THE HUNT FOR KOHINOOR BOOK 2 OF THE THRILLER SERIES FEATURING MEHRUNISA (22 page)

Lahore, Pakistan

Tuesday 11:19 p.m.

R.P. Singh rolled his motorcycle out of the parking
lot.
The security guards were likely asleep but he couldn’t risk waking them up by kick-starting the bike.

For three hours he had been out cold. His assailant had shot him repeatedly – the bulletproof vest had saved him but the rapid-fire pummelling had fractured a couple of ribs at least, and shattered his phone. The trauma was followed by blackout.

When he came to, his body was frozen from chill and his chest wracked with every breath. Once on his fours he located his backpack and swallowed several Disprins. A half hour later, the pain manageable, he snuck out of the fort. Now, to get to the border and cross over to India. Pradhan and Mishra had to be alerted about the Kohinoor and Mehrunisa’s kidnapping.

Two corpses inside Lahore Fort – sooner or later police would be swarming the surround. Singh couldn’t afford to be caught. Safely out of the fort, he kick-started his bike. He would not think of Mehrunisa – she was unhurt, and he had to get to India and figure a way to get her back.

The secret of the Kohinoor was with him – he would trade it with Mishra for Mehrunisa.

Srinagar, India

Wednesday 12:12 a.m.

Jag Mishra’s room had been converted into the
situation room. No operation was ever executed without one nasty surprise – the first had arrived. The chopper that ferried Saby to Lahore had returned empty after waiting for two hours – any longer and the risk of detection and capture would have escalated sharply. Saby wasn’t answering his phone, neither was Mehrunisa. The logical assumption: the operation had faltered, the agents…

A brooding Harry, dark and withdrawn, had taken charge. Against one wall ranged a table with TV terminals, telephones and a couple of tech specialists hunched over their monitors. He had been sitting in that position for a couple of hours now – brow furiously knitted, eyes fixed on some spot on the wood table, his mind trawling the labyrinth of three decades of spy work in which were stored names, locales, contacts, moles… Mishra knew what his ace spy was doing: he was walking through that memory vault, sifting the archives for intelligence he’d need in the hours ahead.

In the four hours that they’d lost contact with the agents Jag Mishra had worked his sleeper network in Lahore for information. And Harry had begun preparations for getting on the ground. Thus far, no information had come through. The only sound in the room was of fingers flying off keyboards.

A phone rang. Jag Mishra’s desk phone. The one that clanged when an operative called from the field. Mishra looked at Harry as he reached for it. Harry’s jaw was clenched so tightly that a fresh bud of blood sprouted on the bandage around his neck.

Mishra listened, his face grave, then wordlessly handed the phone to Harry. A brief quaver of his mouth confirmed it was Mehrunisa.

Papa.

At the sound of his daughter’s voice Harry stood up, cradling the instrument in his hand.

Listen, I can’t talk for long.

She sounded subdued but calm and Harry marvelled once again at the young woman who was his daughter. When he knew her, she was a girl of fourteen, feisty and fiery, brimming with the energy of youth.

Don’t try to trace me. The attack is on – if you don’t try to rescue me I’ll be let off after the attack. If–

Static. Harry scrunched his eyes, focusing his entire being on the device in his hand. A man’s voice instructed Mehrunisa. It was hushed, indistinct, like the man had covered his mouth. A pause.

If you try to track me down, I will be killed. I
– her voice caught.

Then no more. Like the instrument was snatched from her hand … but Harry hung on. Nothing but quiet. Harry had stilled his breathing. Then a snatch of a muffled male voice speaking in Pashto. Next, silence.

A manic gleam in Harry’s eyes as his whole body fused to the phone in his hand. One mistake. The man had made one mistake. He had kept the mouthpiece next to his vocal cords for the fraction of time it took to bark his order before the instrument was switched off. A precious few seconds!

Harry flew to the men at the computer monitors – the IT system at RAW had recorded the entire conversation. Even the muffled Pashto command. Harry instructed them to filter and scrub the tape until he could hear just the sound of the male voice. As the two men set about their task, Harry stepped away and perambulated the room, chin on his chest. Mishra watched him, curious, but knowing better than to interrupt.

The cadence, the tone, the accent had revealed to Harry much more than the man would ever have imagined as he made the marginal delay in switching off his phone. The dialects of certain highland tribes changed ‘a’ to a rounded ‘o’. The Pashto Harry had heard was of the region that ran east of the AfPak border.

Harry’s heart sank.

FATA. Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The most lawless region of Pakistan, with Afghanistan on west, Baluchistan on south and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on north and east. A region that was home to Pakistan Taliban, where neither the ISI nor the Pakistani army held any sway, where hid the men most wanted by the US.

A flinty face flashed in front of his eyes. Babur Khan. The man who had made his name in the messy tangle of Taliban, Al Qaeda, LeT, his linkages within the AfPak terror land nebulous yet existent… Was Babur Khan the man behind Kohinoor?

Even amongst the war-hardened Taliban Babur the butcher was infamous for his barbarity. The US soldiers and NATO forces had recently reported several cases where they had come across bodies buried beneath hen coops of houses, in the village square, in the marketplace. In each case, the autopsy result was horrifying. The body showed no sign of bruises and no sign of poison or narcotics in the blood stream – the person had been alive and fully conscious when buried. Apparently Babur Khan wanted to bring back the Taliban rule of the ’90s, when harsh punishment was meted out to deter future criminals, especially unIslamic women.

The techie at one of the computers turned toward Harry. They had caught the vibrations on tape. Filtered and scrubbed, the sound was faintly audible.

Hegheh khoshaleh deh. Baharta wuzey! Mo nez aos da za ber azedo!

The alien sibilant sound filled the still air of the situation room, incomprehension on the faces of its listeners. Except one. Harry had more than understood.

She is happy. Get out. We leave now!

The hissing syllables had brought the freeze of Hindu Kush in his heart. He walked to the wall mounted with amplified maps and stopped at the one that zoomed in on the AfPak border. The tip of his index finger rested on that sliver of AfPak that was the federally administered tribal area of north-western Pakistan – Kabul to the east, Islamabad to the west, Hindu Kush mountains to the north and Safed Koh mountains to the south.

Technology had only confirmed what Harry had known. His daughter was trapped in a region the US privately admitted had rung their death knell in their decade-old war on terror in AfPak.

Srinagar, India

Wednesday 12:32 a.m.

Jag Mishra got off a phone call. Harry had asked
him
to source any audio file the Americans could locate on Babur Khan before he went AWOL. Mishra gave a slight shake of his head as he replaced the receiver. ‘The Americans believe Babur Khan is hiding in Afghanistan itself. Apparently, his hideout is in the Kandahar safe haven of the Afghan Taliban.’

‘You got this from your counterpart in the CIA?’

Mishra nodded. Harry gave a brisk shake of his head. ‘The CIA has a great reputation and a terrible record. It relies on machines, not men, to understand the other side. They counted Soviet weapons with spy satellites but never figured that in the meantime communism was crumbling. They poured billions into Afghanistan to give the Russians their Vietnam – which they did, only by ending up breeding an entirely new menace, the Islamic jihadis. They claimed the existence of WMD in Iraq and provided a war-mongering President with a pretext for war. Want me to go on?’ Harry snorted.

‘And now, belatedly, they have sent in men to spy. But guess what? The Americans have a chronic weakness: they believe they are the centre of the world. US intel in Afghanistan is clueless and ignorant. You know better than to rely on them, Mishra. Our man is hiding in the hills of FATA.’

That Mishra was a man of caution and deliberation was etched on his brow in deep furrows. He stared at Harry, his mouth glum. ‘You are relying too much on a stray sound heard over the phone and some untested technology.’

Harry stared at Mishra and quietly said, ‘What do you think makes a good hunter?’

Without hesitation Mishra said, ‘Skill. Patience. Perseverance.’

‘That makes for a hunting instructor, Mishra. Like yourself. Someone who knows the skills required to hunt and who can write a manual on them for new trainees. That is why you sit in a chair in an office. But to understand a hunter you will have to hark back to your Stone Age ancestors. Those men were hunters – they had intimate knowledge of both the territory and the game to be found in the territory.’

Mishra rubbed his jaw, his mouth etched in a straight line. ‘How can you be
sure?’
The ticking of the clock was growing deafening with each passing hour – they could not afford a miscalculation.

Harry walked up to Mishra till he was less than a foot away and towering over him. With quiet menace he said, ‘To be a good hunter, you
become
the predator. And the only way you do it is by spending years learning the lay of the land, understanding its game and the game’s preferred habitat.’ Abruptly he swivelled and in a few lithe steps reached a large map pinned on the wall opposite the computers. He jabbed an index finger at the AfPak border.

‘The cadence, the tone, the accent revealed more to me than the man ever intended. But I have spent years in the region, haven’t I, Mishra, courtesy you. So spare me the crap from US intelligence while I figure out where exactly in these hills,’ his fingertip encircling the spot, ‘he could be hiding my daughter.’

Srinagar, India

Wednesday 1:01 a.m.

In a spare room – a wall-mounted TV for furnishing
– Jag Mishra sat at a table and watched Harry. His wounds had healed partially but what had transformed him abruptly back into the warrior he was, was the news of his daughter’s capture. The body that was still recuperating from the explosion of a few days back would now bend to his will and perform.

Mishra watched as the waterproofed bandages disappeared under the dry suit that Harry was pulling on. It would keep him safe from the icy spray from the sub-zero waters of the Neelam River, and in case of accidental immersion were the boat or passenger to take a tumble. Despite the warm air of the room, adequately heated by an oil-filled radiation heater, Mishra felt an icy finger on his spine. It had been a while since he had worked as a field operative and he knew that what lay ahead for Harry would test the endurance of a physically-fit soldier of twenty-five.

Harry had asked for a dossier on Babur Khan – information on his parents, family background, growing-up years, his years in Afghanistan with the US army and after – and to locate any audio files that might reveal what the man sounded like. If, as Harry was surmising, it was Badshah Khan in the fray, it complicated things multiple-fold, for Mishra knew that the lawless man was a law unto himself.

Harry’s plan was simple and audacious. Time was of essence, as was stealth. Harry had to reach the federally administered tribal areas in the lawless westernmost region of Pakistan, determine the hideout where his kidnapped daughter was being kept and rescue her – all this in twenty-four hours.

An airdrop from Srinagar to a quiet spot in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir was a possibility but fraught with risks. The narrow strip of land that formed Pakistan’s ‘Azad Kashmir’ was populated with terrorist camps and enemy fire from across the Line of Control was a routine occurrence. Harry had proposed a reverse ‘winter infiltration’.
Believed to have been crafted by a Lashkar commander, the winter-infiltration
strategy was based on a careful study of India’s LoC
defences.

Traditionally, Kashmir had seen infiltration
in late spring and early summer, after the snow on the mountains melted. The army’s Srinagar-based defence units prepared for this seasonal offensive by pushing additional troops forward, putting up barbed wire and planting electronic sensors. However, when the passes snowed over in winter, the army and jihadist groups shifted their energies to the southern stretches of the line of control, in Poonch, Rajouri and Jammu.

Lately however, Lashkar had begun testing India’s winter defences in Kashmir itself. Beginning in February 2008, infiltrators had probed the Keran and Lolab sectors. Using rubber pontoon boats, fifteen feet long, with large outboard motors, militants had started infiltrating Kashmir from the Kupwara district.
District Kupwara was situated at an altitude of 5,300 feet above sea level and was the northernmost district of the Kashmir
Valley. It shared a long border with PoK in its north and western side and was totally enclosed by Baramulla district on the other side. The Neelam River, also called
Kishan Ganga, was a snow-fed canyon river that tumbled from the Himalayas and traversed the district from east to west. Additionally, Kupwara was endowed with dense forests that made it easier for the infiltrators to disappear once they had crossed over.

Harry’s plan was to take a rubber pontoon down the Neelam all the way to Muzzafarabad, the capital of PoK. If all went well, the journey would not last longer than two hours. Which meant he could do it under cover of darkness. But the freezing temperatures were no guarantee that militants would be asleep. Mishra planned to provide Harry with two escorts, one a sniper. From there he’d use road transport to get to the outskirts of Peshawar. Where he hoped to call in some favours of old Pathan associates.

Meanwhile, there was no news of Saby or Singh. Mishra switched his gaze from the TV. ‘You will come back Harry, with Mehrunisa, after saving us as you always have in the past. And when you do we will play a game of golf on our favourite course.’

Harry knew Mishra was referring to the world’s highest golf course located in Gulmarg. The 18-hole, par-72 course was hilly and offered a pleasurable distraction from the challenges of spying. Mishra and he would routinely take off for Gulmarg when time allowed. Gulmarg, the ‘Meadow of Flowers’ was where he had taken young Mehr for a holiday once.

Harry patted the shoulder where his gun rested. He took the Glock and put it in his waistband. ‘I’m glad you brought the topic up,’ he said, quiet vehemence in his voice. ‘Gulmarg was named by Jahangir, the horticulturist Mughal emperor. Remember your history lessons, Mishra? When not tending to his gardens, the emperor was chopping people’s heads off.’

His jaw set, he looked at Mishra a final time. ‘You’d be well advised to watch yours.’

Mishra’s face maintained its placid demeanour. The entire mission was now vested in Harry. Did the legendary spy still have it in him? As he watched him don his Himalayan parka, Mishra reflected that the probability of a nuclear war on the subcontinent rested on the ability of one man to do the impossible. The lives of a billion-plus people were at stake, and Mishra was not a betting man, yet he had staked all on the legend of a particular snow leopard. At this particular moment Harry loathed him, but Mishra had to remind him why he was who he was, a man who always put his country first.

Mishra swung his head to catch Harry glowering at news on the TV monitor. His jaw set, he hoisted the bag on his shoulder and advanced towards the door.

As Harry strode past him, Mishra caught his forearm. The two men eyeballed each other. Quietly, Mishra said, ‘You’ll do it Harry. You will bring Mehrunisa home to the safety of her country. The hopes of a billion of your countrymen are with you. You’ll do it Harry, for all of them.’