“We can’t attack them so easily this time. The Israelis are aware of the threat and they have requested your government for heavy security at the nuclear summit. Also, we would admit that the Quds force has seen quite a lot of failures over the years in their missions worldwide. So, we want to use local contractors this time.”
“Suppose we carry out this attack on the Israelis. Will you then claim responsibility for the attack?” Tejeshwar asked.
“No. Obviously, we will not. Our government will deny any knowledge of it,” Karim said.
Tejeshwar knew this could land them in a soup. An attack on Israel’s scientists by an Indian group could strain relationships between the two countries. India will use all its resources to track and capture the perpetrators. The Kushwahas would be termed as terrorists. Even the old allies will desert them. They may even lose their international business.
“We cannot take up this mission in that scenario. We don’t want to be called as terrorists. Without anyone taking responsibility for this attack, it’s us who will be left to face the wrath of Israel,” Tejeshwar said. He saw Vinod looking at him with questioning eyes.
“This is ridiculous. We will be inviting a war if we openly claim to have attacked the Israelis,” Karim argued. “By the way, we believed your organization specializes in such covert attacks.”
“That’s true. But we never take sides. We are always neutral. In your case, we don’t look that neutral. Do we?” Tejeshwar debated. “With your country safely denying any involvement, we are going to eat a lot of shit. Hell, we cannot make enemies out of countries.”
Massoud, who was a quiet observer till now, broke his silence at last. He spoke with the demeanour of a leader. “Is there any other way your organization can help us accomplish this mission?”
Tejeshwar noticed that Massoud was speaking to Vinod and not to him. Is the fucker playing on my son’s mind? He saw that Vinod was already feeling restless for not getting an opportunity to take a decision.
“I am afraid, we cannot be involved at all in this mission,” Tejeshwar said.
“Father, can we have a discussion in private?” Vinod said in a complaining tone. He looked miffed.
Tejeshwar clenched his teeth in anger as he saw Vinod walk into the adjoining room. For the first time ever, someone had questioned his decision. He could have upbraided Vinod then and there, but decided against it. One should not show the differences within family members to outsiders. He stood up and followed Vinod into the next room.
“What is this, father? This is such a lucrative party. We cannot lose them,” Vinod protested. “Why are you refusing?”
“Because you still have a lot to understand how this world operates,” Tejeshwar said, trying to keep his calm. “We are contractors. We don’t take sides. Terrorists take sides. With this mission we would clearly look like terrorists fighting Jihad.”
“But you’ve said multiple times that Jihad will give us the maximum business in future.”
“That’s true. But the Jihadis claim responsibility for whatever they do. They don’t let their contractors fight their own survival game.”
“When you kill someone, you take a side. Your client’s side. That’s a fact,” Vinod said brusquely. “We have played this game for generations. I guess you should let me play it my way now.”
“I will not have any more of this discussion,” Tejeshwar roared. “We are done. Tell these people to leave.” He went upstairs, leaving Vinod seething with anger.
* * *
As the Iranian trio got into their Innova, Vinod saw Massoud making a gesture towards him with his eyes. He was calling him. Vinod approached his car window.
“I still believe we can strike a deal,” Massoud whispered and looked into his eyes. “And let me assure you, our purse strings are pretty loose for people who can execute our strategic missions.”
Vinod stood there for a few moments. He was thinking.
He first hesitated for a second and then said, “I think there’s a way.”
35
The Doctor was feeling the first pangs of frustration. He had spent the last half hour looking at the screen of his monitor, watching the real time video feed from Seema’s chamber. He was dismayed at the lack of any reaction in her even after exposing her to external stimulations. His screen showed Seema slouched on the floor, looking unconscious. Wake up bitch. Show me some results.
His phone started ringing. Sultan. Shit! He answered the call.
“What’s up, Sultan?” he said, faking a smile.
“Why is the bitch still alive?” Sultan hissed.
“She’s under my watch. I’ve given her the drug.”
“To hell with your experiments. Listen to me carefully. I know you went behind my back and convinced the bosses to give the girl to you. I don’t like that.”
“Sorry to have hurt you so much,” the Doctor sneered. “NB-67 is still not perfect. I need more subjects, more trials. You guys just know how to pull a trigger and kill somebody. But that somebody can be more useful as a guinea pig. You haven’t given me a single subject after Nitin Tomar. So what do I do?”
“You sound like a vampire to me doc,” Sultan mocked. “In your blood lust, you gave this journo enough breadcrumbs to follow us into Bandhavgarh. Who knows how many people she has tipped off about this case? This is a mess. We have to clean it up. And by the way, powerful people have started taking interest in this case. You know what I mean. Right?”
“Right,” the Doctor said and ended the call.
A wave of fear passed through his mind. Powerful people? This is bad news. He looked at his monitor again. Still no movement from Seema. He shook his head in dejection and dialled the number of the security head. Such a waste of an opportunity.
“Hey Pawan,” he said. “Sultan wants us to wrap up. You know what to do.”
“So it has come to that, finally?”
“Yes, I’m afraid.”
36
Ambala Cantt.
Raman stood over a foot-over bridge at the Ambala Cantt. railway station. His targets were standing beneath on the first platform. All three of them were going to catch the same train to New Delhi. Such a bad idea.
He had followed one of his targets to reach the railway station, and to his luck, found all three of them together. It all happened because he chose to keep an eye on the broken car. His men had located the car yesterday night, parked amid darkness and then covered judiciously. Yet, they hadn’t been able to locate the targets, because of which he had to come into the picture.
He smiled upon recalling how easy it was afterwards. He took a vantage point above a building opposite to the car and kept it under constant surveillance. He saw positive results very soon.
A man had come to check the car out. Mistake number one. The idiot then drove the car to a garage on the Grand Trunk Road, rarely checking for any pursuers. Mistake number two. The man then took an auto-rickshaw for the railway station. He quickly found his friends and here they were – huddled up together to catch the same train. His last mistake.
Raman had not brought any weapon. He didn’t want to take such a big risk at a public place often patrolled by the police. The only option was to pursue these people till they got themselves into ‘his’ zone. Hence, he had booked a ticket for the same train.
He heard the arrival announcement of the train to New Delhi. It was time to move. He dialled a number on his mobile phone and said, “Keep a car ready outside New Delhi station. Bring my kit too.”
37
Seema felt as if she was moving. Her eyelids were heavy. Through their narrow slits, she tried to make sense of what was happening. Am I on a wheelchair? She tried moving her hands and legs, but they were tied to the chair. Where are they taking me? She tried screaming. But to her dismay, she could only scream inside her mind.
The deadly concoction of drugs in her bloodstream was making her feel groggy. She remembered vomiting and then passing out over the cold tiles. Terrible thou
ghts had been running through her mind like a horror movie reel. In one dream, she saw that Vidisha was being chased by gunmen. She was crying for help. In another dream, she saw herself running a car over her husband, crushing him beneath. She constantly kept shaking her head to end the hallucinations, but they wouldn’t stop.
She heard the ding-dong sound of a lift. Her wheelchair was pushed inside. She felt as if she was being pushed into a well. Something in the water kept pulling her down, while she gasped for breath. She felt suffocated, but her hands were tied. She used all her strength trying to free them up, but her shackles didn’t budge.
She heard a ding-dong again. Is it a dream? She shook her head so hard that her neck began to ache. This time she was able to open her eyes. She saw she was in a lift, which had reached the ground floor. Her wheelchair was being pushed across a corridor. She wondered who the person behind her was. The place felt very hot. Why? She looked up. There were thick metal overhead pipes running all over the place. Steam.
A heavy-set man with a massive scar on his right cheek and dressed in army attire walked towards her wheelchair. He and the person standing behind her had a discussion in whispers. Seema understood that the man with the scar was now in-charge of her. He started pushing her wheelchair at a much faster pace. At a dead end, he took a sharp left turn and then stopped. He looked around as if checking for any onlookers. Satisfied that no one was following them, he whispered, “Are you OK?”
Seema tried to study him, but wasn’t able to concentrate on his face. It was a blur.
“Look, I don’t know where they are taking you. But just try to stay alive. We’ll soon get you out.”
Seema shook her hands, indicating him to open her shackles.
“I’m so sorry. I can’t do that,” he said, closing his eyes with regret. “We have spent so much effort in infiltrating this organization. If I set you loose, all will be lost. But I assure you that you’ll be saved. Just stay alive somehow.”
He began pushing the wheelchair again. They turned at another corner and entered the final corridor. A grilled door stood at the far end of it. There was an armed guard sitting at the gate. Some discussion happened between the two men and she was now passed on to her new carrier.
The guard brought her chair out into the open. Even though she was delirious, she felt elated seeing the open sky and the afternoon sun. The place looked like the backyard of a factory. There were huge cylindrical pipes and rusty machinery parts lying all over the ground. A wall with a barbwire concertina on its top stood about twenty meters away. She wondered what lay beyond. The place didn’t look like the jungle where she was captured. Hell, it didn’t even look like Bandhavgarh. What is this place?
Her mind began to wander again. She shook her head again, but to no effect. A dark dream began to envelop her.
38
A muscular man wearing sunglasses emerged from the building behind Seema and stood in front of her. He was the same guy who had kidnapped her and then killed her driver. The man walked with the swagger of a hardened criminal. He gestured the guard to go away. Taking out a sharp knife from his pocket, he cut the duct tapes tying her limbs to the chair.
Even though he had freed his hostage from bondage, he didn’t see any movement in her body. Seema’s head was down. She kept looking at the ground.
“Wake up sweetie. Papa wants to play with you,” the man said, chewing gum in his mouth.
No response.
The man grabbed Seema’s lower jaw and wrenched it upwards to see her face. He removed his sunglasses and looked into her eyes. They were open, yet looked completely lost. He gave her a mild slap.
Still no response.
He looked at her from top to bottom with lustful eyes.
“So, you’re angry with Papa. Aren’t you? Let me make you happy,” he said, sliding his right hand inside Seema’s kurta. He slipped his hand into her bra and cupped her breast. He pressed his hand tighter and started pinching her.
Still no response.
Biting his lips in anger, he took out his hand out of her kurta and growled, “Bitch! You aren’t going to like what I’m gonna do to you.” He started to yank out her pyjamas with forceful jerks.
The next moment, he felt her hand on his eye. Before he could react, she inserted the sharp finger nails of her thumb and index finger at the corners of his left eye and gouged it out. The eye was now dangling from sinuous nerves and blood vessels. Blood and gooey fluids gushed out of the hollow socket.
The man screamed with horror. With trembling fingers, he touched his wound and writhed in pain. He kept moving backwards till he stumbled and fell. The knife he was carrying dropped on the ground. He tried to pick it up, but couldn’t. His lone eye and the severe pain were not letting him concentrate. The knife wasn’t where it looked to be. His hand kept grazing the soil.
Seema stood up from her chair. Her eyes were bulging, resembling those of a wild tusker on a killing spree. She moved towards him and picked up the knife. Howling like a kid, he started to retreat, dragging his body backwards in the soil, but unable to stand up. She plunged the knife into his stomach and kept on stabbing him till he stopped moving. His body was completely still now.
She walked towards one end of the compound like a zombie, carrying the bloody knife in her hand. With her blurry eyes, she saw someone coming towards her.
It was a man carrying a rifle.
39
Prakash stood at the door of his compartment, trying to get some respite from the heat, with the cool wind blowing into his face. The train had been moving since the last thirty minutes. The hot summer day had ensured that it was filled sparsely. That’s why they had easily got seats in the chair car section.
He felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Mrinal.
“Your leg is bleeding,” he said.
Prakash looked down at his legs. His trousers had a crimson coloured blotch near his right knee. The piece of shrapnel. He rolled up his pants to check his wound. The chip of metal, which was only slightly protruding a few days ago was jutting out like a small nail today. He tried pulling it out, but it stung like hell.
“You need to see a doctor,” Mrinal sympathised.
Prakash nodded and decided to ignore his wound.
Mrinal hesitated for a moment and then asked, “You got it in the explosion, didn’t you?”
Prakash kept looking out of door with clenched jaws. He didn’t want to talk about it.
“What happened exactly?” his friend pressed on.
“People died!” Prakash spat. “That’s what happens in an explosion. OK?”
A momentary expression of grief crossed Mrinal’s face. He placed his hand on Prakash’s shoulder. “I have seen death,” he said. “It haunts.”
Prakash saw pain in his friend’s eyes.
Mrinal kept talking. “My father committed suicide when I was ten. He was a stock trader. The prick’s suicide note was funny. He said he had lost all his money in the stock market. He was neck deep in debt, which not even ten fucking sons like me could ever repay. So he chose an easy way. He hung himself. Bloody loser.”
Mrinal looked down for a minute, avoiding Prakash’s eyes. When he lifted his head, he had a forced smile on his face. “See, I’m not new to death. You can tell me what happened with you.”
Prakash hesitated, but still began, “I had gone to Banka a month back to cover a story on children being forcefully recruited into the cadres of the Naxalites.”
“Banka? Where is this place?”
“It’s a district in Bihar. A place gifted with a dense forest cover and picturesque landscapes. But no tourist worth his salt would go there. These forests are infested with Naxalites. Banka is a battleground for their bloody war with the police and the administration,” Prakash said.
He continued, “The day this all happened was the most terrible day of my life. We were accompanying the CISF commandos in their night patrol through the dark forests. There were two jeeps. In the first one, I sat with three
CISF jawans. The jeep following us comprised of two of my colleagues and three more jawans.”
“Colleagues, meaning?”
“Ojas Patel, who was my cameraman and Ishwar Toppo, a local freelancing journalist,” he said. “While we were passing through a narrow trail cutting across the jungle, I heard a ‘click’ behind our vehicle. That’s the most dangerous sound you can hear in those forests. In a second, an explosion tossed up the jeep coming behind us in the air. The flat ground behind us was now a two feet deep ditch. We had been lucky to miss that landmine. The other jeep wasn’t.”
“Before anyone realized what happened, we heard gunshots coming from the bushes. We had run into an ambush. There was absolutely no chance of survival if the Naxals got to us. The driver of my jeep knew exactly what he had to do. He drove like a mad man for the next half an hour, till we were back in the CISF camp.”
“Did anyone survive that explosion?” Mrinal asked.
“Three people, which included Ojas Patel, survived the explosion. Only to be shot from a point blank range by the Naxals. They left no survivors. Five mutilated bodies were found the next morning and then sent over to a local government hospital,” Prakash said and got lost in his thoughts for a few moments.
When he talked again, his eyes had tears in them. “Ojas Patel was a close friend of mine. His death shook me to the core. What do you do when the devastated wife of a newly married guy looks at you with blaming eyes? I felt something break inside my heart. My anxiety knew no bounds when I had to take her to the hospital to identify her husband’s body. I stood at the morgue door while she walked over to his lifeless body, lying on the floor. Beating her chest and sobbing, she crouched and embraced his body. At that dreadful moment, I heard a ‘click’ again. What followed was a deafening explosion and darkness before my eyes.”
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