“Mongol-two-five here. Trip-wire engaged. Inbounds, Inbounds!”
“How many?” Verma walked over briskly to the RSO station. He didn’t have to wait for the answer. The screen in front of the seated operators showed a radar screen pointed west on top and north-south shown along the left-right axis. Small, green dots with altitude and speed information were beginning to populate the screen from about twenty odd locations scattered around Lahore…
Here we go! Verma went into mental overdrive along with most of his Phalcon AWACS crew. His first call was not to the air-force’s western-air-command; they would already be getting whatever he was seeing here. And they would be scrambling every available aircraft into the air.
No, Verma’s main concern was the inbound missile threats. With impact time measured in minutes, the three army corps deployed between Pathankot to the north and Amritsar to the south were under imminent threat. The Pakistanis were trying to take the steam out of these forces before they struck across the border…
He spoke into his comms: “mongol-two to picket-fence-actuaclass="underline" I hope you are seeing this!”
The response from the ground-based integrated-air-defense commander came over some radio static: “Roger.”
Verma cocked an eyebrow at that cryptic remark. The man was cool-as-a-cucumber under pressure. Even veterans like Verma were not immune to getting excited when missiles were headed straight that them. But that army man on the ground was completely unfazed!
Either he is oblivious to the magnitude of the threat or has balls of steel… Verma left the defenses on the ground to the army and moved on to more pressing matters: the enemy air-force. “Mongol-two-three, what’s the long-range word?” Mongol-two-three was the EW operator whose sole concern was the long-range threats materializing over the horizon. This was accomplished through the use of long-range wavelength radio waves that “bounced” through the atmosphere.
Over the past weeks, the Indian forces had built up a detailed picture of the Pakistani ground-based radar systems deployed across the border and the airborne systems. Consequently, the possibility of nasty surprises was low. But vigilance was the prime rule of the game.
“Getting crowded,” Verma heard and walked over to the EW station. The operator turned over his shoulder and saw Verma standing there before turning to point at the screen: “atmospheric scatter from multiple ground-based systems are filling the skies. Our friends are powering up all their air-defense systems.”
“For all the good it will do them!” Verma patted the operator on the shoulder before moving up the cabin. He checked his watch and did some mental calculations.
All right, time to shift gears…
Verma understood that the war would belong to the side that took the initiative. Both India and Pakistan had dozens of airbases within striking range of each other and had deployed advanced ground-based air-defenses. Both sides had the same advantages. So the real advantage boiled down to individual weapon-systems, training, and attrition reserves.
This air war was not going to be a chess game. It was slated to be a raw slugfest.
“Picket-fence is engaging.”
Verma turned to the RSO station monitoring the inbound Babur missiles: “those missiles across yet?”
“Negative! Picket-Fence is engaging over the border!”
Verma grunted. Yup. That fell in line with the ground commander’s aggressiveness. The Babur missiles hadn’t crossed the border yet. But the Indian commander controlling the line of aerostat radars and Akash surface-to-air missile batteries protecting Potgam’s forces on the ground was an aggressive bastard. He had his forces deployed in such a manner so that they were practically leaning over the border. It allowed him to strike quicker and harder.
Verma approved all of this, of course. A lot of lessons had been learnt by the Indian military the hard way during the war in Tibet. A major lesson had been the ability to detect and destroy large, saturation missile-strikes by the enemy. The institutional defensive mindset had been shed in light of the sobering losses encountered at the hands of Chinese missiles. The effects of these lessons were visible tonight as contact after contact on the radar screen disappeared from view as the Akash missiles began intercepting targets…
“Leaks!” The RSO shouted. “We have missiles breaking through picket-fence!” Just over a dozen of the Babur missiles moved past the line of air-defenses as the Akash missile batteries cycled to reload.
Verma noted this before the ground commander chimed-in matter-of-factly: “picket-fence here, we have airspace penetration by enemy missiles. I am all out. Over to you, mongol-two.”
Yeah, no shit, genius! Verma noted sourly and turned to his comms people: “get any flight of aircraft with an air-to-air payload in the vicinity of the missiles and vector them in to take out the remaining missiles!”
“Wilco!”
“Mongol-two-five here. Inbound tag-three-seven has disappeared off screen! I… I think it has struck! Tag-three-one is off screen as well. The missiles are hitting their targets!”
Shit! Verma turned to the comms officer as the latter spoke into his headset: “dagger-two, break pattern and engage low-altitude targets on bearing two-one-five! Mongol-two has the ball! Vectors to follow!”
“Wilco. Dagger is moving to intercept.” Wing-commander Naresh Grewal looked to his port side to see the other three LCA “Tejas” fighters in a echelon-left deployment. The pilots were all equipped with the helmet-mounted night-optics that rendered the world around them in shades of green and black. The cloud cover below reflected the moonlight and was enhanced in their views as a white-colored floor.
“Dagger-actual to all dagger birds, you heard the man. Follow me!”
Grewal flipped his delta-winged interceptor to starboard and dived through the clouds below, followed by his three other pilots. His visibility disappeared and the slick clouds engulfed the cockpit glass from all sides. The aircraft vibrated in the turbulence. All four aircraft broke under the clouds, facing a dark-green landscape below punctuated with a several unnaturally enhanced white light-balls. Grewal pulled the aircraft level and scanned the northwestern skies for white blobs of light moving against the dark background. Of that he found many! Army and air-force helicopters were flying all over the place…
“Damn! Dagger-leader,” his radio squawked, “how the hell are we supposed to I-D the missiles amongst all this?”
Grewal frantically looked left and right as they thundered on. “Roger, — two! Keep your eyes peeled for light-balls moving fast and low, then close in for I-D from the six-o-clock before engaging! Last thing we need is to be shooting at our own guys out here!”
“Wilco.”
The radio chimed again: “mongol-two here: enemy missiles just passed under you! What the hell is going on out there, dagger?!”
Goddamn it! Grewal growled and enabled the transmit: “mongol-two: I have dozens of inbounds showing up here on my night-optics! Somebody needs to pass the message to those army pilots to land their birds or else we are likely to hit our own guys! I need a vector!”