by Fritz Galt
Pakistan called on an old ally and India’s historic enemy, China, for help and got it. China threatened India by restating its own historic claims on Kashmir. Pakistan handed over some of the land it had “liberated” in Kashmir to the Chinese, either for safekeeping or in payment for weapons-grade material, atomic bomb technology and surface-to-surface missiles. India scrambled to renew her ties with Russia, while the world’s last superpower, America, sat perched on the fence preaching a vague “New World Order” to the chaos.
Pakistan wanted a third country to mediate the dispute. Presumably, Islamabad felt that third-party mediation would cement her military gains on the ground by creating a new international border at the existing Line of Control. India rebuffed the idea of a mediator, claiming that all of Jammu and Kashmir, including Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir was hers to keep or retake.
Based on these unsettling developments, the CIA produced a report naming the Indo-Pak border the world’s Number One Nuclear Hot Spot. So, before Mick and Natalie even arrived on the subcontinent, Pakistan and India were on a slippery slope to nuclear war.
“Friggin’ nukes,” Simon said.
Mick continued with a smile.
In fact, the CIA wasn’t even sure if India had an atomic bomb. The only time India had detonated such a device was in an underground blast a quarter of a century earlier, in 1974. Then, India’s scientists had claimed a yield of twelve to fifteen kilotons. Pointing to weak seismographic results, Western geologists studying the event questioned the story. Eventually India conceded that the explosion yielded only two kilotons. Perhaps the explosion was a hoax. After all, several tons of TNT could have produced the same result.
Whether India had a bomb or not, the world knew that she did have a nuclear program, the scientific and technological potential to create her own bomb, and the occasion and perhaps even will to use it. Although Pakistan had never exploded a nuclear device, the Pakistanis were so chummy with China that whenever they shook hands, one could practically smell weapons-grade plutonium passing between them.
In early May, India surprised the world with a series of test blasts that ripped through the international press like a bolt of lightning. The test explosions also galvanized the Indian public, who danced in the streets and burnt Pakistani flags, and swelled their chests as the world’s newest superpower.
India didn’t celebrate for long.
The United States immediately imposed a freeze on investments in India and a freeze on diplomatic relations.
In late May near Honzagool, close to the Iranian border, Pakistan countered India with six explosions of her own, once again throwing the political capitals of the world into disarray. Suddenly it seemed all too possible for the simmering border war between India and Pakistan to erupt into nuclear war. Citizens of the world envisioned their worst nightmare coming true.
Mick and Natalie were immediately summoned to India.
His assignment was to keep a lid on India’s nuclear development and testing while Natalie took on the daunting growth of Hindu-nationalist parties, the most important of which were founded in Bombay and subsequently swept to power in New Delhi.
If Natalie had other duties, Mick was not aware of them. He had stuck doggedly to his assignment, living in hotels on the road, seldom hiding behind his disguise as an economics officer at the consulate, and only seeing his wife and daughter on the occasional weekend.
He barely knew that Mariah had finally grown her twentieth and last tooth, learned how to count to fourteen and befriended a boy at preschool only to see him move back to Germany.
Mick paused, feeling his face burn with remorse. Simon poured him a cold glass of beer from a bottle.
Mick had only learned the sketchiest details of Natalie’s work as the consulate’s political officer. He never heard her version of the anti-American demonstrations, the bomb threats that disrupted Consular work, the rise of gangsters along Grant Road, the murders of movie producers in Bombay’s so-called “Bollywood,” and the national decline of the venerable Congress Party to the new BJP-led coalition.
After a year of keeping close tabs on the flurry of scientific activity following Pakistan’s nuclear blast, he found himself in the middle of a hot summer chase after his main target, India’s father of the bomb, Dr. Umesh Joshi.
That last week before the summer monsoon, Mick had followed Dr. Joshi from Bangalore to Delhi on three quick round trips, as if the scientist had discovered that he was being followed and was trying to lose Mick. By the time Joshi failed to show up at the National Physical Laboratory at New Delhi University on the final trip, Mick had grown confused and admittedly desperate.
How could there be no leak from the five thousand-strong scientific force Dr. Joshi led at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center in Bombay? Mick contacted his copious list of informants within the Department of Atomic Energy and the Defense Research and Development Organization, and they had no word on Joshi or whether a nuclear test was imminent.
His scientist had disappeared into a void, and Mick sensed something in the works. From the American Embassy in New Delhi, situated on its idyllic grassy grounds, he had fired off several urgent coded cables to Washington. He received no replies.
Then the awful news.
It was a black May morning in his hotel room in New Delhi. He turned on CNN and, to his shock, learned that precisely one year after testing its atomic bombs, India had tested a hydrogen bomb. The foundering BJP-led government claimed to have exploded the new, hydrogen bomb at India’s Shakti 1 Test site at Pokhran.
Mick knew the dry, hot sand dunes of Pokhran, Three hundred and thirty miles southwest of Delhi and not far from the border with Pakistan. He had visited there twice, albeit without the proper permission required by the Ministry of External Affairs. Yet, the CIA’s satellite analysts in the Information Directorate were responsible for monitoring that site. They had failed to notice India’s five previous blasts. How could they have missed another one?
The CIA station chief in Delhi, an aging Sean Green, had called him on the carpet. “The president is boiling mad,” Sean had shouted at him. “He wants answers. How could America fail to anticipate another nuclear explosion? How could America be assured of her own safety if some rogue nation is out here exploding the most sophisticated bombs in the world, for God’s sake?”
Not only was the President of the United States, Charles Damon, outraged, the surprise test set off fireworks at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee turned his guns on the intelligence-gathering agencies and labeled the episode “inexcusable” and a “colossal failure.” In the senator’s view, America was responsible for letting India test the bomb.
Felix Krumwald, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had delved into the dangerous lapse on the part of intelligence agencies and issued a report to the House and Senate Intelligence committees, began firing off renewed attacks on the CIA. He had previously said that a “wire brush” needed to be taken to the U.S. intelligence community. “Now we need to use electric shock therapy.”
Krumwald called for new thinking at the CIA, using terms that made Mick cringe. “There needs to be more aggressive activity by the old hands in the organization. They must step forward and take some risks, not wait to be told what to do.”
Mick had returned to Bombay a shattered man.
Held back by police barricades outside the U.S. Consulate, Indian crowds jeered America, once again burned American flags, and danced in celebration.
Blossoming Mayflower trees lost their red, fan-like petals as monsoon clouds let loose in torrents. The last vibrant colors of India’s summer lay flattened and wet on the streets, as a dark, stormy period settled in.
Awash in the seasonal river of backed up sewage, Mick and Natalie had pulled into work each morning for two more weeks.
Neither the embassy in Delhi nor the consulate in Bombay had any assignments for him, so one morning Mick straightened the pa
pers in his office, locked his desk and left a signed cable of resignation to the CIA for approval on the consul general’s desk.
Lou Potts didn’t even give him the dignity of calling him in for an explanation. The cable was approved and sent to Washington.
The story of India’s hydrogen bomb moved swiftly to the back page of the New York Times.
But not to the back of Mick’s mind.
Chapter 6
Below Congressman Butler’s window, landing lights and the floodlit terminal at Sahar International Airport illuminated Bombay’s ramshackle Sahar neighborhood. Meanwhile, jets roared in from Europe, the Gulf, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia.
He smiled with relief as the U.S. Air Force jet landed on its enormous tires with a soft crunch and rolled to a stop at the end of the runway. There it turned, approached the terminal and wound down its engines several hundred feet from the terminal.
“What the hell’s going on here?” Fred demanded. “Don’t they have room for us?”
It was midnight and his plane had to wait for another aircraft to pull out in order to get a slot.
“Jesus, you’d think—” his voice trailed off.
Outside his window, he could see a beehive of activity. Men in white skullcaps rode on bicycles across the cracked tarmac. Farm tractors pulled baggage carts every which way. Teams of sweating baggage handlers swarmed around cargo holds of other planes, and carried off suitcases atop their heads. Stooped women garbed in saris hobbled below his window whisking dust particles away into the night with short-handled brooms.
And atop all this, imperious jumbo jets revved their shrill, high-tech engines and fanned their tails with their internationally renowned insignia while human drones scurried about under their wings.
By the time the Air Force jet finally pulled forward, and a jetway connected, Fred was already standing by the door ready to exit.
“Twenty hours on this bird,” he muttered to the captain.
“That’s right. We did have two in-flight refuelings, sir,” the captain replied.
“We did?”
The outside door popped open and the stench and hot air overpowered Fred. He staggered backward into Linda, who was beginning to gag and thrust a handkerchief over her nose. His daughter craned her neck to look out the exit.
Fred closed his eyes, leaned against the bulkhead and waited for the nausea to pass.
A local ground agent stepped aboard, walkie-talkie in hand.
“Good evening, your excellency,” the man said in a singsong tone.
“Where’s the American diplomat who’s supposed to greet us?” Fred demanded.
“Your good man is waiting inside.”
“Well, I need someone to help us with this luggage,” Fred said, motioning to his family’s handbags.
“We will be most pleased to help you, sir.”
“Well, good. Here you go.”
Fred bolted out of the plane, leaving his bags at his feet. Behind him, the captain called out, “Have a nice evening.”
Fred pulled his small family after him through the old terminal building, where he was instantly surrounded by heavily loaded beltways winding through a sea of passengers, porters, servants and guards.
“Jesus, did we have to see all this?”
He glanced at Linda, who stood stock still, staring straight ahead at nothing in particular.
“This way, sir,” the ground agent said, and led Fred up to his contact from the consulate.
“Good evening,” the young man said brightly. “Name’s Peter Sloan. I’m a vice consul at the American Consulate. Is everybody here?” He nodded to the pallid lady who was wearing a string of pearls and a Lands’ End sweater and at a young blonde in tight jeans.
“The whole crew’s here, Peter,” Fred said. “Now, I’ll buy you dinner if you can get us out of here alive.”
He handed Peter three American passports, which Peter passed off to a man in a smart gray safari uniform.
“Who’s that?” Fred asked, watching the passports disappear in the crowd.
“He’s our consulate travel assistant,” Peter explained.
“A good guy?”
“A good guy. If you’ll kindly step this way, sir and ma’am,” Peter said. “It’ll only take a few minutes.”
“Don’t we get a military escort or something?” Fred asked.
“Unfortunately, you’re just another private citizen,” the young man said, his voice as polished as his shoes.
“Isn’t there a VIP lounge or something?”
“Not in this area.”
Fred stepped back as people brushed past him. He nearly placed an elbow on a counter, but jerked it back in time to avoid the grime.
“It’s okay, Dad,” Keri said. “If they touch you, you won’t die.”
“I don’t want to catch anything.”
Keri swept her long mane over one shoulder, placed her palms together in front of her chest as she had learned in yoga classes in Berkeley, and said “Namaste” to the turbaned men hurrying by.
“Now, don’t make fun of people,” Linda scolded her daughter.
The travel assistant trotted back with the passports and helped speed the small entourage through Immigration and Customs.
Following the flow, Fred suddenly found himself threading through a quiet throng of drivers, travel agents and hotel representatives, many holding signs. Then he noticed cars and motorcycles nosing past him.
He was outside.
The night air was hot and carried the pervasive smell of armpits and exhaust from low-quality diesel fuel.
The family hopped into an air-conditioned consulate minivan and sighed with relief.
The minivan cautiously wound its way down what seemed to be minor streets. The cracked concrete roadway, glossy from humidity, was sporadically lit by white streetlights. An occasional dog, ox, or horse sauntered across the road. It was long past midnight, and human forms slept on the sidewalks of every block.
In a hushed, seemingly clandestine way, he and his anxious party arrived in India for the first time in their lives.
Mick had long since abandoned his dinner. He glanced across the table to see if his audience wanted him to continue. His confessions to Simon were beginning to embarrass him.
Simon ordered a bottle of cognac for them to share and nodded at Mick to continue. He noted the doctor’s calm bedside manners. Simon should have been a shrink.
Mick’s eyes drank in the dark horizon.
His wife at work and his daughter at preschool, he would sit on his balcony in Bombay, lost in thought. Rains had awakened mosquito larvae, and the malarial season had begun anew.
Having quit work, he had remained fixated on the roadmap that had delivered him to his own private ruin.
Each day, he retraced his frantic, clumsy steps crisscrossing the subcontinent.
He had met with scientists at the Department of Defense’s Terminal Ballistics Research Laboratory in Chandigarh. He had entered the various sites of theoretical work by the Department of Atomic Energy in Bombay and Delhi.
As part of a UN inspection team, he had examined plutonium extraction facilities in Trombay and Tarapur north of Bombay as well as the reactor at Kalpakkam south of Madras. Furthermore, he had driven past, photographed and tried to access various uranium enrichment facilities across the land.
He had befriended people at the Aeronautical Development Agency in Bangalore. Deep in Rajasthan, he had bought warm dinners for Army jawans posted in the desert’s nightly chill at the Pokhran test sites. And he had cruised from invitation to invitation at dining halls, graduate student dormitories and faculty housing of the bleak universities in Calcutta and Madras.
On his balcony, with his chin sunk in his hands, he had tried to reconstruct how the evidence had eluded him.
How was Dr. Joshi’s final week different from all the others? Why hadn’t informants come through every step of the way? Any step of the way?
And what for chrissa
ke happened to the spy satellite photos that should have shown Indian engineers moving structures away from the epicenter of the blast site and expanding its perimeters? Had the Indians so carefully concealed their activities in the desert? Or were the analysts responsible for tracking the program asleep, since the test preparations took place in the middle of the night, Washington time?
The hydrogen bomb test had taken him by complete surprise. And now he knew why. They didn’t need scientists to develop the bomb. Natalie had spoon-fed the Indians all the secrets they needed to build it.
So the newspaper was wrong. The bomb wasn’t a fake. Perhaps it was only a dud.
Natalie was correct in saying that India had improved its position against Pakistan. Even if the test was proven a dud, India had presented Pakistan an insurmountable hurdle. Islamabad’s arms suppliers, the Chinese, had yet to develop a deterrent capability.
As Mick wallowed in self-pity during the monsoon, Mariah had come home sick from school. Her complexion pale, she had collapsed during play. Mick attributed it to a lack of sun and exercise during the rainy season. That afternoon, she took a long nap, woke up with reluctance and played listlessly.
Mick wondered if she was empathizing with his emotions. He had tried to smile and be cheerful. It had only made him feel worse to see her try to smile back.
As if the world hadn’t already completely gone mad, Mick helplessly watched his daughter develop a fever and lose feeling in her legs. That night, Natalie called the embassy doctor in New Delhi.
Due to heightened terrorist concerns, the embassy wouldn’t send down its doctor just then. Also, a cable had advised embassy employees not to fly internationally for several weeks. Mick and Natalie would just have to sit tight.