by Vivek Ahuja
“Major,” Grewal replied, “I owe you and your men my life. I will never forget this.”
Pathanya smiled: “it’s our job, sir.”
Grewal nodded and limped over to the edge of the trees where Kamidalla waited for them. Pathanya shouted over the sounds of the helicopter engines: “Kamidalla, deliver our guest to the birds! And then get to team-two!” He then turned to face the others around him: “the rest of you, we are leaving! Team-one with me. Team-two with Captain Kamidalla! Let’s go!”
By now the tree branches were swaying in the rotor downwash. The first of three Dhruv helicopters landed within the wet mud of the fields. Their landing skids sunk into the slush as they came to rest. Pathanya waved the pathfinders forward. Eight pathfinders advanced from the tree-line just as the red smoke was dissipated by the rotors. Kamidalla and the medic lifted Grewal by the arm and legs and ran with him to the third Dhruv helicopter. The crew-chief of the helicopter swiveled the side-mount machinegun out of the way as they loaded Grewal onboard.
Pathanya walked at a slower pace than the others. He had his rifle up at shoulder level and pointed away from the helicopters and towards the houses further west. He saw several occupants on the rooftops there observing the action. But so far no attacks. He wanted to keep it that way.
He looked at Vikram clambering down from his treetop observation post: “Vik! Get your butt down fast! Stop monkeying around!”
“Coming!” Vikram shouted over the noise. “Don’t leave without me!”
Vikram jumped on to the ground, picked up his rifle and hoisted his backpack. The Dhruv helicopter carrying Grewal lifted off the farm and headed southeast towards the Indian border. Pathanya saw the four LCH gunships flying in a large circle: they were looking for trouble and drawing attention away from the vulnerable Dhruv transports…
“Pathfinder-actual, this is panther-actual!” Pathanya pressed his comms earpiece closer into his ear as Jagat chimed in: “get your asses on board! Now!”
“Roger!”
Pathanya waved to the others and patted Vikram as he ran past. Within seconds they were boarding. Jagat saw them from the cockpit glass and got the confirmation nod from his copilot that everyone was aboard. He increased power and the helicopter lifted off the ground and pitched forward as it picked up speed. The second helicopter did the same, moment later.
As the LCHs began taking position ahead and behind the transports, Pathanya saw the friendly face of Jagat’s copilot giving him a thumbs up sign from the cockpit.
“Nice to see you too,” Pathanya muttered and waved back. He changed comms to Kamidalla: “you remember the deal?”
“Roger,” Kamidalla responded from the other helicopter. “I remember you leaving me to guard some godforsaken piece of land with half of pathfinder while you and Vik go get some fun! Thanks!”
Pathanya shared a look with Vikram, who smiled. Pathanya responded: “if you don’t keep that FARP secure, none of us are going home. Just remember that.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Team-two copies all!”
The pilots chimed in: “panther-actual, this is panther-two. Looks like this our stop. We are departing for the D-Z. See you on the way back. Over.”
“Wilco, panther-two,” Jagat responded. “Keep alert and radio-in anything that looks out of our playbooks. Out.”
As the second Dhruv and two of the LCHs peeled off, Pathanya moved up the cabin and poked his head between the two pilots: “what’s our E-T-A to the A-O?”
Jagat checked his map displays: “fifteen minutes. Get your men ready. I will sound the warning when we are two minutes out!”
“Roger!” Pathanya said as he moved back from the cockpit. He found the crew-chief manning the side-mounted machine gun leaning out of the entrance into the wind to detect threats below them. It was an unenviable job. Especially in winter. The crew-chiefs had to be dressed in thick thermal gear, face-plate helmets with oxygen masks and a harness to prevent them being thrown out by sudden turbulence. Add to that their helmet-mounted night-vision optics and they looked positively alien. Except for their arms, they showed no discernable human emotions behind all that paraphernalia…
As Pathanya watched, the crew-chief made some sudden motion and then aligned his machinegun against some target and let loose. The entire cabin reverberated with the vibration and noise of the heavy-caliber machinegun barrage. A few moments later they heard the deadly whizzing noises of tracer rounds flying close by…
As Jagat made violent evasive maneuvers, the copilot turned to the passengers: “we are taking fire from Pak army remnants below! Hang tight! We are evading!”
Vikram grabbed the side frame of the helicopter with both hands as he summarized the situation as understood by the pathfinders: “Oh shit!”
Haider, Akram and the other officers looked up from their breakfast table as the distant sound of heavy machineguns echoed around them. It had come from the east. They got up from the wooden chairs they had been sitting on at the roadside restaurant and looked to the eastern hills. There was nothing much to see.
One of the captains nearby turned to Akram: “maybe it was just some jihadists doing what they…”
“Quiet!” Akram ordered. “Listen!”
Haider walked past Akram and waved to the drivers and other soldiers: “we are leavi…”
The new sounds of helicopter rotors echoed through the eastern hills and was persistent. All doubt was instantly gone. Akram began shouting orders for everyone to get on board the trucks and move. But Haider was smarter. He had already clambered into the back of his truck and had gathered his G3 rifle, maps and other items. He jumped out of the vehicle as Akram ran past.
“Sir!” Akram said in surprise. “What are you doing?”
“It’s too late, Akram!” Haider shouted. “They know we are here! Send the convoy on the road and follow me! We will use the trucks as decoy and make our way into the hills!”
Akram understood his commander’s intention instantly. He muttered an expletive and patted on the side of the truck cabin, ordering the driver to drive on. But the soldiers around them were no fools. Once they saw what the two senior officers were doing, they also began abandoning the trucks…
“You fools!” Haider shouted as he clicked the safety off his rifle and pointed it at the driver who was panicking in front of him. “Get back into the truck and start driving!”
“Sir!” Akram shouted as he watched Haider point the rifle at his own soldiers. “What are you…!”
Akram’s shout was interrupted mid-sentence as a Nag anti-tank missile slammed into the rearmost ambulance in the convoy. The vehicle exploded into fragments. The shockwave ripped through the area and sent everyone around tumbling.
When Haider regained his composure, he found himself thrown into one of the wooden tables they had been using for breakfast just minutes before. As his vision moved alternatively between blurred and clear, he saw the rearmost truck in his five truck convoy burning and spewing black smoke. Cannon rounds were exploding within the other trucks as Indian LCH gunships streaked overhead, spewing flames from their chin-turrets…
He got himself up, only to have to take cover behind a small mud wall as another line of cannon rounds punctured the ground and headed towards two of his officers returning fire from their rifles. Both men were shredded by the impact of the cannon fire and died with agonizing shrieks in their throats. Further away, on the other side of the road, a single Dhruv helicopter landed and he saw Indian special-forces soldiers disembarking. The helicopter lifted again within seconds and flew off. He saw the Indian soldiers making their way to the trucks and knew time was running out.
Haider removed his sidearm from his thigh holster just as a few more of his surviving soldiers took up similar positions behind the same wall. They pointed their rifles over the top of the wall. Haider looked to see where Akram was but didn’t see him anywhere. Maybe he had been killed, he reasoned. In any case, it was too late now to matter.
He looked
at the handful of remaining soldiers under his command: “kill these infidels invading our country! Show no mercy!”
The group opened fire just as the Indian soldiers took cover behind the trucks. The Pakistani defenders were returning a fusillade from behind the mud walls. The pathfinders, on the other hand, returned fire in single rounds or bursts. Within a few seconds, two of the five Pakistani soldiers fell backwards from bullet impacts to their heads. Haider scrambled to pick up the rifle of one of the dead soldiers and then considered making a break for it into the trees. But the gurgle of a dying soldier next to him, drowning in his own blood from a gunshot to the neck, convinced him otherwise…
By the time he picked up the rifle with the intention to return fire, two more of his defenders lay collapsed over the mud walls. And an explosion from an under-barrel rifle grenade against the outer side of the wall sent him and his last surviving colleague diving for the ground as concrete debris fell all around them. Haider put his arms above his head to protect himself from the falling concrete.
As the dust cleared, he heard clear chatter in Hindi as well as the moaning of his colleague. That moaning stopped with the crack of a single rifle round from one of the Indian soldiers. And that meant only one thing. As he rolled over in the debris, he saw silhouetted against the grey skies above, the camouflaged face of an Indian special-forces man wearing a boonie-hat.
As Haider squinted against the daylight, the special-forces man knelt down and smiled: “well, well, well! Look what I found!”
Haider watched in horror as the man stood up again and reversed his rifle butt: “oh, I have waited a long time to do this, you son of a bitch!”
“No!”
The rifle-butt came down on his stomach with enough force that Haider’s view instantly went dark.
The pathfinders turned away as Jagat landed the Dhruv in the farmland south of the road. The gunships continued to patrol near the hills. The grass and dust was being whipped around. Pathanya walked over to where Vikram and two others were standing. Haider lay on the ground, unconscious. He had been moved up against the tire of one of the trucks and his arms had been tied behind his back.
“We missing anything, Vik?” Pathanya looked around.
Vikram shook his head. “Negative. No others left alive. At least no one we care much for.”
“Fair enough,” Pathanya said and pressed the transmit button: “panther-actual, we have the target individual and are inbound.”
“Roger. Make it snappy. Out.”
Pathanya waved to the pathfinders: “we are egressing.” He patted Vikram on the shoulder: “Vik, you carry the asshole here. I have the rear.”
Vikram shifted his rifle over to his back and then leaned down to hoist Haider’s body over his shoulder. Pathanya picked up his rifle and hoisted it at shoulder level and moved backwards in short steps as they fell back to the helicopter. Vikram ran over to the side of the cabin and the crew-chief helped pull Haider’s body inside. Vikram then took position with his rifle. That was Pathanya’s cue to fall back. Within moments the pathfinders were all aboard.
Jagat powered up the helicopter engines. The Dhruv lifted off from the grassy farmland and turned east, leaving behind the charred remains of the truck convoy as well as the bodies of the soldiers and officers in Haider’s entourage. Within minutes the echo of the rotors dissipated away and calmness returned to the area.
In the gentle hills west of Lahore, Kamidalla and four other pathfinders patrolled the tree-line overlooking open farmland. Parked in the grass near the trees, was the other Dhruv, “panther-two”. Its flight crew were also walking in the grass near the cockpit whilst the calm winds moved the rotor blades ever so gently. A mist was hanging in the trees, greatly reducing visibility and increasing concealment.
Kamidalla looked at his wristwatch and then back at the blue skies above. They had a few minutes before their part of the mission went into play.
After what felt like several long minutes, the skies above finally filled with the droning noise of aircraft engines. Kamidalla head it first and ran out into the clearing beyond the trees. Staring up, he hoped to see the air-force C-130J that would be bringing their packaged fuel to allow the six helicopters to refuel and get back to Indian soil…
He waved over the radioman. The latter ran over and handed him the speaker: “pathfinder-three to angel-one, over.” Kamidalla and the four other pathfinders of team-two looked to the skies.
“There!” One of the pathfinders was the first to spot the low-flying C-130J as it flew past the hilltops.
The radio came to life: “angel-one reads you five-by-five, pathfinder. Suggest you mark red smoke to indicate the D-Z. Over.”
“Roger, angel-one. Standby!” Kamidalla made the hand signals to one of the other pathfinders in the tree-line. That man tossed the smoke grenade on a parabolic trajectory into the middle of the open field. Within seconds the red smoke was ballooning out of the grass…
“Smoke deployed, angel-one.” Kamidalla said into the speaker. “Confirm you have visual? Over.”
There was no reply for several seconds. Kamidalla wondered if the mist and fog were interfering with the pilot’s visibility near the ground. Finally the radio squawked: “I see it, pathfinder. We are banking around and will make a drop over the smoke. Prepare for recovery. Over.”
Kamidalla put his hands over the speaker as they waited patiently for the C-130J crew to bring the aircraft around. Big as that aircraft was, a turn like that took time. Kamidalla’s heart pounded away as the seconds ticked. He hoped that there wouldn’t be some straggler Pak army unit with anti-air capability within reach of the lumbering Indian aircraft…
The C-130J flew straight and level over the hills to the north and then came in murderously low with its cargo-doors open. As it pulled up above the smoke marker, several pallets of cargo fell clear from the ramp. Parachutes blossomed behind the pallets to slow them down as they struck the field and slid for several dozen meters. The C-130J pulled up into a steep climb into the blue skies, dropping dozens of flares.
“Good drop, angel-one!” Kamidalla replied.
The response was magnanimous in its tone: “pleasure doing business with you, pathfinders! Angel-one, out.” The link chimed off and was replaced with static.
Kamidalla handed the speaker back to the radioman and saw the C-130J in the distance as it continued to climb, heading southeast into the puffy white clouds. He waved the pathfinders forward just as helicopter noises filled the air. He turned to see the four LCHs and one Dhruv heading towards them. They reached the fuel pallets just the first LCH flared for a landing, followed by another. The other two helicopters remained in the air on over-watch. Jagat’s Dhruv came to a hover a few meters away from the nearest fuel pallet that Kamidalla was running to. He got on one knee as the helicopter flared and landed, whipping grass and dirt in all directions. He saw Pathanya and Vikram running over along with the crew-chief. The latter was already directing others to help with the refueling.
“You got him?” Kamidalla asked as Pathanya patted him on the shoulder. The smile on Pathanya’s face gave Kamidalla the answer he was looking for.
“Good.” Kamidalla noted. “So now we can get the hell out of this godforsaken country!”
“Indeed!” Pathanya replied. “Come on!” He motioned as they ran to help move the fueling lines to one of the landed gunships.
A half hour later, the four helicopters on the ground lifted into the air and joined the other two on over-watch before all six helicopters made their way back to India.
──── 52 ────
Kulkarni watched as the engineers towed his tank away behind an armored-recovery-vehicle. He had wanted to drive it over as it was, but they couldn’t take the risk of it breaking down on the road, clogging up the entire convoy. He sighed and then walked over to the utility truck on the side of the road. The driver was waiting for him with the engine on idle. Before he got in, Kulkarni looked back and saw the other dozen A
rjun tanks moving into a convoy along the road. Their crews were sitting with open hatches. The commander of the lead tank behind him stepped up above his hatch holding an Indian flag that he then tied to the comms antennae. Kulkarni smiled at the gesture and then got into his seat in the truck.
“Ready to go, sir?” The driver asked.
Kulkarni nodded. “Yes. Take us home.”
The truck pulled out in front and the remaining convoy of tanks started moving behind them as rhino and trishul returned to the Indian border along with the rest of the Indian army units in the desert.…
The sun had set and the skies above were a deep red with shades of black. The increasing darkness was beginning to hinder the search. The soldiers had already begun to use flashlights and the lights from their vehicles to assist them in combing through the charred remains of the convoy and the houses nearby. They had been collecting bodies from the location for the last twenty minutes.
As they gave up hope to find any survivors here, one of the soldiers walked around the debris of the house and heard what could only be muffled moans of a man buried alive under the rubble. The soldier shouted to others and frantically began to start moving pieces of concrete and wood away. As others joined in, the pace of clearing up increased until they could clearly hear the voices of a man speaking in Urdu. After about a minute, they got together and pulled Akram out. He was heavily bruised and covered in dirt. But the uniform of a Pak army officer was clear to the soldiers. They put him on a stretcher and took him to the truck waiting near the road. The medics took one look at him and knew that he had to be taken to a field-hospital immediately. His life hung in the balance by a thread…
──── EPILOGUE ────