“This will never work,” Malhotra blurted out. Sinha looked up from the print-out images in his hand and removed his reading glasses.
“What won’t work?”
“The ground offensive we are preparing.”
“Oh?” The navy man asked. Ground offensives were not his domain. “And why not?”
“Too many obstacles in the way,” Malhotra turned to Sinha: “too many villages that cannot be avoided, too many civilians to search and impound to weed out the jihadists and too many intertwined kill-zones set up by the Pakis. We will lose men and vehicles by the hundreds for the short trip between the border and the outskirts of Lahore. This is not 1965!”
“Army headquarters needs to be able to launch a major offensive against the Pak army if conflict erupts,” Sinha observed neutrally.
“Well, it cannot be in this sector. Hopefully they will agree with me when we show them these images.”
“And if they don’t agree?”
“Then it will be a massacre.” Malhotra replied and walked into his office to make some calls.
18
“Take a seat, Basu.” Ravoof welcomed the RAW chief into his office with a smile. Ravoof took his seat after Basu had done the same opposite the desk.
“So I hear Islamabad has withdrawn its officials from its embassy here in Delhi,” Basu noted with a smile.
“They have,” Ravoof replied. “And the war rhetoric is through the roof on the streets in Pakistan. The civilian government in Islamabad is not able to keep it under lids now that the Pak army has been humiliated. If the latter want war to restore their honor, there is nothing the civilian government can do to stop it. Their power, or lack thereof, has never been more apparent as in the last few days. The line-of-control is burning, jihadists are foaming in their mouths chanting war cries in the streets of Lahore and Karachi and the Pak army is mobilizing.”
“Are we optimistic about staring them down?” Basu asked seriously.
Ravoof shook his head: “I don’t think so. Our attacks on the LET commanders has deeply humiliated the ISI. And our air-force has crushed the morale of their air-force. The Pakistanis don’t know how to respond to all this. Not least because they never expected us to carry out our threats to them. I guess past governments had left them with a sense of complacency.”
“Maybe,” Basu offered, “they thought we would shy away from the threat of war in our weakened state following the China war.”
“Indeed!” Ravoof leaned back in his seat. “But in their strike on Mumbai, they under-estimated our response. God knows what their endgame scenario was.”
“Is,” Basu corrected Ravoof.
The latter nodded his agreement to the correction and then leaned forward: “which brings me to a more sensitive matter. How did things go, um, up north?”
Basu kept a neutral expression for several seconds. The room went silent as both men stared at each other. Finally, Basu relented and offered a slight smile, but said nothing.
“Well,” Ravoof leaned back into his chair yet again, “we will need to establish links to the ISI for the strike on Mumbai before we can take it to the prime-minister. We need to prove that the ISI gave him the bomb.”
“Does it matter anymore?” Basu asked. “The Pakistanis are acting like rabid dogs looking for war. Maybe the war will start today, maybe tomorrow, or maybe next week. What difference does one man’s confession make now? Shouldn’t we be focusing on the larger picture instead?”
“Don’t you get it, Basu?” Ravoof asked sharply. “Don’t you see that the war will not achieve anything substantial? The power-players in Islamabad will escape unharmed. So will most of the Generals in Rawalpindi who carried out the dirty strike on Mumbai. The war will cost Pakistan the lives of tens of thousands. But to the ones in power, what is the loss of tens of thousands in a land of three-hundred million poor and destitute? The strike on Mumbai, however, will hurt us. It is already doing so. You have seen the economic projections. This strike will send us back by a decade. In exchange the war will cost Pakistan its economy entirely. But the country is a basket-case ready to be toppled over at any time. So I ask you: is that a fair exchange? The people in power in Rawalpindi and Islamabad will retain their power after the war. No. If this has to have any meaning, we must set an example!”
“What are you suggesting exactly?” Basu was curious. His position demanded clarity. Diplomacy and riddles was not his game.
“I am suggesting,” Ravoof said forcefully, “that we make the real perpetrators of the strike on Mumbai pay for what they have done.”
“Ramp up the strikes further against the last remaining LET commanders?”
Ravoof shook his head: “I mean the real perpetrators. not their proxies.”
“Rawalpindi?” Basu cocked an eyebrow and leaned forward: “Are you insane? How would we even do that? The place is a fortress!”
“You used the limited strikes on the terror camps in Kashmir as cover and almost wiped out the entire senior terrorist leadership, did you not?”
“So?” Basu pressed.
“So, just imagine what you more could accomplish if you had the cover of an ongoing war and the resources of the military…” Ravoof observed.
After several seconds of silence, Basu smiled and got up from his chair: “I will call on you later.”
Pathanya jumped off the back of the truck and looked up as a massive C-17 roared into the bright blue noon sky above the airfield. He saw the rest of the pathfinders jumping off the truck and grabbing their backpacks and making their way to the open ramp of the nearby C-130J. Kamidalla was the last to get off and he grabbed both his backpack as well as Pathanya’s before making his way to the edge of the truck.
“Where to now?” He said as he tossed Pathanya his backpack and jumped off. Both men walked towards the parked aircraft.
“No airbase north of here, so I assume we are going south.” Pathanya said after a few seconds.
“They didn’t tell you?” Kamidalla asked in surprise. Pathanya laughed: “You know the deal. They never tell us anything. But we will probably find out soon enough.”
“Well, I hope it is someplace warm!” Kamidalla noted as he walked into the rear cabin of the aircraft and tossed his backpack to the side of a seat. The loadmaster on this flight walked past the two officers and put up four fingers.
Four minutes.
“We are one short on the team,” Kamidalla noted as Pathanya took his seat. Pathanya nodded. He knew. They had had one casualty during the operation to nab Muzammil. It could have been worse, Pathanya thought. But while his team member would recover and live to fight another day, it had left the pathfinders one man short.
“Ansari asked me about that,” Pathanya replied. The aircraft engines began spooling up and the loadmaster began raising the rear cargo door.
“And?” Kamidalla asked as the blue interior lights of the cabin activated and left everything inside awash with shades of white and steel-blue.
“And I told him I know just the man to fill that position,” Pathanya continued. He noticed his pathfinders beginning to doze off as the aircraft rolled to the runway.