03:02

by Mainak Dhar

  Pandey was standing near the Humvee. He was the only one of us who had actually ever handled an RPG launcher or a heavy calibre machine gun, and so I had him in charge of the Humvee, being driven by one of our drivers. People all around me were talking in small groups and, as I passed them, I got a feeling that all of them had the same thing on their minds.

  When would the attack come tonight?

  Word had got out that we were headed out for a recce, and Megha accosted me when she heard about it.

  ‘You don’t have to put yourself in danger every single time, you know.’

  ‘Megha, I don’t want us to just wait to be attacked. We need to know what they’re planning and, if possible, give them something to think about so they change their plans of attacking us.’

  ‘Someone else can do it, Aadi. Ronald and Shaikh are soldiers. Let them do their job, please.’

  I could see that she was just concerned about me and as much as I did not want to have a fight with her, that last comment set me off.

  ‘So, what is our job, Megha? Should we just sit back and wait for someone else to help us? Would we have lived so long if we had done that so far?’

  ‘Aadi, I know all that. It’s just that I came so close to losing you and I don’t want that feeling again.’

  ‘Megha, I promise you I want nothing more than to come back to you, but I cannot sit here and let others go into harm’s way on our behalf.’

  Megha grabbed my shirt and pulled me closer. ‘That’s why I love you and that’s why you drive me crazy. Now come back in one piece and we’ll get married tomorrow. I’ll set everything up with the others.’

  I smiled and kissed her.

  When I went out, I saw Ronald and Akif were standing together. Ronald called me over. ‘Man, you have some serious issues with clingy bodyguards. Akif here says he will go with you, and that he can carry one of their radios and get us real-time intel. Can’t argue with that, but Mahadev insists on coming as well.’

  Mahadev, standing defiantly in a corner, looked at the much-larger soldier. ‘I go where he does. That’s it.’

  I looked at him and then Ronald. ‘He’s been an auto-rickshaw driver here for eight years. He’ll know every bloody shortcut and by-lane around. If we need to get away fast or get there unseen, he’s our man. Plus, maybe you should leave Shaikh behind to keep working on the prisoner.’

  Ronald thought it over and then smiled. ‘Look, you’re the man here and your team’s been working pretty well for you so far, so who am I to mess with it? Let’s go.’

  We had already planned to take bicycles to make less noise and also enable getaways through alleys where an auto-rickshaw may not fit. As I was mounting mine, Nasir came by.

  ‘A few gifts for them.’

  One was an IED of the sort we had already used, which we tied behind Akif’s cycle. Nasir then handed me two small bombs.

  ‘You could field test the first tennis ball bombs. Just light the fuse, wait for two seconds, and then throw it.’

  ‘I hope it doesn’t blow my hands off.’

  ‘We’ll know soon enough,’ he laughed.

  I took it as a sign of just how much we had grown in confidence that people were able to keep their spirits high despite the situation we were in, and having suffered two attacks in less than twenty-four hours. It was also, of course, a sign of how numb people had become to death and violence in such a short time.

  Megha came to see us off at the Chandivali checkpoint and when we were about to leave, we saw a group of people approaching. Our guards alerted the others over radio and two auto-rickshaws filled with armed men were there within minutes. By then it was apparent that these were not attackers. We had placed lamps lining the approach roads and I could see that the group consisted almost exclusively of old men and boys, many of them bloodied and obviously injured.

  One of the men hobbled up to me. ‘They asked for taxes last afternoon, and we gave them some food and water. Then they came today asking for our girls and women. When we resisted, they killed all our young men and took the girls away.’

  His eyes looked haunted and he had suffered a terrible wound to the head that had left a flap of skin almost hanging out. As I looked at the group of close to twenty people, I saw similar expressions of shock and anguish.

  ‘Get the ambulances here!’

  As the call for ambulances went out, I asked Megha to ensure the people got a place to sleep and some food to eat. The old man looked at my gear and our weapons.

  ‘You’re the one who’s been killing them, right? We heard rumours that someone is fighting back. A young man who is hunting them down. You’re the one, right?’

  As we set off, the old man shouted out to me.

  ‘Kill them all, son. Kill them all.’

  Mahadev led the way, and I was glad we had got him along as we squeezed past houses and shops through alleys, staying on the main roads for less than one-fifth of the way. Finally, he stopped and whispered to us, ‘We’re now near Sakinaka. To move forward, we have to go on the main road before turning into the airport road.’

  Akif, who had a working understanding of Hindi after many years of travelling to India on business, picked up his cue, turned on the radio and held it close to his ear.

  ‘They’re not saying anything. There’s no way they could know we understand Arabic, but they must realize that we’ve probably got a lot of their radios, so it’s natural for them to be cautious.’

  Ronald moved ahead on foot and took out his night vision goggles.

  ‘Guys, nobody on this road at least. Their security must be closer in to the airport. Let’s move forward.’

  We went down the main road as fast as we could, the creaks of the old bicycle I was riding seeming to echo in the otherwise silent night. I was sure someone would hear us coming and kept bracing myself for a challenge or a shot but we reached the turning of the airport road without incident. That’s where we saw their checkpoint about a hundred metres away from us. It had not been there the last time Mahadev, Akif and I had come, but they had clearly beefed up their defences. They had pulled out sandbags and barriers from old police checkposts near the airport and Ronald counted out the sentries as he looked through his night vision goggles.

  ‘I see four men there. One of them seems to be scanning the area with night vision glasses. These guys are well-equipped.’

  I was thinking of how we could launch an attack while Ronald got on with his mission. He whistled softly to himself as he surveyed what we could see of the airport terminal. ‘I can see four Humvees just sitting outside. Two of them seem to have anti-tank missile launchers mounted on them. God knows how many more they’ve flown in. I also see two mobile anti-aircraft systems with guns and missiles. That’s what must have taken the Alizes down. They sure are stocking up on some heavy firepower.’

  He handed me his goggles and I took a look, seeing the world suddenly turn a ghostly green. I saw one of the four men say something into his radio.

  ‘Akif, did you get that?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Can you get a distraction going here?’

  So far we had never transmitted on their radio, as that would give away our advantage of surprise, but now was perhaps the time to use it.

  Akif said something into the radio which I did not understand, but its impact was clear. Three of the men came out from behind the checkpoint and began walking towards us.

  Akif whispered to us, ‘I told them that there was some movement up ahead and that they needed to go and check.’

  When the men were fifty or so metres away, I lit one of the ball bombs and threw it underhanded towards them. The ball flew for a few metres and then skittered along the ground as we took cover and prayed that it worked. Our prayers were answered by a loud explosion a few seconds later followed by the sounds of men moaning. We ran out of cover down the road. The man at the checkpoint was screaming in Arabic on his radio and realized too late that the four of us were running at him in the
darkness. Mahadev stopped to finish the three wounded men with one bullet each while Akif and Ronald fired at the guard at the checkpoint and he fell to their crossfire before he could raise his rifle to fire back.

  As we waited for their forces to respond, I placed the IED I had carried with me and jogged back down the path we had come, unspooling the wire leading to it while Ronald and Akif gathered up gear and weapons from the fallen terrorists. We were barely back at the mouth of the road when two jeeps came screaming down towards the checkpoint, their headlights on. They stopped just short of the checkpoint and I could see at least eight men dismounting as I triggered the bomb.

  The explosion ripped the checkpoint apart and lit up the blackness of the night. I could see one jeep rolling over to the side of the road and men being flung away by the force of the explosion. We ran forward again and, as we got closer, we turned on the flashlights we had taped to the barrels of our AK-47s and saw a scene of utter carnage. I could see dead bodies and body parts all around us. A few men were wounded and crawling on the ground. I remembered the bloodied group that had come to us in the evening and we shot each of them once to finish them. All except one man, a large man with a flowing beard who was wearing distinctive stripes on his shoulder and was bleeding profusely from wounds to his leg. An officer or leader of some kind, presumably.

  ‘Mahadev, does the second jeep work?’

  The windshield had been shattered and the side of the jeep peppered with bomb fragments, but it had been a few metres behind the lead jeep and largely survived intact. When Mahadev turned the ignition, the engine roared to life.

  ‘Let’s get out of here! They’ll send reinforcements any time.’

  We bundled our prisoner into the back, and Mahadev started the jeep as Akif and Ronald threw in all the weapons and kit they could gather.

  ‘Hurry up!’ I shouted as I saw headlights of vehicles headed out from the airport. At least four vehicles were on their way, and we didn’t have the luxury of lingering much longer. We sped away, and then I asked Mahadev to wait at the turning. Our prisoner began to shout something and I hit him hard on the head with the butt of my rifle, knocking him senseless.

  The vehicles came roaring down the road and I lit the remaining ball bomb and threw it towards them. They never saw it coming in the darkness and it exploded about two metres to the left of the lead jeep. It was much smaller than the IED and the jeep was not destroyed, but men screamed as they were peppered by shrapnel. The jeep swerved hard to the right and the other vehicles behind it came to a screeching halt.

  I aimed at the mass of men and vehicles and opened fire on full automatic, raking them with bullets. Akif and Ronald joined in and we fired for a few seconds before I tapped Mahadev on the shoulder.

  ‘Let’s go home!’

  As we sped away in the blackness of the night, I knew we had won another battle, but the enemy was clearly preparing for a war with weapons that we had no real counter to. We had survived so far simply because we had taken the initiative and managed to surprise them, and I wondered how soon it would be before we had to fight on the enemy’s terms and how we would survive that.

  FIFTEEN

  That night was one of euphoria but also racked by tension. We had left behind our four bicycles but had brought back a jeep, three working radios and, most importantly, eight assault rifles, nine pistols and four bulletproof vests. All of these added further to our arsenal, but, crucially, we had shown that we could, and would take the battle to the enemy instead of waiting to be attacked. Akif and Ismail reported that the enemy commanders were furious and were ordering their units to aggressively sweep neighbouring areas for bombs or hidden attackers. We also learned that the enemy had a name for us.

  Mohtamarid. Arabic for insurgent.

  I smiled when I heard that. The General would have been pleased.

  Of course with the celebrations that followed our arrival came the very real fear that the enemy would lash out, and with the heavy weaponry we had seen at the airport, our arsenal of rifles and pistols and a solitary rocket launcher seemed ever more insignificant. We had teams of people out till the wee hours of morning setting up IEDs. We could no longer hope to sit in the safety of our checkpoints and trigger bombs when the enemy was only a few hundred metres away so we set up ‘bomb bunkers’ well beyond our checkpoints where a single sentry would sit with the controls for up to three roadside bombs. He or she would trigger the bombs if the enemy approached and then run back to our checkpoints. It was a hazardous job and, to be honest, nobody really believed that it was anything but suicide duty, since being out there in the open when the enemy was bearing down on us was little more than self-annihilation.

  I was surprised, and inspired, when I asked for volunteers. Many hands went up, almost entirely among the newcomers. They had suffered the most and when I tried to convince the elderly folk that this was not a job for them, an old man looked me in the eye and said, ‘They took my son and my daughter in-law. I have nothing to live for, but if I can take a few of the bastards with me, at least I will have got some revenge. You have had your shot at the enemy, don’t deprive me of mine.’

  I knew if an attack came, we would be sending these people to their death, but they were going to it willingly, and if I could risk my life, who was I to stop them from doing so? People watched in awe as five teams of two people, all in their sixties or seventies, set out. One of them would be in the bunker at any one time, to be relieved after four hours. Their willingness to sacrifice themselves made everyone raise their game, and I doubt anyone in the community slept that night.

  After hearing about what our bombs had done, Nasir’s factory had even more volunteers. Someone brought over a tennis ball machine that had been used for coaching at a nearby school. ‘Sir, here is our own missile launcher!’ he said, clearly very excited about the idea. He had got others on board too. ‘Nasir has made a few bombs with longer fuses so we can use this at long range. This baby can throw a ball at least fifty metres out with much more speed and accuracy than anyone could throw one. And wait till you see this…’ He pointed to one of our auto-rickshaws, which had been entirely stripped of its covering. ‘We’ll place it on this so it becomes a mobile launcher. I just need a driver and a loader.’

  I had to smile at the ingenuity and the initiative. ‘And I suppose you’ll be firing it?’

  ‘Of course, I was the tennis coach here and I can put a ball within a two-foot circle at fifty metres.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘I’m Gurpreet, sir.’

  ‘Well, Gurpreet, congratulations on being the commanding officer of our missile regiment.’

  He beamed with pride and got back to work, loading the machine onto the auto-rickshaw. As I watched them drive away I realized that, while I had been trying to think of how we could keep outsmarting and surprising the enemy, I had burdened myself with the responsibility of figuring it all out. Perhaps there were many more people like Nasir and Gurpreet out there, people with ideas I would never have come up with. Rather than taking on all the load myself, it would be better to get everyone to help out.

  I addressed everyone gathered around.

  ‘Any ideas on how we could fight back and surprise the enemy? They have missiles, rockets and more guns than we do. We need to keep thinking of how we can take them by surprise.’

  Soni put up her hand.

  ‘They seem to need food. That’s why they’re trying to extort food from the societies. How about we leave some food supplies lying in shops near the airport. I’m sure they’ll pick them up.’

  ‘Why the hell would we want to feed them?’ someone asked with a snigger.

  Soni looked at him with scorn. ‘We would want to feed them if I had mixed rat poison in the food first.’

  Many people applauded the idea and another team was formed to get working on it. An attack might come at any moment, but I allowed myself the luxury of relaxing for a while, watching a group of people work together, who in th
e old world might never have had much in common. A student at IIT, a tennis teacher, an auto-rickshaw driver and a maid servant, yet all were now contributing equally to keeping us safe, because the labels they had, or the bank balances they had in the old world, meant nothing now. For all the things that had gone wrong since the Blackout, perhaps this wasn’t such a bad thing.

  Ronald came running to me then. ‘I heard an update on the radio,’ he said, ‘and it’s not good news.’

  ‘Come on, Ronald. Let us know what is going on!’

  Mr Sinha was losing his patience, but Ronald was just trying to do the right thing by letting all our leaders get there before he shared what he had learned. Kundu and Nitish were the last to enter and then Ronald closed the meeting room door.

  ‘There are two pieces of bad news,’ he started. ‘As I’d said earlier, battles are raging across parts of India. While the east of India had been blacked out, there had been no major terrorist attacks there. But over the last two days, large columns of terrorists have come in from Bangladesh. The BSF was largely non-existent, most of its units having been moved back to cities to maintain law and order once the local police melted away, and the Army had been swinging resources to meet the threat in the north, so everyone was caught with their pants down. They got almost all the way till Kolkata when they were stopped by a combination of some police and Army troops. But the fighting is far from over and terrorists are still coming in.’

  ‘It’s not just the one attack, is it? They clearly planned this out.’

  ‘Yes, Aadi. I think they had this planned in case they ran into opposition in the north. We quashed their efforts near Delhi so they did this to make us split our forces. The same thing is happening in the US, from what we hear. The terrorists got hammered on the Mexico border but then they had sleeper cells attack US bases throughout the country, and that’s really played havoc with that country’s effort.’