LASHKAR (20 page)
Tonight the two Krishnas operating ahead of the Force 22 team were equipped with the most sophisticated surveillance package possible. They silently clawed their way into the cold night air and gained height rapidly. A few seconds later they had vanished into the darkening night sky.
‘Isn’t this beautiful?’ Vashisht said admiringly to Tiwari, pointing at the real-time data streaming in on the array of monitors before them. The data feed was also being simultaneously piped across to the main command post at the Force 22 headquarters at Kasauli, to enable Anbu to keep an eye on things. This was always a dangerous and double-edged proposition since a lot of commanders tend to get into the thick of an operation and try to fight ground action from hundreds of miles away without realizing that things are never as simple and clearly defined as they appear on the screens in front of them. Anbu was mature enough not to get too closely involved and start micro-managing the operation, but human enough to want to know every last detail of what was happening.
‘Technology! A real bitch!’ Tiwari grinned as he looked at the monitors. Sitting at the command post they had a fabulous panoramic view of the desert ahead. ‘Just look at that!’ He pointed at one of the monitors as the Rangers’ sentry at the Lambawala BOP stepped out to take a leak in the desert. The imagery was so sharp that the urine hissing away from the man glowed red through the thermal imagers. ‘Tango for Tiger. Are you getting the feed?’
‘Roger that Tango. I’m getting it loud and clear.’ There was a smile in Anbu’s voice. ‘Stop pissing away the tech, guys and show me something worthwhile.’
Sitting in the improvised control room near Khajewala both Force 22 officers grinned as they put their heads down to the task at hand. High up in the air, the two Krishna UAVs moved into a carefully calculated pattern a little ahead and over the four Force 22 officers as they raced through the desert night in the jeep.
Travelling a couple of kilometres towards the east, but following a path very similar to the one that Afzal was taking the two terrorists out on, the jeep with the Force 22 officers headed straight for Chengiz Khan where the slightly implausible labour gang had carefully created a gap in the fencing.
‘Tango for Fox.’ Tiwari’s voice crackled into the headset Tony Ahlawat was wearing. ‘You are six hundred now. Chengiz get ready to rock.’
‘Roger Tango. We are ready. Come on in, Fox.’
The Chengiz team leader turned away from the radio set and signalled to his second-in-command. Immediately the work on the fence speeded up. The eight-foot-wide section of fence covering the gaps in both the fences was removed just as the jeep drove up to it. It barely had to check its speed as the fence section was swiftly moved out of the way. The minute the jeep went through the gap the workers replaced the section of the fence. However they did not fix it back in a particularly permanent manner.
It was going to be removed again tomorrow. If all went as planned.
The jeep was crossing through the cut in the border fence when, a couple of hundred miles to the west, another MIL-8 chopper with Indian Coastguard markings, pulled into a hover over an Indian Navy warship on the high sea around which two missile boats were busy frolicking. The chopper alighted lightly on the deck and Lieutenant Commanders Chandan Deopa, Ranjit Dhankar and Sunil Jaggi of the Indian Navy, all presently seconded to Force 22, jumped out. It took them a moment to retrieve their gear from the chopper, which then took off immediately and returned to the Air Force Base at Bhuj.
A few minutes later, the warship launched a small speedboat that sped away from it at high speed. The tiny speedboat did not reflect on any radar or raise any alarms as it skimmed over the choppy waters and headed for the fishing dhow, which was still moving at a steady pace and by now was barely forty miles out of Karachi.
Deopa and Dhankar were on board the speedboat along with two other sailors from the warship. It closed in on the dhow and tied up with it. Both Force 22 officers got on to the dhow while the two sailors returned to the Naval warship on the speedboat. Deopa activated his radio set and called in almost as soon as they were onboard the dhow. ‘Dolphin for Golf. We are on now. Confirm strength.’
‘You are strength five Dolphin,’ Jaggi replied from the warship.
‘Roger Golf. See you tomorrow.’
Both Deopa and Dhankar had cut their teeth in the Navy SEALS and were just beginning to feel frustrated with their careers when Anbu proposed Force 22. Both snapped up the offer since they no longer found anything special about the Special Forces.
From a small village in Haryana that boasted one son from every household in the Defence Services, Dhankar could have walked onto a movie set anywhere in the world and signed on as the archetypal villain; there was something hard and brutal about his eyes that sent an involuntary shiver up one’s spine. He was definitely not the kind of person you would like to bump into in a dark alley. Or anywhere.
His buddy Deopa, on the other hand, was amiability personified. He had an infectious smile and talked as much as he grinned. Deopa was so short and stocky that his course mates used to say that he qualified the minimum height stipulation in the medical selection test for the National Defence Academy because they had measured his girth instead of his height.
Appearances notwithstanding, the two men gave each other close competition when it came to the speed and skill with which they handled all kinds of weapons. Dhankar could hit a bird in the eye with almost any gun as efficiently as Deopa’s knife could slit a throat. The two men were as much at ease in water as they were on ground and equally adept at fighting in both elements.
Arriving on board the dhow they checked their gear and then, with the help of two crewmen, unpacked the Chariot mini-submarine that had been delivered to the dhow by the warship earlier that day. With a length of around seven metres and a diameter of about one, the Chariot mini-sub can accommodate two men and their complete weapon-load and stay submerged for over twelve hours covering ten knots per hour; it is the perfect vehicle for a covert insertion into enemy territory.
Just before midnight, about eight miles out of Karachi, the fishing dhow changed tack and released the Chariot into the sea. The Chariot took a minute or so to right itself and settle down on an even keel. Then it slid silently through the water as Dhankar guided it towards the Karachi coastline.
‘Why can’t they make these things a little more roomy?’ Deopa said and smiled when this elicited a string of curses, as Dhankar roundly abused the mothers and sisters of the Chariot designers for the mingy dimensions of the craft.
Omar was right. Maulavi Sahib was not pleased to see them. In fact it was clear from his expression that had he known they were coming he would have refused to meet them. ‘Hadn’t you been told to wait for orders? Didn’t they clearly tell you that I was not to be contacted?’ he said curtly when he saw them waiting outside his room.
Omar was mumbling a reply when Iqbal cut in: ‘Something important came up. It was imperative that I meet you.’ His tone was mild but there was nothing remotely apologetic in it.
Maulavi Sahib unlocked the flimsy looking lock on the door and irritably ushered them inside the same small room that they had met in everyday soon after he had recruited them. Despite his obvious ill humour, which he made no effort to hide, the Maulavi was a man of fixed habits. He motioned for them to sit down as he went straight to the small metal box in the corner of the room. He opened the box and emptied the contents of his pockets into it. It only took a brief glance for Iqbal to confirm that there were still several bundles of cash in the box. Iqbal watched the Maulavi replace the key in his pocket.
Iqbal heard Omar recount the story of their adventures in Pakistan. He saw the Maulavi listen to everything keenly yet with a pretence of impatience. He was clearly torn between his curiosity to know everything about the terrorist camp and the troubled restlessness of being burdened with a situation he did not wish to have to deal with.
When Omar finished with his narrative the Maulavi took up his usual refrain: ‘Allah’s will…the jihad…a blow to the kafir…martyrdom…’
Iqbal was not really listening. He felt detached and removed. The Maulavi’s words no longer swayed him. He sat in stony silence, his fingers caressing the knife that was stuck in his waistband and concealed by the shawl he was draped in. He longed to pull out the knife and drive it deep into the withered body of the man talking at him but he restrained himself.
Somewhere during the one-sided conversation the Maulavi sensed that he did not have Iqbal’s attention. He looked up. What he read on Iqbal’s face unnerved him. He stopped talking abruptly and stood up. ‘I would like both of you to leave now.’
The Maulavi scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to Omar. ‘This is my phone number in case you need to talk to me. Let me talk to the others and find out what you should do next.’ He gave Iqbal a long searching look, as though seeking concurrence. ‘Okay? But don’t call me unless it is imperative. And don’t come to see me again… no matter what happens…’
Iqbal nodded briefly as he felt Omar take his arm and tug him towards the door. ‘Let us go to my home now. You can stay with me for the time being, okay?’ He looked at Iqbal questioningly, but did not wait for a reply. ‘Let’s go.’
The two men walked out onto the road and up to a waiting autorickshaw. Iqbal and Omar climbed in and Omar gave directions to the driver. ‘Mohammedpur.’ The autorickshaw pulled out into the chaotic traffic that flowed all around them as Omar began to save the Maulavi’s mobile number on his own phone.
As the Chariot sped its underwater course to Karachi, the four jeep-borne Force 22 officers used the gap between the Rangers’ BOPs at Ranabhana and Lambawala Toba to cross into Pakistan. Due to three halts forced on them by the movement of the Rangers patrols they took a little over four hours to cover the next seventy kilometres. The patrols of course did not pose any significant threat to them since they were being guided by the Krishna UAVs circling overhead and unseen in the sky.
The terrain they traversed was rough and undeveloped. ‘I guess they are too busy setting up madrassas, training terrorists and growing opium to develop their economy,’ Tiwathia muttered. The others laughed, softly: ‘Why the hell would you want to grow sunflower and wheat when you can grow opium instead?’
They were deep in enemy territory now. Danger lurked behind every sand dune; anyone and everyone they might run into was the enemy. The slightest mistake or error in judgment could result in death. And, if they had the misfortune of being taken alive, death would be exceedingly painful. Anyone who had seen the mutilated bodies of the soldiers of the Indian patrol whom the Pakistanis had captured during their Kargil intrusion could bear testimony to that.
It was almost 2300 hours when they skirted the Pakistani military garrison at Fort Abbas and hit the road to Bahawalpur a little ahead of the town. Just before getting onto the road they stopped for a minute. ‘You take the rear plates,’ Tony told Sami as they both jumped out.
A tall lanky man with an unruly head of hair, Captain Kuldeep Ahlawat was an an expert with explosives. For some strange reason his mother had nicknamed him Tony. In direct contrast to Tony, Captain Mohammed Sami, his operational buddy pair, distrusted explosives. Although he was quite adept at using them he much rather preferred the scoped sniper rifle that he carried today.
Working swiftly together it took them barely two minutes to change the plates on the jeep. When the jeep hit the road to Bahawalpur it bore a Pakistani number plate.
‘There is no way the number plates or the vehicle will stand up to a close scrutiny, but it should get you past the casual glance of other passing vehicles. In the worst case it may create doubt and give you those few critical seconds that you need to act,’ the Force 22 Intelligence Officer had said. ‘In any case, the road is not very heavily used. There is not likely to be much traffic on it at that time of the night. I have personally reviewed the satellite logs of the past few weeks and barring the odd military vehicle the road is mostly deserted.’
The four men rode in silence as the jeep kicked the gravel through the chilly October night, burning the 117-odd kilometres to Bahawalpur.
‘Tango for Fox.’ The radio set in Tony’s hand squawked to life. Tony double-clicked the transmit button. He did not want to transmit unless it was absolutely imperative. ‘Get off the road now. You have three inbounds. They’re about fourteen hundred. Sorry for the delayed warning but they seem to have come out of nowhere.’
Tiwathia, who was at the wheel, swerved off the road immediately. He hit the lights and killed the engine as the jeep came to a halt behind a small sand dune about forty feet from the road. The four men waited in silence as an Army jeep and two three-tonners thundered past in the night. Their grip on their weapons relaxed as the vehicles vanished in the distance. Tiwathia waited for another few minutes before he gunned the engine and hit the road again.
Set amidst sand dunes and poorly cultivated cotton fields stretching on all sides, the remote rocky outcrop two miles outside Bahawalpur town was not only sans houses or population it was also at easy striking distance from the target.
Bahawalpur town was notorious for the rabid religious fundamentalists and the hardcore criminal types who gave the cops a perennial run for their money. Surrounded though it was by fields of cotton and corn, the sleepy little town had a reputation for Sunni extremism. Consequently, the town police was up and about at all times and more than quick to pull the trigger when they saw something out of the ordinary. ‘Buying a gun there is as easy as ordering a pizza from Dominos,’ the Force 22 Intelligence Officer had said wryly, adding, ‘and not half as expensive.’
Tony and Sami got off the jeep, quickly offloaded the motorcycle and wheeled it out of sight into the rocky outcrop. The jerry can of fuel required for the motorcycle was buried next to it. Sami retrieved three almost identical rocks and placed them in a neat triangle exactly ten feet to the right of the spot where the bike and fuel were buried. The rocks would mark the spot. Katoch took two jerry cans from the four strapped onto the sides of the jeep and emptied them into the jeep’s fuel tank. The empty jerry cans were carefully strapped back onto the jeep.