They were now close enough to the Pakistani armor force that he was forced to zoom in further on the ABAMS screen to separate his forces from the enemy. Blue markers showed his force advancing roughly north. The opposing green markers were moving south-east. Kulkarni could see that the Pakistani commanders intended to overrun rhino and make a break to the border to reclaim the enlarging chunk of land that had now fallen under the Indian control. And ABAMS showed him that should they succeed in overrunning Rhino, there was not much to prevent the enemy from achieving that goal. Trishul would not survive a frontal attack by heavy tanks…
Kulkarni swiveled the ABAMS screen out of his way and peered into his commander sights: “rhino-actual to all elements: imminent enemy contact! Fix bayonets and prepare for a knife fight! Out.”
“Targets?” He asked his gunner as the tank rumbled over yet another sand dune. He could see Arjun tanks on either side of him doing the same. The way rhino-one and rhino-three were staggered, rhino-three was to his south and was his “right hook”, which would swing down from the east on the enemy’s left flank if such an opportunity presented itself. Of course, if his own rhino-one took excessive casualties, rhino-three was also positioned to provide the second layer of tanks to reinforce his line. It was all about the commander’s options. He wanted to have as many of them as he could when the battle shaped itself…
“Just a mass of dust clouds to the north,” the gunner replied without looking away from his optics. “Our friends are still rolling south.”
“Keep our welcome presents hot and ready!” Kulkarni noted to his loader, who was sweating profusely and showing visible signs of nervousness. Kulkarni worried about his driver and loader more than his gunner. His gunner seemed to thrive on the chaos of combat and had ice water in his veins and had seen armor combat alongside Kulkarni in Ladakh. His other crew members were raw and had no prior combat experience. This would be their first battle.
Their baptism by fire.
“Contact! I have contact! Three kilometers at twelve-o-clock!” the gunner shouted, causing the loader to jerk.
Kulkarni calmly peered through his optics: “wait for a clear shot! Rhino-actual to all elements: contact! contact! Maneuver offset by forty degrees east! Take your shots!”
On that command, the twenty-three Rhino-one tanks swiveled by forty degrees to east, but kept their turrets aimed north on independent stabilization. This presented the enemy with a sideways moving force which was harder to adjust for in the fire-control than a head-on target. To further complicate matters, Kulkarni had his force follow a zig-zag maneuver where enemy gunners could not apply a constant lead on the sideways motion when aiming. For its part, the advanced fire-control computers on the Arjun compensated for the motion, stabilized the turret and evaluated the motion leads without too much hassle for the gunner. It wasn’t as easy as point-n-shoot, but it was close…
Kulkarni felt his tank shudder and the turret filled up with slight smoke as the main gun recoiled and dumped an empty shell casing inside.
“Shot away!” The gunner shouted.
Kulkarni watched the round rip up the sandy terrain as it flew horizontal and low and went into the front glacis armor of the incoming Pakistani Al-khalid tank. The shot splattered into a fireball of sparks and smoke and then dissipated. The enemy tank shuddered to a halt. Moments later the engine compartment of that tank started spewing smoke.
“On target! Move-on!” Kulkarni confirmed. The turret was already swiveling to the left. His optics flared white as the next shot shook the tank and went on its way. It missed its intended foe and flew over the latter’s turret.
“Too high! Compensating!”
Kulkarni turned his attention to other matters. He swiveled his optics left and right and saw that a massive tank battle was now underway. Both sides were trading shots and the cohesiveness of rhino-one was dissipating. As expected under the conditions…
“Hold on,” the driver interrupted. “We are going over a dune!”
Kulkarni and three Arjun tanks to his side went over the dunes almost in formation. As they came over the dunes and went down the other side, the gunners got back into action again. The Arjun tank furthest to the north exploded in a fireball. Its debris flew radially in all directions.
“Oh god! Rhino-one-ten is gone! I say again, one-ten is burning up!”
The comms were instantly alive with the shocked voices of novice tankers. The hardened veterans just kept their heads down.
Kulkarni turned his optics north just as his tank shuddered again. The smoke and smell inside his turret was becoming unbearable. But what he saw outside was even worse. There were now seventeen pillars of black smoke from burning tanks rising into the blue skies. Dust was everywhere and the ground was a churned mush of tank treads. Visibility was fast diminishing amidst the smoke and dust and his initial initiative was giving way to a chaotic melee. He swiped the sweat dripping into his eyes.
As he watched, a Pakistani Al-Khalid tank rumbled around the burning chassis of another burning Pakistani tank and made its way past of the bellowing smoke… straight in front of Kulkarni’s tank and another to his right. Kulkarni’s gunner was aiming the other way to engage some other target…
Kulkarni shouted the warning: “Gunner! Enemy armor contact point-blank! Twelve-o-clo…!” The sentence was killed midsentence by the fire of the main gun on the Pakistani tank. A split second later the forward chassis of the Arjun tank on Kulkarni’s right exploded into pieces and showered the entire area with debris. The burning Arjun tank shuddered to a halt with the main gun bent at an awkward angle.
Kulkarni turned in horror to see the Pakistani gunner swivel the main gun on their tank to point at his tank. His gunner did the same around the same time. He expected death to come instantly. The turret shuddered and the Al-khalid tank fell backwards against the momentum of the point-blank sabot round. A second later it exploded from the bottom up and the turret fell to the side amidst a tower of flame…
“Target destroyed!”
Kulkarni allowed himself to breathe again and could see his heart pounding against his ribcage. That was too close!
He turned his optics right and saw that they were now leaving rhino-one-five burning behind them. The two enemy tanks three-hundred meters north were burning into blackened hulls as well. But the smoke from these tanks and all others was obscuring visibility. A brown haze had now replaced the blue skies. The scenery reminded Kulkarni of the Kuwaiti battlefields from the first Gulf war. The only light that seemed to enter this haze was from the flashes of main tank guns.
That was where ABAMS came into its own. Kulkarni could see all of his tanks against a terrain overlay. Those that were alive, anyway. The Pakistanis had no such capability. This allowed Kulkarni to maneuver his force regardless of outside visibility, detrimental as it was to his gunners. He could, if he wished, extricate his force from chaos and regroup further away.
Had that moment arrived?
That was the key question. And Kulkarni couldn’t say one way or the other. He had lost six tanks so far, based on their absence from ABAMS. Four others were mobility-killed and were fighting as standing-pillboxes. Three others were reporting minor damage.
The enemy was doing much worse. One of the features in ABAMS was the ability for each crew to mark targets for the others. That way, all tanks connected to the net could coordinate target strikes. Right now the ABAMS screen was only showing a handful of enemy targets marked. Could it be that in the heat of battle, his tanks were not updating the net?