India’s Most Fearless

by Aroor, Shiv

  Maj. Tango knew it was impossible to overthink the de-induction phase. And so, during those crucial hours, he rummaged through every bit of SF training he had had—to see if there was a tactic or stratagem he could employ to better ensure that every one of his men got out alive. Or, even better, not badly injured. Of all the uncertainties that faced them in the darkness that loomed over them from the mountain range, Maj. Tango knew the escape phase could be their true enemy.

  The 2 terror launch pads identified as targets for Maj. Tango’s team were well inside PoK and roughly 500 metres away from each other. Each launch pad is really a transit staging area for terrorist infiltrators before they are sent across the LoC. Both launch pads were close to Pakistan Army posts for logistical and administrative purposes. ISI handlers would often visit these launch pads before infiltration attempts.

  Maj. Tango made a final call to his CO in Srinagar before ordering his team to turn off their radios. The men would now maintain total radio silence until they returned from the operation, with only the most fleeting data transmissions on their hand-held satellite equipment.

  Shortly before noon on 27 September, the 3 assault teams received their final go-ahead to attack the 4 terror launch pads. Seven days after they had taken position on the LoC, they had finally been cleared to go into PoK. The mission brief was uncomplicated. The soldiers were expected to reach their targets, study the latest intelligence they could possibly access with their satellite devices and then proceed to wipe out every man they saw there.

  Nobody in the military or the government knew about the mission apart from a carefully pruned chain of command that stretched from the Prime Minister at one end and 3 SF team commanders at the other. A bare handful of officers populated the top-secret chain, an imperative given Pakistan’s remarkable human intelligence capabilities in the Kashmir valley. The assets Indian intelligence agencies had on the other side were far fewer in comparison.

  Late on the evening of 27 September, with final confirmatory checks complete and darkness setting in over the frontier, Maj. Tango and his team from the Para-SF rolled out from their post at 2030 hours, putting the LoC behind them 25 minutes later and heading into PoK. They then began a 4-hour trek downhill into one of the most dangerous places in the subcontinent.

  ‘This was meant to be total surprise action. And it was. But as we neared our targets, the Pakistan Army posts began firing illumination rounds to light up the area, as they normally do. This was a huge risk as we were inducting just then,’ Maj. Tango recalls. ‘If they even smelt us, we would have a fight on our hands. And their positions meant they could dominate us.’

  Then, just as suddenly as the illumination bursts had begun, they died down. Maj. Tango took no chances, ordering his men to stay down, and waiting nearly 20 minutes before moving forward.

  A kilometre from their targets, Maj. Tango split his team into 2—one for each target. Nine of the warriors followed the Major as they made their way in darkness towards their designated launch pad target.

  Approximately 200 metres from the launch pad, Maj. Tango’s team came to an abrupt stop. The men dropped down flat on their bellies—because the sound they heard from up ahead was the last thing they were hoping for: gunfire.

  Out in front with his night-vision goggles, Maj. Tango quickly deduced that the firing emanating from the launch pad was speculative. It came in short, uncertain bursts rather than with the searing sureness of a targeted bullet hail. This was good news, because it meant that the Indian warriors had not been spotted. It was bad news too in a way, because it also implied that the terrorists suddenly had their guard up and may have been alerted that something was afoot. The intelligence network that Pakistan’s military machinery enjoys along the LoC and in J&K is formidable. It was not beyond the realm of possibility that the news of the arrival of Indian soldiers had been shared with the Pakistan Army posts as a belated input, even as the final approach was in flow.

  It was this possibility that made Maj. Tango pause. He knew that an enormously difficult decision needed to be made quickly—whether he would order the assault right then, or wait.

  Maj. Tango craned his neck slowly, looking back towards the men behind him. He didn’t need reminding that each of their lives was in his hands. Through the darkness, they looked straight back at him, waiting for the order. Crawling backwards on his elbows, Maj. Tango retreated a few metres to where his team lay in wait, informing them of his decision in the lowest, most hushed tone he had ever employed: he and his men would seek out a safe, hidden position in the area and hunker down through the night and the following day. Maj. Tango knew it was an enormous risk remaining in such hostile territory after sunrise. But the potential value of having a chance to visually study their targets before the final assault was difficult to ignore.

  There was no question of sleep. Maj. Tango and his men retreated on their elbows about 200 metres in the darkness, finding a rocky crevasse wreathed by a thick clump of trees. They regrouped and waited for sunrise, a pair of look-outs keeping their night-vision-assisted gaze fixed in the direction of the terror launch pads.

  The next 24 hours would be perilous in the extreme. With the cover of darkness gone, Maj. Tango and his men would need to do all they had to with only a bare fraction of the freedom that night afforded them. Switching on the sole satellite kit among them, Maj. Tango tapped on the touchscreen to first transmit his decision to his CO in Srinagar, and then to download two crucial bits of data: (1) a set of coded text messages from Srinagar with updated intelligence; (2) a pair of photographs of the area taken by an Indian Air Force Heron surveillance drone flying near the LoC.

  Both sets of data confirmed that there was no major change in the situation, nor any reason to alter their plans. If their presence had been detected by the Pakistan Army posts or those manning the terror launch pads, the satellite data would have likely had indicators that their game was about to be up.

  The data was useful, and a confirmation to proceed with the assault that night. But in those daylight hours, the team hadn’t managed to visually study their targets first-hand. It had been deemed simply too risky to the mission to send out reconnaissance teams in daylight. Maj. Tango made one last transmission to his CO before powering off his satellite kit: the operation would be carried out late that night.

  In Delhi that evening of 28 September, the Indian Coast Guard commanders’ conference was getting set to host its annual dinner. But its top invitees, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Army Chief Gen. Dalbir Singh, excused themselves from the event. The 3 would meet instead at the military operations room on the first floor of Army Headquarters in South Block—for one final look at the historic mission that was about to commence.

  The media hadn’t a whiff of what was afoot. The full focus was on India’s diplomatic response to the Uri attack. As India publicly rallied support at the SAARC Summit, reports emerged that US Secretary of State John Kerry had spoken to his Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj twice over the phone with a request that India not escalate tensions. In Delhi’s upscale Gurgaon suburb, a scheduled concert by Pakistani singer Atif Aslam was cancelled following advice from the administration citing ‘sentiments of armed forces/soldiers at the frontier’. The carefully crafted ‘mess’ of diplomatic, public and political indignation was the ultimate ruse.

  At midnight, less than 1000 km away from India’s capital, Maj. Tango and his men had emerged in the darkness from their temporary hideout, returning to their final positions from the previous night. There, Maj. Tango ordered his men to lie low and remain motionless until he gave the final word. Stilling the sound of his breathing, the Major peered through his night-vision goggles at the terror launch pad that lay literally a stone’s throw away from where he and his men lay on their bellies, their weapons primed and ready. The speculative firing continued for many minutes, echoing through the valley. Then, finally, it stopped.

  Maj. Tango once again told his men
not to move. He needed to be absolutely sure that the terrorists were not waiting in ambush. If they were, this mission would end before it had even begun. The men in Maj. Tango’s team were India’s finest SF commandos. But even they could not face a terror ambush backed by dominant firing posts that could pour uninterrupted hell on them from positions of advantage. A few minutes after the firing had stopped, Maj. Tango ordered his men to spread out into 2 squads and follow him as he crept forward.

  Fifty metres from the launch pad, Maj. Tango summoned his buddy to crawl forward towards him. He then pointed directly to the open space in front of a forested outcrop that made up the launch pad itself. Their silhouettes clearly visible in the green glow of their night-vision devices, they identified 2 terrorists who stood guard at the spot.

  This was the moment the SF team had been waiting for—the moment when the fight would begin, when tension would dissipate and calm would return as bullets flew.

  From a distance of 50 metres, Maj. Tango opened fire at the 2 terrorists, dropping them instantly. The officer then whispered urgently to the squads behind him to move towards the forest launch pad and attack the other terrorists who were certain to be there. Before they entered the forest, 2 commandos opened heavy fire from their hiding places directly at the launch pad, allowing the assault team to move in unchallenged. The men now sprinted in a crouch towards the hideout, immediately opening a blaze of fire as they reached. Nearly every bullet fired found a target.

  The open area cleared by his initial attack, Maj. Tango now sped towards the forest hideout to join his men. As he reached the spot, he noticed 2 terrorists moving through the jungle in an attempt to attack the Indian warriors from behind. These were terrorists with commando-style training who employed movements and tactics that bore a disturbing resemblance to military strategy, a fact that was shatteringly brought home to India during the 26/11 attacks, and has been a staple with infiltrators ever since. The terrorists at the launch pads were trained like soldiers.

  Realizing that the 2 terrorists would, in seconds, be in a position to shoot down his men with a few bursts of fire, Maj. Tango sprinted through the forest directly towards them. As he neared them, they saw him and leapt behind a tree taking offensive positions, ready to greet the incoming Indian team leader with a burst of fire that would drop him in his tracks. But before they could raise their AK-47s, Maj. Tango was upon them. The hectic dash had deprived him of the precious seconds he would need to raise his M4A1 carbine and fire. So in the few seconds that he had before they could fire, he had whipped out his Beretta 9-mm semi-automatic pistol. With a series of shots just 5 feet away from the terrorists, Maj. Tango felled both the men.

  From the moment the firefight began until the last bullet was fired, it had been just over an hour. The frenetic pace of the assault meant the teams, now united after the split attack on 2 launch pads, would prepare to leave with only a very rough estimate of the number of terrorists they had managed to kill: 20. The figure would be corroborated days later by India’s external intelligence.

  A total of 38–40 terrorists and 2 Pakistan Army personnel were killed at the 4 targets. The 3 separate teams had simultaneously struck 4 launch pads across the LoC. Their entry into PoK had been coordinated and precisely timed. The assault and exit were conducted in total radio silence; therefore, each team was entirely on its own. Their 2 designated launch pads cleared, Maj. Tango’s band of warriors turned about and headed east, back towards the LoC.

  The officer’s biggest fear was about to come true in a far more frightening way than he had imagined.

  The return, or de-induction, had to be carried out with a step beyond extreme care. The route was known, since the warriors had just used it to enter PoK, so it would take them less time to make the uphill trek back. But through the entire stretch, they would be dangerously vulnerable to Pakistan Army posts freshly aware of the intrusion and now doing everything in their power to stop the Indian soldiers from escaping back over the LoC.

  A decision had to be made whether to risk taking the speedy escape route that would bring with it the certainty of angry firepower from Pakistani posts, or to trek a different path that would be longer and more circuitous, but offer safer passage to the warriors. Maj. Tango knew he didn’t have more than a few seconds to take a decision. He was well aware that even a circuitous route wouldn’t fully confuse the army posts that were now in an angry state of alert all along the LoC. Every alarm bell in Pakistan’s military system in the field was now blaring. But aware of the immediate danger of interception by Pakistani quick reaction teams that were probably already in motion, the Major and his men decided on a longer, circuitous exit.

  The return would need to be quick, but phased. One squad from Maj. Tango’s team was designated as the fire support group. Men from this group would provide intermittent cover fire from the mountainside as their mates made onward progress. It would be a dangerous exercise, given that the Indian soldiers would be vastly outgunned and outnumbered by the dominant Pakistan Army positions. What they did have access to was continuous real-time guidance from the Indian drone that was back in the air over the LoC, helping the returning warriors chart as deceptive a route as they possibly could as they trudged back.

  Maj. Tango was right about the risk of retaliation no matter which route they took. Enraged by the cross-border strike, the Pakistan Army posts opened fire with everything they had. From medium machine guns to rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition of every kind, short of heavy artillery, rained down on the earth around the escaping Indian warriors.

  ‘At one point, the bullets were so close, they were whistling past our ears. There’s a familiar put-put sound when rounds fly very close to your head,’ Maj. Tango recalls. ‘If I were a foot taller, I would have been hit many times over.’

  During the circuitous escape, the men were frequently flat on the ground as trees in their path were shredded to bits by hails of ammunition. A particularly vulnerable 60-metre patch in the de-induction route gave the commandos their closest call. Still flat on their bellies, but with no natural feature hiding them, they needed to slither the full distance without being hit. Crossing in pairs as ammunition hit the ground inches from them, Maj. Tango’s team made it to the LoC before the sun was up, finally crossing it at 0430 hours. But the men knew the LoC was not any sort of force field against Pakistani bullets—they still had some distance to go before they were fully out of range. But now, they were provided heavy covering fire by Indian Army border posts, and so the commandos could quickly cover the distance to the post they had departed from 36 hours before.

  With 7.62-mm Pakistani sniper rounds still finding their way to targets within a few feet of the team, Maj. Tango and his men finally reached the Uri post. Maj. Tango made his first encrypted radio call to his CO. A few minutes later, Maj. Tango received a call from Lt. Gen. Satish Dua, commander of the Army’s 15 Corps, headquartered in Srinagar and responsible for the entire Kashmir valley. Lt. Gen. Dua, himself a counterterrorism specialist, kept the call brief, merely informing Maj. Tango that a chopper would soon be on its way to get him.

  Lt. Gen. Dua had been crushed by the Uri attack. As the man who oversaw all operations in the Valley, the ambush had taken place on his watch. If there was one senior officer who could not wait to get even, it was he.

  In Delhi, Prime Minister Modi and the national security leadership was informed of the mission’s success. A second act of making history would ensue shortly thereafter.

  Meanwhile in Uri, as Maj. Tango waited, he took a full debrief on the other 2 strikes. Apart from a landmine blast that injured a commando in one of the other teams during de-induction, there were no casualties. Not only had the surgical strikes of 28–29 September been the most audacious and dangerous peacetime attacks mounted by Indian forces, they had also been the cleanest. In the table of options provided by the Army to the government leadership, the final list of chosen targets carried a probable casualty number of 1 or 2 for each target. By that
measure, the mission would have been deemed successful even if 4–8 commandos had perished during the operation. With no man dead or left behind, the government would be thrust into a daze that such a surgically clean operation was possible. The reputation of the Para-SF, already inestimably high, would reach a historic zenith on the morning of 29 September 2016.

  A few hours later, an Army Cheetah helicopter landed at a helipad near the Uri post. The helipad was on the leeward side of the mountain and facing away from Pakistani firing that still had not stopped. As Maj. Tango made his way towards the helipad, a series of sniper rounds smashed into the ground in front of him, killing a dog.

  ‘The dog was walking a few feet in front of me. A bullet smashed right into the poor creature. And I was saved,’ Maj. Tango says.

  The officer rushed forward towards the helipad as a final blaze of sniper fire tried to cut him down. Taking off and following a terrain-hugging flight path, the Cheetah transported Maj. Tango to the headquarters of the 15 Corps, known in the Army as the Chinar Corps, after the rich, deciduous trees native to the Valley.

  At the Corps Headquarters, Lt. Gen. Dua had skipped lunch in anticipation of Maj. Tango’s arrival. At 1530 hours, the Cheetah landed at the 15 Corps’ helipad. Maj. Tango was led straight to the operations room. Waiting for him at the door was his CO.

  ‘Chhote!’

  ‘Sir!’

  The two men hugged, slapping each other on the back, pulling back and regarding each other wordlessly. Both knew what had just happened. There was no need for small talk.