Fenix

by Vivek Ahuja

  Vikram took Pathanya’s outstretched hand after lowering his salute. Pathanya was beaming at the sight of his old friend. Vikram was struggling to keep up as he met the other team members. They all looked at him through the lens of his Bhutan accomplishments. Nobody could see Vikram as the human being he was now. Not within his peers here.

  Pathanya led Vikram out of the tent just as the weak sunlight began to break through the dense fog.

  “The new team looks sharp, sir.” Vikram noted neutrally.

  Pathanya nodded. He understood. “We have to move on, Vik. The job requires it.”

  “Fair enough, sir.”

  “No,” Pathanya shook his head, “not fair. But life never is. I didn’t ask for this assignment but I did ask for you. Sorry.” He smiled faintly. Vikram left out a deep breath as though shedding his doubts.

  “Where are we bunked?” He asked after a moment.

  “Two tents down, on the left. Get yourself kitted out and head back here for a briefing on what we are up to.”

  “Yes, sir. Any news on the overall situation?” Vik said as he hefted his rucksack over his shoulders.

  “The balloon is about go up within hours.”

  “God! This war feels like a continuation of the last one!”

  Pathanya crossed his arms: “that’s because it is! The Pakis are like sharks sensing blood in the water. They think we are weak right now. And so they are pushing their luck. We will push them into their graves instead.”

  “Oh. Before I forget,” Pathanya said as he stopped midway on his way back to the map-boards, “we are call-sign ‘pathfinder’ on this one.”

  “Pathfinder it is, sir.” Vikram smiled and headed off.

  Across the semi-arid plains west of Lahore, two-dozen launcher vehicles elevated their quad-missile tubes through the camouflage netting laid over them and pointed east, towards India. Each of the four tubes on every vehicle carried the subsonic “Babur” cruise-missiles. Essentially a clone of the American “Tomahawk” missile, the Babur was capable and lethal. The US government had disabled GPS coverage for both India and Pakistan to deter them from war. As a result, the Babur missiles were relegated to relatively inaccurate inertial guidance systems. But considering the short distance between the border and supposed targets inside India, the missiles were accurate enough. And that was all that mattered to the Pakistani army commanders. As the dust settled around the deployed launchers, the war now stood a button push away…

  ──── 21 ────

  The darkness of the night was shattered with streaks of orange flashes as the Babur missiles left their launchers. Their rectangular flight wings snapped out of the fuselage and locked into place as the air-breathing engines roared to life, propelling them to half the speed-of-sound and…

  For those in Lahore, the view was visible from the rooftops as small specks of yellow-light to the east. Most of the civilians still in the city were those that had been unable to leave for various reasons. The did not envy what they knew was to follow now. Many of the elders in town remembered when the Indian forces had reached the outskirts of this city the last time Islamabad went to war with India. And as they stared silently at the specks of light heading towards the Indian border. The streets below them filled with jubilation as thousands of jihadists cheered and fired their rifles into the air: their jihad had begun.

  “Mongol-two-five here. Trip-wire engaged. Inbounds, Inbounds!”

  “How many?” Verma walked over briskly to the RSO station. He didn’t have to wait for the answer. The screen in front of the seated operators showed a radar screen pointed west on top and north-south shown along the left-right axis. Small, green dots with altitude and speed information were beginning to populate the screen from about twenty odd locations scattered around Lahore…

  Here we go! Verma went into mental overdrive along with most of his Phalcon AWACS crew. His first call was not to the air-force’s western-air-command; they would already be getting whatever he was seeing here. And they would be scrambling every available aircraft into the air.

  No, Verma’s main concern was the inbound missile threats. With impact time measured in minutes, the three army corps deployed between Pathankot to the north and Amritsar to the south were under imminent threat. The Pakistanis were trying to take the steam out of these forces before they struck across the border…

  He spoke into his comms: “mongol-two to picket-fence-actual: I hope you are seeing this!”

  The response from the ground-based integrated-air-defense commander came over some radio static: “Roger.”

  Verma cocked an eyebrow at that cryptic remark. The man was cool-as-a-cucumber under pressure. Even veterans like Verma were not immune to getting excited when missiles were headed straight that them. But that army man on the ground was completely unfazed!

  Either he is oblivious to the magnitude of the threat or has balls of steel…Verma left the defenses on the ground to the army and moved on to more pressing matters: the enemy air-force. “Mongol-two-three, what’s the long-range word?” Mongol-two-three was the EW operator whose sole concern was the long-range threats materializing over the horizon. This was accomplished through the use of long-range wavelength radio waves that “bounced” through the atmosphere.

  Over the past weeks, the Indian forces had built up a detailed picture of the Pakistani ground-based radar systems deployed across the border and the airborne systems. Consequently, the possibility of nasty surprises was low. But vigilance was the prime rule of the game.

  “Getting crowded,” Verma heard and walked over to the EW station. The operator turned over his shoulder and saw Verma standing there before turning to point at the screen: “atmospheric scatter from multiple ground-based systems are filling the skies. Our friends are powering up all their air-defense systems.”

  “For all the good it will do them!” Verma patted the operator on the shoulder before moving up the cabin. He checked his watch and did some mental calculations.

  All right, time to shift gears…

  Verma understood that the war would belong to the side that took the initiative. Both India and Pakistan had dozens of airbases within striking range of each other and had deployed advanced ground-based air-defenses. Both sides had the same advantages. So the real advantage boiled down to individual weapon-systems, training, and attrition reserves.

  This air war was not going to be a chess game. It was slated to be a raw slugfest.

  “Picket-fence is engaging.”

  Verma turned to the RSO station monitoring the inbound Babur missiles: “those missiles across yet?”

  “Negative! Picket-Fence is engaging over the border!”

  Verma grunted. Yup. That fell in line with the ground commander’s aggressiveness. The Babur missiles hadn’t crossed the border yet. But the Indian commander controlling the line of aerostat radars and Akash surface-to-air missile batteries protecting Potgam’s forces on the ground was an aggressive bastard. He had his forces deployed in such a manner so that they were practically leaning over the border. It allowed him to strike quicker and harder.

  Verma approved all of this, of course. A lot of lessons had been learnt by the Indian military the hard way during the war in Tibet. A major lesson had been the ability to detect and destroy large, saturation missile-strikes by the enemy. The institutional defensive mindset had been shed in light of the sobering losses encountered at the hands of Chinese missiles. The effects of these lessons were visible tonight as contact after contact on the radar screen disappeared from view as the Akash missiles began intercepting targets…

  “Leaks!” The RSO shouted. “We have missiles breaking through picket-fence!” Just over a dozen of the Babur missiles moved past the line of air-defenses as the Akash missile batteries cycled to reload.

  Verma noted this before the ground commander chimed-in matter-of-factly: “picket-fence here, we have airspace penetration by enemy missiles. I am all out. Over to you, mongol-two.”

  Ye
ah, no shit, genius! Verma noted sourly and turned to his comms people: “get any flight of aircraft with an air-to-air payload in the vicinity of the missiles and vector them in to take out the remaining missiles!”

  “Wilco!”

  “Mongol-two-five here. Inbound tag-three-seven has disappeared off screen! I…I think it has struck! Tag-three-one is off screen as well. The missiles are hitting their targets!”

  Shit! Verma turned to the comms officer as the latter spoke into his headset: “dagger-two, break pattern and engage low-altitude targets on bearing two-one-five! Mongol-two has the ball! Vectors to follow!”

  “Wilco. Dagger is moving to intercept.” Wing-commander Naresh Grewal looked to his port side to see the other three LCA “Tejas” fighters in a echelon-left deployment. The pilots were all equipped with the helmet-mounted night-optics that rendered the world around them in shades of green and black. The cloud cover below reflected the moonlight and was enhanced in their views as a white-colored floor.

  “Dagger-actual to all dagger birds, you heard the man. Follow me!”

  Grewal flipped his delta-winged interceptor to starboard and dived through the clouds below, followed by his three other pilots. His visibility disappeared and the slick clouds engulfed the cockpit glass from all sides. The aircraft vibrated in the turbulence. All four aircraft broke under the clouds, facing a dark-green landscape below punctuated with a several unnaturally enhanced white light-balls. Grewal pulled the aircraft level and scanned the northwestern skies for white blobs of light moving against the dark background. Of that he found many! Army and air-force helicopters were flying all over the place…

  “Damn! Dagger-leader,” his radio squawked, “how the hell are we supposed to I-D the missiles amongst all this?”

  Grewal frantically looked left and right as they thundered on. “Roger, -two! Keep your eyes peeled for light-balls moving fast and low, then close in for I-D from the six-o-clock before engaging! Last thing we need is to be shooting at our own guys out here!”

  “Wilco.”

  The radio chimed again: “mongol-two here: enemy missiles just passed under you! What the hell is going on out there, dagger?!”

  Goddamn it! Grewal growled and enabled the transmit: “mongol-two: I have dozens of inbounds showing up here on my night-optics! Somebody needs to pass the message to those army pilots to land their birds or else we are likely to hit our own guys! I need a vector!”

  “One-three-five, relative!”

  Grewal ignored the curt response from Verma. He flipped his aircraft and brought it about on a easterly heading and dived for the deck. Two of the Babur missile’s engine exhausts showed up on his night-optics as white balls of light…

  “Dagger-actual has visual on two inbounds heading south in general direction of Bathinda!”

  “Dagger-three has visual on one inbound heading east!”

  “Dagger-four also has visual on one inbound!”

  Grewal added it up in his head. The numbers came up short. What happened to the other missiles?

  Shit! No time. He enabled the infrared guidance on his R-73 heat-seeking missile. It had no difficulty locking on to that massive thermal plume from the Babur missiles in front of him. The enemy missiles were chugging along at a cruising speed, oblivious to the threat materializing to their rear. Grewal heard the audio tone of missile-lock and depressed the launch button on his control stick. The shower of white blanketed his vision abruptly as the R-73 leapt off the rails and fell lower, matching the altitude of the Babur missiles. Two seconds later it exploded behind one of them in a ball of orange-yellow flame, shredding the target into fragments. The fragments struck the farmland below in a shower of sparks as Grewal’s LCA thundered overhead.

  As he banked, he saw his wingman destroying the other Babur missile before pulling above the exploding fireball. The underneath of his LCA was momentarily lit up in the glow of the explosion. Grewal rubbed his eyes with his gloved fingers whilst climbing up towards the clouds. His radio squawked: “dagger-three here: we splashed two more targets! No more inbounds to be seen. Over.”

  “Roger. Good job, gentlemen!” Grewal shook his head and cleared his vision before lowering his night-optics again. “Formate with me and return to altitude! We are burning up a lot of fuel down here!”

  “Wilco.”

  Hel then changed frequencies: “mongol-two, we splashed four enemy missiles and are awaiting vectors. Over.”

  “Negative on vectors, dagger. We count eight missile strikes against friendly ground units. No more targets to intercept.” Grewal tightened his grip around the control-stick. Despite their efforts, eight missiles had broken through to their targets and struck. Only god knew how many lives had been lost…

  The radio chimed in after several seconds of silence: “dagger, what’s your combat status?”

  “All green, mongol-two. Dagger is still in the fight.” Grewal checked the fuel and weapons indicators. Yup. All green.

  “Roger. Move to vector three-five at ten-thousand feet and hold station.” The four LCAs broke through the cloud cover and were once again staring at the starlit skies above. Grewal could now see numerous sets of lights showing up on the horizon. A lot of friendly combat aircraft were collecting in the skies around him.

  “Dagger requesting sit-rep, mongol-two.” He was not one to sit in the dark while the war lit up around his ears. He needed to know what the threat picture was. The onboard radar on the LCA was meant to seek and destroy, not scan the skies like a flashlight in the dark. That was Verma’s job.

  “Sitrep is fluid, dagger. Will advise momentarily.”

  “Yeah. I guess we will just twiddle our thumbs in the meantime then!” Grewal added after disabling the voice transmit.

  “Mongol-two-three here, two long-range mobile radar sources detected on bearing two-five-two and three-one-five magnetic! Airborne. And coming over the horizon.”

  Verma looked up from the comms console and to the EW operator who had called out the warning. He then pressed the transmit button on his intercom: “designation and source?”

  “Bandit on bearing three-one-five is inbound southeast. Possible source is Peshawar. Bandit on bearing two-five-two is inbound easterly. Possible source is Multan. Tagging as bandits vortex-one and vortex-two. Beginning track.” Verma saw the EW operator use the control mouse on his console to tag the contacts. The screen panel to the side immediately populated with the two active sources: VORTEX-ONE and VORTEX-TWO.

  The Phalcon was detecting these two inbound sources based on their long-wavelength radar signatures over the horizon long before the aircraft emitting these signals was detected. Much like how a man holding a torch in the dark is seen long before he sees what he is looking for, the EW operators on the Phalcon were seeing the light of the torch emitted by these two Pakistani airborne-radar aircraft.

  But who were they? Verma mulled that over. Peshawar made sense for the Pakistani air-force. It was far enough behind the border to safely place their precious airborne control assets. But Multan was far closer to border. Pakistani aircraft based there were effectively forward-deployed. It was a risky place to base critical airborne-control aircraft.

  They must know where we are the same way we know about them. At least we must run with that assumption…Verma thought.

  The EW operator came back on comms: “vortex-two has boosted signal strength to full power!”

  They are looking for a fight…Verma concluded and changed comms to the flight controllers: “mongol-two-five and –two-six, be advised that we have inbound enemy airborne-control aircraft to the south and west. Contacts designated vortex-one and –two. They will have strong protection centered around the control aircraft. Vortex-two is the higher priority. I want that bird taken down before we are forced to split resources in two directions. Divert flights as necessary. Out.”

  Verma watched as his crew went to work relaying his orders to combat flight commanders whose aircraft were filling up the skies all around him.
He felt the sudden sensation of sweat and absently looked at his hands, which had become sweaty. Perhaps a part of him knew what he was committing his fighter pilots to. The Pakistanis liked to overrate their equipment and tactics beyond reality, but they were still deadly. He knew he was going to lose pilots and airframes tonight. But that was war. As commander, his job was to ensure that the losses incurred amounted to something, instead of nothing. Was this a fight he wanted to commit to?

  That was a question as old as war itself. Which battles should a commander commit to? Which others to retreat from? Good commanders were those that knew the difference. Bad commanders committed to every fight. The idea was to win. If it required him to withdraw his forces from one front and commit them to the other, then that was what he would do.

  This was a fight he wanted to commit to. The Pakistanis only had a handful of airborne-control aircraft. Taking them out quick and dirty would nullify the PAF’s ability to wage war in the skies, leaving the Indians in control. The side that lost its airspace, lost control of the war.

  Verma awoke from his reverie and found himself staring at his palms. He wiped them on the side of his flight-suit and took a deep breath as the Phalcon controllers handed the fight over to the fighter flights. He reminded himself that there was, after all, yet another rule to war: once committed, there were no if’s and buts allowed. Finish the fight. Fight to win.

  Grewal copied the message from the Phalcon and took a deep breath. He transitioned mentally to what needed to be done now. He gripped the control stick tighter and could feel his senses moving into hyper-drive. Everything registered in his mind. The smell of the leather straps holding him to his seat. The fabric of the flight-suit. The rumble of the engine powering his aircraft. The individual stars in the night sky above. The bluish-white color of the clouds below.