03:02 (29 page)

Pandey handed me a fresh t-shirt and my pistol.

‘Get dressed, sir. They’re all waiting for you at Central Avenue. They wanted to start but we said we needed you there. The doctor has passed word that you’ve gained consciousness.’

Megha was there by my side as I put on the t-shirt and the holster.

‘Since you won’t listen to me and rest, at least let me come with you.’

‘The General?’

After seeing Ismail and Pandey, I had been holding out hope that somehow he had made it, but Megha just shook her head and looked down.

Mahadev was waiting for us just outside the club and he came and embraced me. ‘Next time, wait for your bodyguard before you go and do crazy things like that.’

He drove us to Central Avenue in a jeep that I recognized as one of the vehicles the attackers had come in. Mahadev looked behind at me as he drove. ‘We’ve got an upgrade for you as far as cars go. No more auto-rickshaws.’

There was a huge crowd gathered at Central Avenue. Lamps and torches had been lit along the streets, bathing the area in a yellowish glow. I saw Mrs Khatri, Kundu, Bhagat and the others of our committee huddled in a group. With them was a tall man wearing a black uniform and a black bandana. When I got down from the car, he spotted me and walked over with a warm smile on his face.

‘If someone had told me a civilian had killed four hardened terrorists in hand-to-hand combat, I would have called him a liar.’

I saw a smile on Akif’s face and realized that, once again, tales of what I had supposedly done had far exceeded my real contributions thanks to people like Akif and Pandey. The man in black now offered his hand to me and I took it as he finished.

‘But after seeing you in action, all I can say is that it is a real honour to meet you. My name is Ronald Ely, and my colleague Shaikh and I are with MARCOS—the Marine Commandos of the Indian Navy.’

Realizing that the men who had come to our aid were our own troops and that the failed air strike had not been the only attempt by our government to fight back, I grinned and hugged him.

‘Boy, are we glad to see you. Where are the rest of our troops?’

He looked at me, an amused grin on his face. ‘Easy, my friend. We don’t come with an army. All we have is the two of us, for now that is.’

‘What happened? How did you guys get here?’

Mrs Khatri interjected. ‘Aadi, we’ll talk about all that, and I suspect we’ll stay up all night learning of what these two men have to tell us about the world outside, but for now, we need to say our goodbyes to those we lost.’

We walked to the construction pit behind the school, which was acting as our cemetery, and laid our fallen to rest. Mira was buried by her parents while someone recited Koranic verses. Yash’s body was consigned to flames by his father, while his mother stood in a corner, weeping inconsolably. Finally, it was the General’s turn. His body was wrapped in a white sheet, with only his face showing, looking serene and at peace.

‘Who will do the final rites? He had no family here.’

I took the torch and performed the final rites. I stood by the pyre as the flames took his body. With his sacrifice, he had bought us all a new lease on life, and I was now going to make sure that it was all worth it.

My side hurt every time I moved and my head ached. I realized that I had also managed to sprain my ankle sometime during the battle. Basically, once the adrenaline had worn out, it felt like my entire body was in pain. Dr Guenther gave me an Ibuprofen to help relieve the pain and Mrs Khatri told me the debrief would take place in my apartment so I wouldn’t have to move too much.

So, at eight in the evening, there were around thirty people gathered in my living room. Drinks and snacks were being passed around and it would have looked like a party had the circumstances not been what they were. I was on the sofa with Megha next to me and the others were on couches or sitting on the floor.

Ronald had a glass of wine in his hand and he grinned as he began. ‘You guys sure wasted them!’

‘We would be dead if you hadn’t shown up. I certainly would have been. Thank you.’

He raised his glass to me and continued. ‘True, but they only had three men standing. They may have killed you but their attack was stalled. They would never have taken the colony with three men. As it turned out, this battle was a game-changer. We got nine Kalashnikovs, twelve pistols, one RPG launcher, the heavy machine gun, nine radio sets and twelve bulletproof vests that still work. You do realize what that means?’

I’d had no idea so much of the enemy gear would survive the explosions. It did indeed transform us into a group that would be able to field close to thirty armed men.

‘What about enemy casualties?’

‘They sent sixteen men. Seven died in the fight. Of the others, we took the one who had the least wounds prisoner.’

I looked Ronald in the eye as I tried to process what he was saying. ‘What about the others?’

He just moved his fingers across his throat.

I considered what he was saying, and thought of what those men would have done had they broken through our lines. No, this was not a time nor a world where mercy was to be given easily, so I just nodded.

‘What has he revealed so far?’

‘Not much, but Shaikh has a way with people. Everyone talks, sooner or later, and he will too.’

‘What brought you here?’ Bhagat asked.

‘Technically, we violated orders. We were to do a recce for enemy forces and saw the attack on the society this morning. There was no way the two of us could have taken on all of them. Then we saw them massing for another attack. What got us interested was you guys raising the tricolour. Finally, it looked like someone was standing up to the bastards. Then we saw the battle and you guys giving as good as you got, so we chipped in. I say “technically violated orders”, because we were to avoid detection by the enemy. With all the attackers dead except the one bastard, we’re still sticking to orders.’

He laughed as he said that and I found myself increasingly liking our new friend. I knew he was a trained killer, but he had a warm, genuine laugh that seemed to put everyone around him at ease.

‘Won’t they attack again? Shouldn’t we be watching our checkpoint?’ I asked.

Ronald smiled again. ‘Akif?’

Akif tapped the radio he held. ‘They totally freaked out when they asked for updates and didn’t hear back from their men. They sent a two-man patrol to check and Shaikh sniped them both. They’ve lost eighteen men in one evening, when they thought all they were up against were helpless civilians. They’re digesting this and making plans—I heard them order all patrols to get back to the airport. I’ve got a dozen kids with weapons out there now, and by tomorrow we’ll start training more people with the new weapons.’

I tried to convince myself that things were secure for now, but with the battle and the killing we had been through, it was hard to sit in my apartment while the enemy was outside, planning another attack. Ronald saw my expression and laid a reassuring hand on my shoulder. ‘Shaikh is also out there, and the two of us have radios of our own. Any trouble and we’ll get help out there fast. You’ve done more than your share of fighting for now. Relax, eat something, and get some rest.’

Megha whispered into my ears. ‘Listen to him and relax!’

So I sat back, but relaxation was the last thing on my mind. ‘Ronald, fine, I’ll sit here, but why don’t you tell us your story. What’s happening out there?’

‘We were on board a submarine, the
INS Chakra
, on patrol in the Indian Ocean, when radio transmission from Mumbai stopped. We surfaced and saw that the whole city was black, except for a few military frequencies. Largely strategic units that had been hardened against nuclear or chemical attacks. It was chaos, nobody really knew what had happened, though there had been a heightened state of alert for a few days and intelligence of impending terror attacks, so we all assumed it was an attack of some sort. With the evidence we had, our Captain was about to conclude that it was an EMP attack, but then we heard from the Americans and realized just what had happened.

‘The Americans have forces all over the world, and many more subs and airborne command posts which are hardened, so while they were in a state of panic for the first day, gradually they began to connect the dots. At least four nukes were set off in the upper atmosphere. One over the continental United States, a huge bomb that blacked out all of the US; one over south Asia that took us out along with a lot of neighbouring countries; one above northern Europe which has blacked out the UK, France, Germany and some parts of Russia; and finally one launched in the southern hemisphere which has most of south-east Asia and Australia blacked out as well. At one stroke, these bastards took most of the world’s major players off the table.

‘They say well over two million people may have died that first day itself.’

There was a ripple in the room. We had seen the violence that had been unleashed, but it was difficult to process and comprehend death on that sort of scale.

‘Think about it: five thousand passenger planes over the US alone at any given time. When they all fell, perhaps seven lakh people died. Add to that similar losses around the world and more than a million would have died in air crashes alone. Then, traffic accidents, looting, people dying in hospitals as systems went offline, and you’ve got to think two million may be an understatement.

‘They had planned it well. They had sleeper cells in many cities, including Mumbai, which went into action soon after the blasts. Their job was to attack security forces and create even more chaos for the next phase of the plan, which was for reinforcements to come in and hold territory. They did that with groups moving up from Mexico into the US; with boats that landed on the Italian and French coasts from Libya to join their sleeper cells there, hidden among refugees; and as you’ve seen here, flights. They tried to fly into Delhi first, but thank god the Air Force had a few fighters that were hardened against nuclear strikes and were meant to deliver nuclear weapons. They blasted those bloody transports out of the sky. But then they came to Mumbai, and there was nobody to stop them here.’

I asked the question that was no doubt on everybody’s mind.

‘How did they pull off the attack? Who helped them?’

Ronald held up his hands in mock surrender. ‘Easy, easy. I don’t have all the answers, but I’ll fill you in with what I do know. How they pulled it off is a matter of conjecture. The US thinks they got warheads from Pakistan and old Soviet stocks. They likely used rockets captured in Iraq and Syria, so no major help needed there. What we do know is that they used converted freighter ships to launch them. The word is that elements of the Pakistani military helped them think through and execute this.’

‘What’s the US doing to retaliate?’

Ronald’s face grew solemn. ‘The US President was killed in a suicide attack on the White House just as the Blackout happened. In the chaos, they got through the Secret Service and wiped out the First Family. They did the same here as well—a lot of top government leaders were targeted. In our case, thankfully, the PM survived and is in a secure bunker supervising our response. The new US President took a few days to evaluate the situation and is co-ordinating with allies, including us.’

‘With all the power out, how are they communicating?’

‘The US has its own military intranet that was hardened against nuclear strikes; we have our secure systems; and a lot of guys in the field are using old-fashioned shortwave radios.’

Nitish chuckled. ‘We should have thought of that and found a set here.’

‘It took a week or so for all the governments to get their heads around what had happened,’ Roland continued. ‘God knows how many more millions died in the chaos, and then the new US President ordered massive retaliation. Tactical nuclear weapons were used to wipe out all known ISIS bases and those of their sympathizers in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Somalia, and all major Pakistani air bases and nuclear installations.’

There was a gasp of astonishment at that.

‘Surely lots of civilians died in those strikes?’

‘Yes, but it seems the US decided that was better than risking more attacks.’

Mr Sinha had been sitting quietly. Indeed, all evening I had heard him say very little, and assumed he had taken the General’s death hard. They had become good friends over the last few days. Now he sat up and asked Ronald another question. ‘If all their bases are gone, it’s over, right?’

Ronald shook his head. ‘Hardly. What made these killers different from any other terror group was their desire to hold physical territory, to create their so-called Caliphate. Their major bases are wiped out, but they planned for this. Thousands of them are in the US, Europe and here, recreating their Caliphate on a global scale, and their flights coming in here are just reinforcing that. They initially sent some men on boats disguised as Pakistani fishing vessels, but now the Navy’s onto it and sinking any boat that looks suspicious. This air lifeline is harder to bust, though.’

‘If we had fighters in Delhi, why not here?’

‘Only fighters tasked with nuclear missions were hardened, and in the first few days, the bastards hit air bases around the country. You must have seen the fires burning—Naval and air bases around Mumbai and Goa were hit by sleeper cells and terrorists who had come in by boat. Goa managed to survive but all the newer fighters are useless, so they cobbled together the strike this morning. There’s a whole other war going on all across India. With air power cobbled, the Army’s relying on the good old railways and old coaches to transport troops. Of course the bastards are trying to intercept trains, but it’s a matter of time before a big Army contingent gets here to launch an assault on the airport and wipe out the other cells. In a congested city like this, though, it’s going to be messy.’

‘Where are they flying in from?’

‘Nobody knows. The Americans have high altitude satellites up but they are so busy with the battles raging in their homeland that they haven’t gotten around to tasking them to find out. Probably coming from a hidden base in Pakistan. That’s why Shaikh and I were dropped ashore, to have a closer look at the airport and come up with a plan to retake it once our troops get here. Our info is that the first train will be here within three days. By the way, Aadi, I did need to ask you something.’