Fenix

by Vivek Ahuja

  At least that’s what they told us…he shrugged off the rain water and again shouldered his rifle behind his back. The eyes of the two crewmen were focused on his actions.

  “Look at the sea where we are going!” he shouted with a brash wave of his arm. “If we get lost out here, I will personally chop and throw your heads off this boat for the sharks to feast on! I want to be at our objective within the next few hours before this storm dies away! Understand?!”

  The two men nodded in quick successions but said nothing. Afridi moved to the old man and grabbed him by the throat, nearly choking him.

  “You have been very quiet ever since I came up here. You are not having second thoughts about the task God has given you, do you?” He pressed his fingers tighter around the old man’s neck, causing him to gasp for breath. “Speak up, you old bastard!”

  A few seconds later Afridi relaxed his grip around the man’s throat. The captain instantly fell on his knees gasping for air.

  “Bah. You miserable villagers are not worthy to be leading this task!” Afridi turned to a hatch nearby that led into the belly of the ship. That was where the rest of his men were. There was a small orange-yellow glow of light coming from down there. Afridi bent over the hatch and was met down the ladder by one of his men, sitting with his rifle next to the base of the ladder.

  “Rashid!” Afridi shouted. Rashid looked up and smiled.

  “Wake everybody up. We are getting close to the destination. I want the cargo checked and primed. Understand?” Rashid nodded and threw his cigarette away, getting up with the help of the ladder. Afridi looked back at the bridge once Rashid was on his way. He could hear the voices of other men now. The captain’s assistant had helped the captain get up and take a seat near the steering column. The latter’s face was red and he was still struggling for breath.

  “You!” Afridi pointed at the assistant. “Get back to the control! Leave him or I will shoot you right here and now!”

  As the petrified man promptly got up to get to the controls, Afridi looked out the glass and saw the drizzle dying down. He could even see some break in the cloud cover…

  “How far are we from the coast?”

  “Probably two dozen kilometers.”

  Not a good time to lose weather cover…Afridi thought. They were entering one of the busiest commercial shipping areas. He could even make out the lights of at least half a dozen large container ships on the horizon.

  Afridi turned as he heard noise behind him and saw Rashid climbing up the stairs to the bridge, his rifle slinging over his shoulders. He kicked the captain blocking his way on the floor and walked past the writhing man. Afridi had taken the binoculars from the bridge and was actively scanning the horizon.

  “Problems?” Rashid asked.

  “Not yet,” Afridi replied without taking his eyes off the optics. “But the weather is starting to clear and we still have some distance to go before we are in range of the dinghies.”

  “Inshallah, we will deliver as promised!” Rashid proclaimed confidently. Afridi grunted and smiled.

  “Indeed, my friend! I…” Afridi’s voice died off as both men overheard droning aircraft noise. A warning from the assistant made them look just as an Indian coast-guard Dorner-228 aircraft broke cloud cover about a kilometer away from their location. The aircraft was on a path away from the boat and was moving on…

  “Maybe they didn’t see us!” Rashid offered. Afridi continued to watch the departing aircraft through his binoculars as it drifted in and out of the low hanging clouds and the early morning mist. The aircraft noise was dying down now and Afridi was almost agreed with Rashid when the aircraft banked to port and began to turn.

  “The infidels have spotted us!” Afridi lowered his binoculars and let out some heart-felt expletives. He then turned to Rashid as the aircraft noise began to rise: “Get everybody up now! Tell Ahmed to open up the containers we have for just this emergency! Go!”

  As Rashid leapt to the ladder and began climbing down, Afridi kept his eyes on the twin-engined propeller aircraft as it swung by the ship, this time within a few hundred meters of the bow. Afridi saw the logo of the Indian coast-guard against the flicker of a lightening flash. He thought he also saw light flashing from some small dome-shaped optical pod lens…

  There’s no hiding it now...he looked on as Rashid and two other men of his team brought up a pair of wooden containers through the hatch. Rashid slid one of the containers over the floor of the bridge and cracked open the lid. He removed the thin cover of foam on top to reveal a long green tube with optics on one end. It had painted on it “ANZA MK-II”. Rashid put his rifle down and hefted the loaded surface-to-air missile launcher in his hands. He removed the lid off its optics and slid the batteries in. The optics lit up. He looked to Afridi:

  “Ready when you are!”

  Afridi frowned. This was to have been their last resort. But given the nature of the mission at hand, they were armed for any eventuality. He held no assumptions that the Indians would be unaware of the threat posed by this weapon or even the weapon’s characteristics. After all, they had faced versions of the same weapon many years ago during the Kargil war. No, the issue here was not the weapon itself but its use. Deniability doesn’t work very well if one advertises the source of one’s weaponry…

  “Not yet,” he replied finally. “Let’s make sure they are on to us. For all they know, we are just another fishing vessel lost in the storm.” He got a wicked smile from Rashid on that one just as the aircraft made another low pass over the vessel, drowning the bridge in propeller noise.

  “They are hailing us on the radio!” The captain’s assistant shouted.

  “Tell them what they want to hear!” Afridi shouted back. “And stick to what we told you to say. One word besides it and your sentence dies with you! Understand?” The assistant nodded in fear and began to respond to the radio hails. All the while the ship continued towards the coast. All they needed to do was to buy time.

  “The aircraft is armed!” Rashid said as the aircraft banked around the bow of the ship again, scrutinizing it with its infra-red optics. Afridi saw what Rashid was pointing to: there were a pair of rocket pods underneath each wing of the small patrol aircraft. Each pod carried four fin-stabilized unguided rockets. Enough firepower to sink this vessel without too much trouble…

  “Take it easy, now.” Afridi ordered. “Let them keep talking. And keep that launcher stowed away. The more they talk, they closer we get!”

  The assistant turned from the radio to face the men behind him: “The Indians are ordering us to shut off our engines and stay where we are. They are ordering us not to come any closer to the coast!”

  “How far are we now?” Rashid asked.

  “About eighteen kilometers away,” Afridi replied, looking at the GPS tracker in his hands and the paper map laid out on the chart table. He shook his head. “Still too far!”

  “No choice then!” Rashid said as he flicked open the optics of his launcher. Afridi realized that his colleague was correct. There was no other option. He turned to the assistant: “You! Do what the Indians are asking.”

  Rashid let out a derisive laugh. “Get them complacent! I like it!”

  A few minutes later the ship was dead in the water. It rolled and pitched with the waves, helplessly. The flight crew of the Dornier-228 overflew the docile and obedient target, observing them via night-vision goggles. Behind them, the systems operators continued their task of observing the Pakistani ship through the infra-red and near-infrared optical pods. One of them spotted a man on the railing outside the bridge elevating a long tube at them and realized what that was. He shouted the warning to the pilots and zoomed his optics on the tube just as the optics flashed white. Then smoke drifted away from the pipe. The operator zoomed the optical scope back out and saw the rising thermal plume coming up towards them. The pilot banked his aircraft hard and prepared to punch out flares, but he and his crew had been caught completely off guard against su
ch an unexpected anti-air threat. A second later it was already too late.

  Afridi saw from inside the bridge as the Anza missile climbed into the Indian aircraft and slammed into its engines just as the pilot had released flares. The explosion tore apart the small aircraft’s starboard wing amidst a flurry of flames. The aircraft splashed into the waves a couple seconds later.

  “There is no hiding it now!” Rashid said as he threw the discarded launcher off the ship and walked inside, wiping the smut of the missile exhaust off his face. Afridi turned to the captain’s assistant:

  “Full speed ahead! Head straight towards Mumbai! Get us as close as you can!”

  As the ship’s engines rumbled back to life and the vibrations made it back to the bridge, Rashid looked at the rest of the men and then to Afridi: “What’s the plan now? They will be waiting for us! There is little hope of carrying out the original mission.”

  Afridi grunted in amusement.

  “The original mission? The original mission still stands, my friend. But our execution is now much more direct! Prepare the payload!”

  Rashid raised his eyebrow in surprise and then nodded. He then motioned to two of his men to follow him down the hatch, leaving Afridi on the bridge with everybody else.

  Fifteen minutes later there was no doubt that the Indians were aware that something was going on off the coast of Mumbai. Afridi was the first to spot an Indian coast-guard ship on the horizon, steaming at full speed towards his boat against the hazy backdrop of the Mumbai skyline much further south.

  Here they come…He ran over to the hatch: “Rashid! Are you ready?”

  “Almost! Give me five more minutes!” was the reply.

  “Five minutes! That’s all we have! Let me know when its set!”

  Afridi then walked back to the assistant and saw that the Indian ship was now much closer, given the high closure rate between them. He could see the Indian sailors moving up the bow of the ship to man the mounted machineguns. He also saw what looked like preparations for a boarding party.

  A floodlight from the Indian ship switched on and began moving up and down his boat. Afridi nudged the assistant to keep his direct course towards Mumbai, forcing the Indian vessel to move to the side. This time, of course, the Indians were not spending time to talk. A burst of heavy machinegun fire riddled the stern of the boat. Afridi and the others dived to the floor as splinters flew off the ship and tracers flashed by, lighting up the night. The thunderous rattle of the gunfire drowned out all other noises.

  When it stopped, Afridi raised his head and saw smoke piling into the bridge from the rear of their boat. The engine had died and they were now adrift. The flashlights from the Indian vessel were shining straight at them, making Afridi wince and bring his arm up to shield his eyes.

  “What’s going on up there?” Rashid shouted from the hatch as he climbed up the stairs.

  “Stay where you are!” Afridi shouted back and waved him to go back down. “They are preparing to board and kill us. Our time’s up! We are as close as we are going to get. Are you all set?”

  Rashid nodded in the affirmative.

  Afridi looked at the light from the sky scrapers of Mumbai on the horizon and then smiled. “Good. Do it! Allah-u-Akbar!” Afridi closed his eyes…

  …Several seconds later, a flash of white erupted from the Pakistani vessel and engulfed the Indian ship, expanding outwards for a kilometer in radius before rising off the sea underneath a rapidly rising stem of flames. Mumbai was backlit against this rapidly rising ball of nuclear fission. Manmade tsunamis raced towards the Mumbai coast along with a massive cloud of radioactive fallout.

  ────

  2 ────

  The satellite moved above the brown-green subcontinent as it headed southwest on its orbit. The camera’s optics silently zoomed on the slowly drifting mushroom cloud over the waters of the Arabian sea, just northwest of Mumbai. As the brown pillar of dust and smoke lazily drifted east, the optics on the satellite zoomed in further on the city. Sea water had flooded the roads and turned them into gridlocks. Panicked people were attempting to make their way through the water as rumors and fears of nuclear fallout spread through the media. The satellite noted all the damage and carnage, but in the serene desolation of space, it was a muted sight.

  The scene was anything but serene down below. At the operations center for the Indian aerospace command, the nodal agency for the combined Indian space based assets, chaos was taking hold.

  “Tell me what happened!” Air-Marshal Malhotra ordered. As men around him hurried trying to get their assessments put together, Malhotra stared at the large screen in front of him showing the live video feed of what the satellite was seeing from above Mumbai. He looked at the corner of the screen as it showed various orbital parameters of the satellite in question. He saw that the bird overflying Mumbai at the moment was RISAT-2A, a recently launched satellite. RISAT, or Radar Imaging Satellites, were one of the newer generation series of satellites to be put under the Indian military command following the war with China. They were attrition replacements.

  For Malhotra, it was very much a sense of déjà-vu. It was as though he was witnessing the very same acts that had started the bloody war with China. The same opening moves in a game of devastation. When that war had started, it had been a younger Malhotra at the helms of the newly formed Indian aerospace forces, operating out of the city of Bangalore, in southern India.

  A much younger self…he rubbed his sleep-deprived eyes.

  And so it was. Over the two weeks of conflict that had taken place from the mountains of Ladakh to the cities of Bhutan and the high seas off the Indonesian coasts, space based assets had proven critical. At the time, however, India had been caught flat-footed on the military reality of space in modern war. It lacked redundancy in space assets which meant that every loss was crippling to satellite coverage. India had also lacked offensive space weapons such as anti-satellite or ASAT weapons…and the Chinese had not.

  Malhotra was on point when one of his precious birds had been taken out over northern Tibet by Chinese ASAT missiles later in the war. And it had almost cost them everything.

  Following the war, Malhotra had enjoyed an extended stay in charge of his beloved space units. Longer than most people in such positions. But he had been the right man with the right operational credentials to expand Indian military presence in space. In the last three years, he had initiated numerous crash programs to enlarge the command to the level where it actually was a full command, operated jointly by all three services. Several launches and deployment of military satellites had been authorized by the government. RISAT-2A was one of the products of this expansion program. And of course, he had also been promoted to fit the required rank for anyone commanding this force.

  But that war with China had been a “legitimate” war.

  What the hell is this? Malhotra wondered as he watched the black-and-white picture on the main screen showing the mushroom cloud losing its shape as it broke over the Indian coast.

  “What’s the prevalent wind conditions out there?” He asked one of the weather people sitting at their operations consoles.

  “East by north,” was the quick reply.

  “Fallout is heading inland,” Malhotra noted dryly.

  “And some of it will make it to the northern parts of the city by mid-morning today,” Rear-Admiral Sinha added dryly. Sinha had been deputed here from the Strategic Forces Command, or STRATFORCOM, to improve synergy between the two commands. He was also now Malhotra’s deputy-commander. Nuclear fallout patterns and analysis was part of Sinha’s job specialization. Malhotra shook his head. He could not picture himself doing such a job with the objectivity it required.

  “What’s the yield we are looking at here?” Malhotra asked Sinha, who focused his stare on the large screen and then glanced at the resolution data visible on the top-left of the video.

  “A few kilotons,” he said with finality. Malhotra turned to his comms peo
ple and pointed to the screen with his arm:

  “Get the folks at STRATFORCOM and give them our preliminary imagery analysis. Our boys in Delhi are going to want to get their hands on all of this as soon as they know we have it.” He then turned to see that Sinha had walked closer to the screen and was staring at some location of the screen. “What do I tell Delhi on what we think this is?”

  The navy officer turned to face him: “Tell it like it is: nuclear terrorism by our friends in Pakistan.”

  Pathanya walked into the officer’s mess building and saw a crowd of his fellow instructors standing by the wall mounted television in the ante room. Pathanya noticed the grim look on their faces and aborted his short walk to the library, to find out what the matter was. He found one of his fellow instructors, Captain Samik Kamidalla, standing with his arms folded near the television.

  “Samik, what’s going on?”

  Kamidalla turned to see Pathanya walk in and then faced the television again. “Not sure,” he replied with his fingers cupping his chin. “News coming in on all channels. Mumbai has been hit by a tsunami. No warning or anything. People in panic over there.”

  Pathanya let out a deep breath as he exhaled in consideration. This was the first he was hearing about this.

  Hell of a morning!

  “Well, natural disasters aren’t anything new,” he replied with a hand on Kamidalla’s shoulder. “Stuff happens. Let’s find out if any of the boys who have relatives in Mumbai or nearby coastal areas need to take some immediate leave and see what we can do. I…”

  “Oh god!”

  Pathanya and Kamidalla both jerked towards the screen and saw a breaking news report that had just aired a video taken on the ground at Mumbai. The scene showed a brownish-white mushroom cloud dissipating into the morning blue skies north of Mumbai…