Several more bursts of fire and the last of the Pakistani soldiers was silenced. For several minutes, Grewal struggled to get the body of the dead civilian in salwar-kameez off of him. But it wasn’t easy with only one good arm. He groaned and moaned in his efforts but the dead body wouldn’t budge.
He heard the clearest sounds in Hindi that he would forever remember from that day on. It was then that he knew he was in the presence of friendlies. A few moments later he saw the camouflaged face of an Indian special-forces trooper hovering over him. The soldier lifted the dead Pakistani and tossed his body aside. Grewal could not control his tears as the soldier offered his gloved hand to help him up:
“Come on, sir. Time to get you out of here.”
Grewal took the offered hand and got up, hobbling on his one good leg. He scrutinized the special-forces team members around him but could not spot any national markings or insignia on their uniforms. But the Indian-made rifles and comms gear were clear enough. As was their chatter in Hindi and English as they walked around the dead Pakistani soldiers, firing pistol rounds into whoever had survived, civilian or otherwise.
“Who are you?” Grewal asked sheepishly.
The medic tending to him did not reply. But one of the taller soldiers walked over, wearing his boonie hat. His face was camouflaged in streaks of green and brown just like the others, but he seemed to be carrying gear meant for a team-leader. His posture confirmed this assumption: “you are in the company of friendlies, sir. And you are extremely lucky that we happened to be in the neighborhood. We saw the explosion and your chute descending about the same time as these bastards did,” he kicked the dead Pakistani on the ground next to his feet. “Looks like we got here just in time now, didn’t we?”
Grewal breathed a sigh of relief. His heart was still pounding away in his chest and despite the cold weather, he was sweating: “I owe you my life! If you had been a few seconds late…”
Pathanya nodded and smiled sympathetically. He had no illusions about the barbarians they were dealing with here.
“What’s your name?” Grewal asked. “SOCOM?”
“Can’t share any details, sir. And we need to get out of here right now, but I am Major Pathanya. And these are my men. Welcome to the pathfinders!”
Haider walked past the soldiers sitting in the stairwell of the house and on to the roof. He found several of his guards as well as some of the staff officers perched there with their binoculars. They were staring silently as the brown-grey mushroom cloud dissipated into the winds.
This rooftop was a clear vantage point for the area, being the highest one around. Some of his communications troops had already set up VHF antennae here to allow them to talk securely with the 6TH Armored Division unit north and east of here. Haider found Akram and Saadat kneeling besides some battlefield computers that they had set up on the terrace.
“Well?” Haider asked as he walked up behind them.
“Comms established with the 6TH Armored,” Akram said without looking away, “and they are patching us through to corps command links. We should be online shortly.”
Haider crossed his arms. His next moves weren’t exactly clear at this time. When he had been tasked to hold Lahore, that had been a clear objective which he had hoped to keep on until the end of the war. Now, that order had been superseded by the one he had just executed. And that had left him without a clear purpose. He had just terminated the lives of thousands of jihadists, civilians and enemy soldiers and had flattened and irradiated one of the most culturally symbolic cities of his country. But he was purposeless, and left hoping that the plan would work.
If it didn’t work, he would be left sitting here in the dust covered villages while the full-scale nuclear war raged. As the commander who once led the ISI, he was not a passive man. He needed to control the flow of events. Sitting here in a random village and cut out of Hussein’s inner loop was a bit too much of a reversal in his fortunes for his liking.
The problem was that he couldn’t just get on the phone with Hussein and ask him “what next?”. Plausible deniability was the name of the game now. The news outlets and world media were already reporting the nuclear detonation in Lahore. And it was clear that nobody could claim decisively on who carried out the attack. Both sides were already blaming each other. And until a forensic analysis was done to determine that the fissile fuel used in the detonation came from Pakistan, the charade would continue. Now the Indians would have to respond either by declaring a ceasefire to prevent a worse outcome, taking the destruction of Lahore as retribution for Mumbai, or they would continue the fight. If they did the latter, Hussein could claim nuclear provocation and strike. The international community would be too busy demanding both sides to back down to actually do anything. After all, he was only defending his country against a massive invasion by its much larger neighbor.
But what it meant for Haider was what he wanted to know. He wasn’t going to allow Hussein to leave him hanging out to dry when all this went down. Maybe he had wanted Haider to die in the explosion instead of pulling his units out. After all, it would have been more convincing if Pakistani civilians and military defenders had died in the explosion, no?
Knowing what he knew, both about the strike on Mumbai as well as the detonation inside Lahore, Hussein clearly expected him to martyr himself, ensuring that his secrets would never make it into Indian or western hands.
But Haider had other plans. He wasn’t about to martyr himself for Hussein or for anyone else. The only question was: how would Hussein react when he found out?
“All units, this net: this is steel-central! Condition red! Condition red! Nuclear warfare conditions are declared. All taskforces report N-B-C red-con status! Over!”
Kulkarni’s heart missed a beat. At first he thought it was a mistake. It had to be! But this was no mistake.
They were now in a nuclear war.
All sorts of questions raced through his mind overriding the combat enveloping his forces at that moment. Had the Pakistanis nuked Indian cities? Or Indian forces? How bad was it? Or was it just a warning for what was about to happen?
The metallic clang outside his turret and the recoil of his main gun reminded him that this warning would have to wait. The battle for Rahim Yar Khan was in full force. And nuclear warfare or not, Kulkarni’s biggest threats were the hand-launched anti-tank missiles and the lurking T-80s inside the town. He did check that ABAMS showed all of his tanks were reporting “buttoned-down-and-sealed”. He pulled his comms speaker just as the shadow of an Apache helicopter momentarily covered his sights and the whump-whump-whump of its rotors dissipated away: “rhino-actual to steel-centraclass="underline" reporting N-B-C red-con active across the board. Over.”
That message caused his gunner and loader to share looks before they went back to fighting. Whatever it was that had caused the nuclear conditions to be declared, it would have to wait. The enemy inside Rahim Yar Khan had to be crushed first.