by Shiv Aroor
The INS Sumitra arrived in Djibouti at 0700 hours on 1 April. The arrival and disembarkation of 350 rescued Indians became a broadly televised event in the Indian media, with the Minister of State for External Affairs, Gen. V.K. Singh waiting at the port and famously addressing the crowd. Pictures of the ship, the tearfully relieved citizens and the smiling sailors would appear on many front pages. Cdr Mokashi finally afforded himself the luxury to exhale. He knew that his work had just begun.
The crew would have only a few hours to rest as their ship was fuelled and restocked—this time with more suitable equipment, including disposable plates and spoons. That afternoon, they received fresh orders to make a dash for a different part of Yemen—one that was literally in flames.
On 1 April, a dairy factory owned by Yemen’s massive Thabet Brothers business conglomerate in the Red Sea port city of Al Hudaydah had been bombed, killing over 30 workers. Given the large number of Indian nationals living in Al Hudaydah and known to have been employed at that factory, it seemed likely that Indian blood had been spilt in that attack. It was towards this port town that Cdr Mokashi and his men accelerated their ship.
The approach to Al Hudaydah would prove even more challenging than Aden. While the latter could be navigated with some care, there was a standing advisory to all ships approaching Al Hudaydah to arrive and depart in daylight. With very limited room and once again without navigational charts, the port would prove a dangerous gamble. But Cdr Mokashi and his men had their orders. As they sailed slowly down the narrow approach channel to the familiar roar of fighter jets overhead, the crew of INS Sumitra did not know that Al Hudaydah had already fallen into the hands of Houthi rebels. This meant dealing directly with an armed rebel group in order to secure safe passage for Indian nationals.
At noon on 2 April, the Indian ship docked at Al Hudaydah. On board, it was action stations. Every armed member, including the MARCOS, was in a state of maximum alert with every weapon primed and ready. It was daylight, but the crew of INS Sumitra had just sailed into what was easily one of the most dangerous zones in the world that day.
Houthi rebel officials who had taken over the port communicated directly with the ship as it docked, ordering the crew to embark Indian citizens and leave within 4 hours. As the sound of bombing and air strikes got closer, the Indians waiting at the port were rapidly boarded. With the practice at Aden 2 nights ago, the ship’s crew breezed through the procedures. But an unexpected challenge arose—an Indian woman stepped up for the screening with her 7 children. And while she had the relevant documents, none of her children did.
Cdr Mokashi knew he did not have the time to conduct a background check. Nor could he bring the woman on board without her children. With strict orders not to board individuals who couldn’t be screened completely, it came down to the young officer’s discretion to allow the family to board.
When the ship was finally ready to leave with 317 Indians, rebel authorities would not give them permission to cast off. From India came the constant, and alarming, input urging the ship to leave as quickly as possible. Every conceivable threat to the ship had been imagined. Cdr Mokashi needed to make a decision. And once again, the day had given way to night.
Once again in pitch darkness, INS Sumitra inched its way out of Al Hudaydah’s treacherous harbour. Cdr Mokashi looked out from the bridge as his ship felt its way out from another bombed and broken town. The moon’s phase ensured that there was no natural light to give the ship’s crew a hand. They sailed out blind.
Clipping at 25 knots (about 46 kmph) through the darkness, the ship’s crew needed to ensure that the many children on board remained safe as they leaned over the ship’s railings. As the adults slept, the crew remembers the children who fanned out, fascinated by the vessel and the new experience that had been thrust upon them. This passage was a long one. After hours of play, the children were escorted back to their parents’ cabins, where they proceeded to fall asleep. Twenty hours later, on the night of 3 April, the ship once again arrived in Djibouti.
After Aden and Al Hudaydah, it was the third Yemeni port that would prove the trickiest of the lot. The crew had just been ordered to steam at full speed to Al Mukalla, 480 km from Aden on the Arabian Sea. The capital city of Yemen’s Hadhramaut region, Al Mukalla had just witnessed a terrifying series of attacks the day before.
On 2 April, terrorists from Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP) had stormed several buildings in Al Mukalla, including a large prison, freeing hundreds of inmates (including 2 AQAP commanders) and looting millions from the central bank. A street war between the AQAP, the Hadhramaut Tribal Alliance and the Yemen Army was raging, with at least 15 people having been killed over 2 days. The AQAP had seized full control of the port town. As the INS Sumitra zipped across the gulf in response to a rescue call for 250 terrified Indian nationals there, the infamous Battle of Mukalla had just begun.
Sailing at full speed for nearly 40 hours, Cdr Mokashi and the crew of INS Sumitra arrived off the coast of Al Mukalla on the morning of 5 April. But there was no talk of docking, not even the suggestion of it. The port was closed and completely under the control of Al Qaeda terrorist affiliates, groups not disconnected from those who had bombed the USS Cole. Cdr Mokashi rounded up the ship’s commandos and armed teams for a quick meeting. The men agreed. Getting any closer to Al Mukalla would heighten the possibility of a direct attack on the INS Sumitra.
With almost no intelligence about the capabilities of the terrorists who had seized control of the city and port, Cdr Mokashi would take no chances. The ship then received an input about another port town, Ash Shihr, about 63 km further north, with a PetroMasila oil terminal not far from the border with Oman. The company employed hundreds of Indians who also awaited rescue.
Unlike Al Hudaydah and Aden, where Cdr Mokashi and his crew managed with rudimentary maps to help them inch into unfriendly ports, they had nothing on Ash Shihr. Not a port for regular freight operations, it did not have a jetty, so berthing the ship was ruled out. INS Sumitra would therefore have to hold position a short distance off the coast. And in an extremely risky exercise, stranded Indians would have to be brought to the ship 1 boatload at a time.
The MARCOS team leader on board had his hands full that afternoon. His squad noticed a number of small boats in the sea not far from their ship as it arrived off Ash Shihr. Having done their homework about the area, they were aware that in 2002 in this precise area, an oil tanker, MV Limburg, chartered by Petronas, was attacked by Al Qaeda suicide bombers in a dinghy, killing 1 man from the crew and spilling a huge amount of crude oil into the gulf.
The Indian warship’s crew knew that stopping or slowing down off Yemen’s Hadhramaut region was possibly the most risky thing they could do in what was the world’s most dangerous zone at the time. By now, the Indian Navy’s rescue operations were well known around the world. Clear intelligence inputs warned the ship’s crew that terror groups were almost definitely expecting them. There was no clarity about which of the many boats were friendly and which could possibly be carrying enough explosives to sink INS Sumitra, or at least paralyse her a very long way from home and turn her into a sitting duck for a bigger attack.
Over the next few hours, in one of the tensest humanitarian operations ever, 2 boats from INS Sumitra and 2 from the oil terminal delivered 203 Indian nationals to the waiting warship. A third boat carried the MARCOS and a fourth stood by for search and rescue with naval divers. Not for a second during those hours was a finger off the trigger of any of the weapons on board.
Boats neared INS Sumitra that day, but veered away. None came too close, saving the Navy men from having to use their weapons. Throughout the operation, Cdr Mokashi remained in contact with his headquarters in an effort to squeeze as much real-time intelligence as he possibly could for the operation at hand. He knew he could leave nothing to chance. After many tense hours, the 203 Indians, including an infant, were safely on board. The ship couldn’t have steamed out faster that night.<
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By the time INS Sumitra docked at Djibouti to deliver its third load of rescued Indians on the evening of 7 April, 2 more Indian Navy warships—frigate INS Tarkash and destroyer INS Mumbai—had arrived in the Gulf of Aden from Mumbai. While the burden of operations could now be shared by 3 warships, none of the ships could dock at Aden again. The situation there had deteriorated considerably. It had also been decided by this time that Al Hudaydah was logistically the most accessible port, both for the warships as well as stranded Indians spread across Yemen.
That evening in Djibouti, the crew of INS Sumitra got their first chance to speak with their families in India. Cdr Mokashi spoke to his wife and children, answering their anxious questions with the usual reassurances that are second nature to military personnel. His work wasn’t over yet, and he wouldn’t see them for the next 2 months.
INS Sumitra would conduct 2 more rescue operations from Al Hudaydah on 9 and 15 April, rescuing 349 and 403 persons on those final missions. In total, the ship pulled out 1621 stranded persons, which included over 600 foreigners from 26 countries. The Indian government had given INS Sumitra clearance to receive foreigners on board after being flooded with international requests following the first Aden rescue.
An elderly couple from Pakistan were among the foreign nationals Cdr Mokashi’s crew rescued from Al Hudaydah. Cdr Mokashi remembers not knowing they were Pakistani until they introduced themselves personally to him in order to thank him. He was only doing his job, he told them.
Of the 9 rescue missions, INS Sumitra conducted 5, with 2 each by the other 2 Indian Navy ships.
On 16 April, after delivering their final load of Indian nationals to Djibouti, Cdr Mokashi and his crew, already heroes back home, got fresh orders. Seventeen days after they were diverted from their original mission in the Gulf of Aden, they were ordered to return to their anti-piracy patrol. After 2 more months of securing ships and making its way up or down the gulf, INS Sumitra was summoned home to Chennai.
On Independence Day 2015, Cdr Mokashi was awarded with the Shaurya Chakra for ‘unparalleled valour, conspicuous gallantry, bold and daring decisive actions beyond the call of duty’. But Cdr Mokashi is uncomfortable with the individual decoration.
‘This operation wasn’t handled by me alone, or by one man. The success of the mission was by us as a team,’ says Cdr Mokashi, who was promoted shortly after his gallantry decoration to the rank of Captain. The government appeared to recognize the young skipper’s sentiment and INS Sumitra became the Presidential Yacht during the International Fleet Review and received a unit citation in 2016.
Cdr Mokashi’s father, who was seriously ill through 2015, tracked the brave operations under his son’s command through reports on television. In August 2015 when the government announced that his son would be decorated with the Shaurya Chakra, it became an overpowering wish for him to attend the ceremony and see his son receive the medal. But his health had dipped drastically. With great effort, the senior Mokashi was transported to Delhi for the ceremony on 22 March 2016.
He would pass away 20 days later.
12
‘You Think It’ll Never Happen to You’
Squadron Leader Rijul Sharma
Jamnagar, Gujarat
1 June 2016
Sqn Ldr Rijul Sharma, 30 years old, woke up early like he always did. It was a warm Wednesday at the Jamnagar Air Force base in Gujarat’s Gulf of Kutch. A light breeze from the north-west whipped around the dusty skin of the station. If there was one thing Sqn Ldr Sharma knew as he squinted out of the window of his quarters, dressed in his shorts and T-shirt, it was that there couldn’t have been a better day for a flight.
The young pilot stepped into a patch of sun in front of his residence, stretching and twisting the sleep out of his bones. Like hundreds of other military aviators across the country that morning, he would be going through the paces of an exercise that keeps the Indian Air Force nimble, alert and ready for active operations.
But this was peacetime. The last time an Indian combat jet had been used in hostility was during the Kargil conflict 17 years earlier. Sqn Ldr Sharma had been 13 then, a boy who had just discovered his athletic gifts. He remembered the stories his father, a former Air Force pilot himself, told him about Indian fighter jets cruising into hostile territory to blast away Pakistani intruders in Kargil. News channels, then in their infancy, beamed out grainy photographs and videos to a mesmerized Indian public. His father, who had flown DC-3 Dakota transport aircraft and Canberra light bombers in the restive North-east sectors decades before, was a living inspiration to the teenaged Rijul. The Kargil War merely sealed his fascination for flying.
Sqn Ldr Sharma had got married only a few months before. Pulling on a fresh T-shirt and jeans, he smiled goodbye to his wife, Deepika, and made his way to the operations briefing room at his unit, a MiG-29 squadron, about 3 km away. The squadron was constituted a year after the 1962 Indo-China war and code-named ‘First Supersonics’ because it was the first to operate supersonic MiG-21 jets. It has, since the 1990s, operated another type of aircraft from the same legendary Russian Mikoyan-Gurevich stable: the MiG-29 Fulcrum. It was the jet that Sqn Ldr Sharma flew.
The young pilot received his flying orders that June morning from his Squadron Commander. He was to conduct an ‘airframe and engine sortie’, a kind of torture test to ensure the aircraft is in top shape and capable of stretching itself to the physical limits it is designed for—a structured workout to keep the nuts and bolts humming, and pilots in sync with their machines.
Strapping a G-suit over his dark blue flight overalls, Sqn Ldr Sharma made his way out to the flight line to climb into the MiG-29 he would be flying that day. A final check of all systems and weather confirmed it was an excellent day to stretch the MiG-29’s limbs out over the shimmering Gulf of Kutch. He climbed into the familiar cockpit and strapped in, putting his helmet on. He would lower the visor later to keep out the harsh sun as he soared.
Power on, the cockpit came to life in a low wheezing hum as the MiG-29’s twin Klimov RD-33 jet engines were gradually brought to a ground idle position. Releasing the brakes, the pilot eased the jet out of its parking bay and taxied it on to the apron towards the end of the long tarmac. Sqn Ldr Sharma sat in his cockpit, waiting for permission to take off. He glanced around, as he always did, at the base.
The Jamnagar Air Force station is an old, venerable combat base. It came up shortly after India gained independence, initially as a weapons training wing for pilots to hone their bombing skills. It was after Jamnagar proved enormously useful as a base to launch strikes into Pakistan during the 1965 and 1971 wars that it was upgraded to the status of a premier fighter aircraft base in 1979. In the early 1990s, the base received its first Soviet-built MiG-29 Fulcrums.
The Indian Air Force calls its MiG-29s ‘Baaz’—Urdu for ‘falcon’. Sqn Ldr Sharma had been flying MiG-29s for years, and like his squadron mates, loved the eager agility the aircraft demonstrated in the air. Built as a highly manoeuvrable dogfighter during the Cold War, the jet had matured well across Air Forces, displaying a capacity for missions well beyond frenetic close combat. In Indian hands, the MiG-29s at Jamnagar proved worthy of a variety of missions, from defending airspace against testy airborne intruders from Pakistan to projecting power over the Arabian Sea armed with anti-ship missiles. Sqn Ldr Sharma and his jet had been scrambled several times before on such missions.
But on that June morning in 2016, there was no apparent threat. No intruders in the air or suspicious ships at sea to ward off. Just a clear, blue sky, and the comforting crackle of static in the earpiece embedded in his helmet. Sqn Ldr Sharma waited.
A few minutes later, right before 1000 hours, Jamnagar ground control gave him permission to take off. Sqn Ldr Sharma gently pushed forward the throttle, throwing the MiG-29 into a growl, then a steady roar, as the engine’s afterburners created 2 licks of orange flame from the jet’s twin nozzles, propelling the MiG-29 off the ground and into the air. He
quickly put the jet into a steep climb to an altitude of 1000 metres, his peripheral vision under the fighter canopy noticing the base peel away from beneath and behind him.
Flattening out after his steep climb, Sqn Ldr Sharma did a quick systems check on the aircraft’s airframe and twin engines. Then he fed the engines some more fuel and steered the jet upward to an altitude of approximately 11,000 metres through a tenuous cloud deck that had blown in from the Gulf of Kutch. The Perspex glass of the fighter canopy glinted in the harsh sunlight at that altitude. Sqn Ldr Sharma levelled out his jet, bringing it into steady flight.
The test points he needed to achieve on that flight included stretching his MiG-29 to its limits in the ‘supersonic corridor’, where the aircraft would be flying at just over the speed of sound at that altitude, while executing a series of manoeuvres, all the while checking airframe response and engine performance. Sqn Ldr Sharma lowered his visor as the sun came up at him from the left. Several kilometres behind him, the Jamnagar airbase silently dropped away over the horizon.
Now cruising, the pilot increased throttle up to Mach 1.1 (1358 kmph), crossing the sound barrier, and proceeded to kick-start his routine of systems checks. The cockpit instruments beamed out their comforting figures, telling the pilot that all was well, and predictable. This is the one thing combat pilots love above all else: Predictability. Everything checked out.
About 110 km from base, just as Sqn Ldr Sharma was getting ready to begin his next set of manoeuvres, he noticed a whistling sound in the cockpit. it was a sound he had never heard before.
In a pressurized, air-conditioned fighter cockpit, a pilot only really hears 3 things: the steady hum of his engine, the radio voice from ground control and the sound of his own breathing, amplified by snug headgear designed to tune out any other sound. The sharp whistling sound immediately stood out as odd.