03:02 (35 page)

As we signed off, Ronald and Shaikh got to work contacting Goa and their fellow MARCOS to co-ordinate with them. I stepped out. This was my wedding day, a day that was meant to be filled with joy; a day when, if only for a short time, I had hoped that I could focus on being with Megha. That was not quite how things had turned out.

Ronald had advised us not to tell everyone in the community about what we had learned. Till the reinforcements came, the information might panic people and it was probably better to only tell them who and what we were up against when we could do something about it. I saw people milling around, many headed for guard duties as the sun began to set, and others going home to spend time with their families. If these people had to storm the airport in the face of a determined and well-armed enemy, I wondered how many of them would be coming back alive.

Mahadev pulled over in the jeep, interrupting my thoughts. ‘Megha madam says that you should come straight to the Meluha. She’s waiting there for you.’

I tried to push all my worries away as Megha lit the candles on the table and we poured ourselves some wine. This was our honeymoon treat organized by the community. Kundu had agreed to dig into the stocks of ready-to-eat pouches he had kept for longer-term use and we had a meal of paneer butter masala, pulao, and dal makhni, all washed down with some wine. Before the Blackout, I remembered complaining about how ready-to-eat meals could never compare to freshly-cooked food, but after days of eating mashed bhaji and baked beans, the meal tasted delicious.

‘Aadi, you look worried. Is everything okay?’

I toyed with the food, wondering how much to tell her, and then decided it would not be fair to burden her with worries to which I had no solution to offer, and which we could do nothing about for the time being. Even then, there were some things I could share with her.

‘Four more flights came in today. God knows what other weaponry they’ve brought in, or how many more men have come in. We are better prepared than we were, but I don’t know if it will be enough.’

Megha put her hand on mine. ‘Ronald, Shaikh, Akif, Ismail and the others are all out today on duty. If they need you, I know you’ll be out there fast, and I won’t stop you, but can I at least help you forget those worries for just a few minutes? Could we pretend for just a little while that we are going to enjoy our honeymoon?’

An hour later, we lay together in bed in the darkness, her head resting on my chest.

‘Megha, are you asleep?’

‘No.’

‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just have a normal honeymoon? Go off to the Maldives or Australia or wherever you like, and just spend a few days with nobody but each other.’

‘We can’t do that, but we do have the here and now, and unless you’re too tired, we can make the most of it.’

I lifted her face to mine, kissed her and showed that I was certainly not too tired.

Later, having finally banished thoughts of enemies lurking in the darkness, I began to drift off to sleep. It was so quiet outside that it was easy to believe that we were indeed on our honeymoon in some resort somewhere, far from worries, far from civilization. Megha was already sleeping and I closed my eyes.

Just then, I heard the sharp crack of a high-powered rifle, followed seconds later by two more shots.

I jumped up, pulled on my clothes, grabbed the gear I could and ran downstairs. Reality had just brutally intruded into the make-believe world I had allowed myself the luxury of indulging in for a few hours.

‘What’s going on?’

Ronald silently handed me the night vision glasses and through them I looked out from our Ghatkopar checkpoint towards the small bunker where the old man would have been, waiting for his chance to avenge his family. I could see two legs splayed out on the ground, and the rest of his body inside the bunker.

‘Bastards must have brought in snipers and taken him out with night vision optics. I guess the time for amateur hour is over.’

I sat back against the checkpoint. The same thing had happened at both our other bunkers: a single shot had taken out our sentries in the blackness of the night. The enemy was sending us a clear message, that they still had surprises up their sleeves and that the days of sending overzealous young recruits like the Brit we’d captured were over.

‘At least they’re taking us seriously,’ I said.

‘Yeah, now they’re treating this as a military operation, not just another civilian society to be rolled over. I wonder what and who they’ve flown in recently.’

I was thinking of the three old men who had volunteered to be in the bunkers, and whom I had effectively sent to their deaths. I longed to lash out and avenge them in some way, but in the darkness and with snipers out there, the enemy had the advantage. I heard a dull thud, followed a split second later by a whistling noise, and before I could react, Ronald had thrown himself on me and flattened me against the ground.

‘Mortars!’

Several more explosions rocked the area around us and it took me a second to realize that they were not targeting the checkpoint. They were firing into the societies, targeting the families inside. I pushed Ronald off me and stood up to see smoke coming out of at least three buildings where rounds had struck home.

‘Hold the checkpoint, we need to see how badly people are hurt!’

I rushed inside the society with Mahadev and we caught Guenther near the clinic. The two ambulance auto-rickshaws were already at work, ferrying the injured to the clinic, and Kundu was leading some people in trying to put out the fire that was blazing where a mortar had struck a parked car that still had some fuel in its tank. It was a scene of absolute carnage. I met Megha, who had pulled on the red sari she had worn for the wedding. There was no need to say anything, her expression said it all, and my heart went out to her for not hesitating a second before she jumped in to help those in need. She was carrying a boy who had been cut across his legs by shrapnel and was bleeding badly. I took him from her and ran to the clinic as she followed me.

‘Doctor, how many casualties?’

Guenther looked at me grimly. ‘At least fifteen wounded and perhaps five or six dead, but we’ll know for sure when we take stock of all the damage.’

Mr Sinha was on the road outside, organizing an evacuation of families from the higher floors, and an ever-increasing number of people were now standing around Central Avenue.

‘Mr Sinha, they’ll be sitting ducks out there in case they fire mortars again. We need to get them to cover.’

Mr Sinha looked around. ‘Where? The high rises are a death trap as mortar shells can hit the buildings on the way down. Wait, I have an idea.’

He shouted out to Anu who was rallying people from her building to safety. ‘Anu, let’s get people in the underground parking lots. They’re the closest thing we have to a bomb shelter.’

The word spread and people began moving to the parking lots in several buildings. Some of them were talking about the damage to their homes, but most just looked shell-shocked. This was the first time the enemy had targeted the families living within our community, and the sudden and savage violence was not something they had been prepared for.

I reached Mahadev’s jeep and checked in with the others on the radio. ‘How are we doing, guys?’

Shaikh spoke from the Powai Lake checkpoint and Ronald from the Ghatkopar one. They both had similar news—there was no enemy movement discernible anymore. That did not mean they were not out there, planning the next move.

Early the next morning, we laid our fallen to rest. Two were buried in keeping with Islamic traditions and eight were cremated. It had been a night without much sleep for anyone and, all around me, I could see people walking with the slouched gait of the defeated. The enemy had shown us that they could hit us at will, in our own homes, and we had no means of retaliating.

After the funerals we all headed back to our duties. I was planning to review our security in light of the night’s events, but before I had gone too far, Kundu came running towards me, huffing from the exertion. He stood before me, trying to catch his breath, his hands on his hips.

‘We…we have a big problem.’

I hailed Mahadev and we drove to the lake and I immediately saw what he was talking about. Down the road, perhaps five hundred metres out, stood a Humvee with a small black flag flying above it, its heavy machine gun pointed at the road ahead which we would need to cross to get to the lake.

Pandey, who had come there in our captured Humvee and had hidden it out of sight behind a building, said, ‘Sir, see that black box on top? That Humvee has an anti-tank missile launcher on it. It’ll slice through our Humvee like a knife through butter.’

‘Can you get it with the RPG from here?’

He shook his head sadly. ‘That RPG has a range of, at most, three hundred metres with any accuracy. Beyond that, we may as well be lobbing it in the air and hoping it hits them.’

Kundu knelt down beside me and pointed at the crossing ahead. ‘We had set out for our morning water supply run and this bastard showed up. We’ll be sitting ducks if we try and cross the road in the open, that too carrying buckets and barrels of water.

‘How much water do we have stored?’

He thought it over. ‘I’d say enough for three days. If we get people to stop taking baths and use water for drinking and cooking only, then maybe a week, but even that’s stretching it. It could be much less than that, since we’ve had a lot of newcomers join us.’

Ronald, who had got word of what was going on, joined us. I turned to him and said, ‘They know that attacking us with infantry will cost them lives, so they’re putting us under siege. They’re trying to starve us out and bomb us from afar to break our spirits.’

‘Why don’t they just move on?’

I pointed to the Indian flag that still flew proudly atop the building where we had placed it. ‘They cannot. They need to make an example of us, otherwise how will they tell their people that they are setting up their Caliphate in this country if we sit here, defying them, so close to their headquarters and where their Caliph is?’

‘Any ideas? Shaikh could take out that guy with his sniper rifle.’

I looked at the Humvee through my binoculars and saw the masked, black-clad man standing at the turret, manning the machine gun.

‘No, then they may just move the Humvee back and put in a few snipers of their own. Then they would just pick off our supply teams. I do think we’ll need Shaikh to work his magic, but we have to do something else as well.’

‘What?’

I put the binoculars down and looked at Ronald. ‘The only thing we can do when the enemy is trying to dictate terms and show us that he is in control. We find a new way of messing with his mind.’

The enemy had been used to us slinking around at night, well this time we would walk up to them in broad daylight. We had the uniforms of the two men we had captured, and when I told Akif about my idea, he was delighted. Akif put on the Arab’s uniform, both because they were similar in size and because he needed to pretend to be the officer if he was to do the talking. We didn’t tell too many people about what we were planning, simply because we wanted to move fast while there was just the single Humvee on the road.

We jogged past the main access road and through small shops. This was an area which we had totally blocked off with overturned cars and a large abandoned truck, and we scrambled over those to enter an area none of us had seen since the Blackout. There were a few housing societies, but they seemed to be largely abandoned, and the small shops nearby had all been ransacked. We turned right through a small alley and emerged below the flyover which the Humvee would have taken to come to its current position. We climbed over the side of the flyover and approached the Humvee from behind. I tried to control my breathing and calm myself. We were now no more than ten metres from the enemy, and if this was to work, then we had to walk casually, without giving them any cause for alarm.

The man standing in the hatch on the Humvee manning the machine gun suddenly turned towards us, perhaps having heard movement. Akif raised a hand in greeting and we kept walking towards the vehicle. He shouted something in Arabic and Akif responded calmly, adding what could only be a joke; he laughed and I saw the man visibly relax.

We were now just a few feet from the vehicle and the rear door opened and two men began to get out, stretching their muscles. Akif went towards the nearest man, greeting him effusively and reaching out to shake his hand. As the man extended his hand, Akif brought his left hand out from his pocket and slit the man’s throat. The second man was looking at them wide-eyed in shock and didn’t even see me lunge at him. I stabbed him in the throat and brought him down. The man who had been standing at the machine gun was starting to shout to the driver when his head exploded in a mist of red and he slumped forward. Shaikh had shot him with his sniper rifle and, with a silencer attached, we had not even heard the shot.

I entered the Humvee through the rear door and the driver turned towards me, pulling a pistol out of a shoulder holster as he did so. I grabbed him around the neck and, as he struggled, I pulled him back. By then, Akif was inside the vehicle and he stabbed the man in the neck repeatedly. I felt his warm blood spray over my hands and his body convulse before he went still.

The man I had stabbed was still alive but barely, grabbing at his neck and making gurgling noises before he finally died. We pulled all the bodies inside, both because we figured we could use their uniforms and kits and also because we wanted to keep the enemy guessing as to what had happened to their men. Akif started the Humvee and we rolled forward towards our checkpoint.

From the first stab to the last, the whole battle had taken just about two minutes. The radio crackled to life and someone said something in Arabic and then switched to accented English.

‘Abu-Amriki, why haven’t you checked in?’

Akif glanced at me, ‘One of these is an American recruit.’

As the voice on the radio repeated the question, I thought about it and decided that the time for subterfuge and playing in the shadows was gone. These people had declared war on us—they needed to know whom they were fighting against. I pushed the transmit button on the radio.