were now running radio-silent and didn’t need to be reminded of it. Jagat could see only the faint outlines of the two LCHs to his front, two kilometers down the valley. He had to assume that the others behind him were keeping eyes on him and maintaining distance as well. As they flew into the valleys of occupied Kashmir on their way to Deosai, Jagat looked to the side and saw only the ghostly black silhouettes of the mountains against the greenish skies above…
“Drop zone in the next valley at two-o-clock, three kilometers,” his co-pilot noted, breaking the silence in the cockpit. Jagat transmitted the only VHF comms from the seven helicopters to be picked up by the orbiting Indian unmanned-aerial-vehicle over the Deosai valley:
“Panther is entering the A-O. Out.”
15
The splattering of sparks on the ridgeline caused Muzammil and his lieutenants to look up just as the Indian Jaguar strike aircraft dashed out of the valley. The thunderclap from the explosion ripped past Muzammil and his men and left the trees swaying under its force…
One of his lieutenants exclaimed in Pashtu. Muzammil realized he had never gotten used to the language of his afghan veterans despite the years they had been with him. He kept his peace as the other afghan mujahedeen in his group spoke excitedly with each other. Secondary explosions lit up the sky from the Pakistani army ammo dump that had just been destroyed. Tracers were still flying into the sky as the rumble of aircraft echoed through the valleys long after the actual aircraft had left.
“Shut up!” Muzammil thundered, bringing silence within the excited men around him. “Go see to your men!”
“The Indians have taken over the skies!” Muzammil’s aide noted as he made sense of the dozens of back-and-forth conversations over his radio. “We cannot get our men to move on the roads to the border!”
Muzammil frowned. This was the day they had planned for years. Open jihad in Kashmir. And yet, the infidels had seized the initiative and were laying waste to all logistics behind the Pakistani lines. Indian artillery rockets were pummeling prepared positions. And they had decimated Pakistani aircraft stationed in the Kashmir mountains. All in all, it was a staggering escalation of events that neither Muzammil nor the Generals in Rawalpindi had anticipated. The net result of it all was that the attacks were choking the movement of the thousands of gathered jihadists.
“If only we could get to the frontlines, we could overwhelm them!” Muzammil muttered as he unrolled the paper map on the hood of the Toyota truck, parked by the roadside. He unshouldered his Kalashnikov rifle and put it on the hood while his commanders gathered around him. He looked at them: “We must find a way to move forward, despite the cursed enemy aircraft and artillery! We will disperse and move on foot if we have to. They cannot catch us when we are off the roads.”
“It worked in Afghanistan and it will work here,” his Afghan commander noted. Muzammil liked this man. He had had led his cadres alongside the Pashtuns when they had overwhelmed Kabul’s forces along the Afghan-Pakistan border, two years ago. And Muzammil had seen for himself the massacre of those Afghan army soldiers who had the misfortune to being taken alive by these men. It had made Muzammil shudder. And that was saying something, considering the blood on his hands. Muzammil had long since decided to listen to this man for military advice…
“How long you imagine before the men can move through the forests to the Indian positions?” Muzammil said as both men peered at the maps. The maps had been provided to them by their contacts in the Pakistani army, and it showed all Indian military positions and strengths along the border. His commander stared intently at the map and then nodded as he stroked his beard: “I anticipate two days f…”
The splatter of blood on his face caught Muzammil by surprise and he shuddered, utterly shocked, as the body of his afghan commander slumped to the ground.
Kamidalla lowered his multi-caliber rifle and focused his night-optics to make sure the target was still alive and kicking. He opened comms just as the cacophony of rifle-fire picked up around them:
“Pathfinder-two here. The chicken are all riled up but the rooster is still up and about!”
Kamidalla brought up his rifle and took aim. He could see Muzammil’s men firing in all directions around their parked Toyotas. They had no inkling of who, or what, had engaged them and where from. Three of their commanders now lay in a pool of blood. Muzammil had taken cover behind the open door of his vehicle, not knowing that he was in full sight of Kamidalla, two-hundred meters away in the trees…
Kamidalla put his index finger on the trigger of his rifle whilst putting the red-dot sight on Muzammil’s forehead. The latter was clearly shaking and shivering. Inside his green-black view, Kamidalla could see dark, black stains on the man’s face and on the military jacket he was wearing.
Blood stains.
“What’s the status of the rooster?” Pathanya’s calm voice came through on Kamidalla’s earpiece. He lowered his rifle: “Shaking but alive.”
“Good,” Pathanya noted. “Let him keep shivering for the next few minutes. Keep your eyes on him. And keep us informed if makes a break for it.”
“Wilco.”
Pathanya and two of the other pathfinders moved past the bushes, three-hundred meters west. They had one arm holding their rifles at shoulder level and were using the other to move odd branches and scrubs out of the way. They took slow, deliberate steps and moved gradually to the east. From his night-vision optics, Pathanya could see the two mud huts directly in front of him. These were silhouetted black against the flashes of white from the rifle fire that Muzammil’s men were firing south of the road just beyond the huts. Save for Kamidalla, whose sole job was to keep his eyes glued on Muzammil, the remaining eight pathfinders were keeping a solid base of fire on the dozen Toyotas and larger five-tonner trucks which made up Muzammil’s command convoy.