Chimera

by Vivek Ahuja

  No!

  He forced himself out of the shock just as freezing winds swept into the cockpit.

  “God damn it!”

  He changed frequencies:

  “Mayday, mayday! This is Firefly-One! We are hit and going down! I saw again, we are hit and going down! Good luck boys! Out!”

  Parekh was now really struggling to stabilize his aircraft just as he noticed two other Jaguars successfully hitting a couple of other important targets further north at low level.

  Time to go, buddy!

  He pulled the ejection cord and was punched out of the cockpit by the explosive cartridge into the freezing cold winds. His seat buffeted for several seconds before a small drogue stabilized it. Then a second jerk as the parachute deployed and he began descending into the rapidly approaching rocky ground below.

  He slashed into the gravel and slid along it for a couple dozen yards as the parachute strapped to his body buffeted in the sweeping wind. He detached it and rolled to a stop with several bruises all over his body and his flight-suit ripped. He tasted a combination of blood and gravel in his mouth, which he spat out.

  As he lay there, he saw the remaining Jaguars lay waste to the last of the launchers from a nearby S-300 battery to the north. He saw them sweeping away at high speeds to the west, into Indian airspace, their job done and the Chinese S-300 batteries destroyed…

  day 3

  THE AKSAI CHIN

  DAY 3 + 0125 HRS

  Group-Captain Parekh turned over on the ground and checked his limbs. They were all there. His arm was paining but didn’t look like it had been broken, which was important given the freezing temperatures around him. He checked to see where his personal sidearm was and realized the holster for it had been ripped out when he was being dragged on the gravel by his parachute.

  So much for that then!

  He sat up on the ground and looked around. He could see the Chinese in utter chaos all over the region. Smoke pillars were rising into the skies all over the horizon. He could not find where his own aircraft wreckage was. He had lost sight of it during his violent ejection and subsequent recovery back to terra-firma. He realized something else as well: he was all alone out here…

  Sorry about this, JC. I couldn’t get us both out in one piece. And I know I promised it anyway.

  Please forgive me!

  “On your feet, Indian!” a voice behind him said.

  Parekh jerked around to see a PLAAF Major in winter digital pattern uniform walking over to him. Several other PLA soldiers stood nearby, their QBZ-95 assault rifles pointed at him. The Major walked over as Parekh struggled on to his feet.

  “Well, that didn’t take you too long,” Parekh quipped and smiled.

  The Major did not return the favor.

  “After what you have done, I should just shoot you now and say you tried to escape,” the Major said as he glanced at the burning fires around the region.

  “Do it then. Why are you wasting my time?” Parekh replied, and was responded with a hit on the lower neck by a rifle butt from one of the soldiers behind him. He staggered to his knees under the impact and heard the air-force Major shout angry commands in mandarin to the guilty soldier.

  So. They want me alive…

  Parekh was handcuffed and escorted by the Major and his PLA entourage to the parked trucks half a kilometer away.

  Parekh saw the roads filled with military vehicles supporting the ongoing ground offensive in Ladakh. They loaded him into a truck and the small convoy moved off. The Major sitting across him spoke some broken Hindi, which surprised Parekh greatly.

  He had expected some English from the Chinese officer but he also got Hindi. The Chinese took great pains to understand their enemies. His only other observations were based on what he was seeing out the back of the truck. It was clear that he was being driven to the north and was under the direct control of the PLAAF, who were highly interested in what he knew about the Indian Jaguar operations and tactics...

  BANGALORE

  INDIA

  DAY 3 + 0355 HRS

  “Attention!”

  Everybody in the room stood up and saluted as Air-marshal Subramanian walked in. He glanced over to the assembled group of pilots in their green flight-suits. Most of them were Squadron-Leaders or Wing-Commanders in rank. They were in a room whose walls were covered with maps and where the tables were covered with technical documents and papers.

  Subramanian turned to the commanding officer for the pilots in the room. The latter was also in his flight-suit.

  “Tell me you can do this,” he said.

  That didn’t leave much choice for Wing-Commander Dutt. Luckily for him his answer matched his options:

  “Yes, sir. We can do it.” Barely.

  “Good. How soon can you deploy?” Subramanian continued.

  “Well, we have six machines that first need to be airlifted to Leh. Then the equipment, supplies, weapons and manpower has to follow. At our end we are good to go. It’s a question of how fast we can airlift them up there,” Dutt replied. Subramanian shook his head on that one.

  “I have one, and only one, Il-76 that I can spare for this airlift over the next two days. After that you and your men will have to squeeze in what supplies are coming into the region either through ground convoys or airlift. I don’t need to remind you of the kind of heavy attention Leh airbase has been receiving from the Chinese and their bloody missiles. Leh has been closed down twice now in as many days. It’s been opened again for now so we are flying in what we can before the Chinese realize it and try to shut it down. Your testing and evaluation period has been cut short. You said you have six machines in your command. Does that include or exclude the TD versions?”

  “Includes, sir,” Dutt responded. The three senior HAL employees in the room looked at each other but didn’t say anything.

  “You sure they are ready?” Subramanian asked dubiously after noticing the look on the civilian faces in the room.

  “Sir, if you are asking whether we have tinkered out every issue on the aircraft then the answer is: no, we haven’t. But they will work within the parameters we have fixed. This is exactly why I am taking my flight evaluation pilots with me on this one. We are the only people who know at this point how to fly these things and how much we can push them. We are not about to sit here flying tests while the real war needs us out there! Get me and my unit to the frontlines and we will do the rest,” Dutt concluded.

  He noticed that he had managed to convince his boss.

  “Very well. Get your requirements listed out. Your Il-76 will land at nine in the morning. Also, before I forget,” Subramanian pulled into his coat pocket and removed what appeared to be a small cloth circle about five-inch in diameter and tossed it to Dutt. On it was stitched the background of the Himalayan peaks with white tops and brown bases with the frontal silhouette of a helicopter gunship in black. Around the outer perimeter of the circle was stitched:

  199 HU: The Himalayan Gunners

  Dutt rubbed his thumb over the stitching and smiled. Subramanian laughed grimly.

  “That came into my office an hour ago. Now your group has a name and a unit. For now. Live up to it. Show us what your machine is capable of doing. But more importantly, show it to the red bastards!”

  THE VILLAGE OF DOKUNG

  NORTHERN SIKKIM

  DAY 3 + 0600 HRS

  “They are here much earlier than expected,” Ansari noted as he lowered his binoculars.

  “Yes, they are. I should ask them how they managed to pull that off,” the Colonel commanding the local army battalion replied as he removed his night-vision goggles. Ansari laughed at that.

  “Indeed! Probably whacked some Chinese outfit along the way, I bet!”

  The twelve darkened figures were slowly clambering down the high snow-covered peaks of the Himalayas as they entered Indian Territory.

  Ansari smiled at the sight. They had been right about Gephel and his teams all along. Here were twelve men comi
ng back after weeks of operations in the arctic cold weather of Tibet. These men were the bearers of cold hard information about the Chinese in Tibet. It was Ansari’s job to debrief the team, make sure they had good food and to make sure this operation was closed out permanently.

  Kongra-La sits at the tip of northern Sikkim and is approached after moving up the magnificent valleys of the north-south running Yumtang River. Ansari’s team had arrived at the village on board a Mi-17 that had taken off from a small army helipad at Mangan, north of Gangtok and flown northwards up the Yumtang valley which gradually increased in altitude from four-thousand feet right up to sixteen-thousand feet above sea-level.

  The peaks surrounding Kongra-La were all above eighteen-thousand feet. Gephel’s team had walked through these peaks on their way into the plains of Tibet months ago as all other passes were sealed off by the PLA. They had walked through the most brutally cold winds and rocky terrain before entering the Tibetan plateau.

  There was no food to be salvaged in the barren terrain of Tibet just north from these mountains until the fertile Gyantse valley, which was extremely well populated by PLA units at any given time. As a result, all food items had to be carried along by the team members. So the teams had to be extracted frequently in order to resupply and rearm them. And since all of the travel was on foot, most of the time inside Tibet teams was spent on the ingress and egress to the target rather than the target area itself.

  Couldn’t be helped back then…

  And now it is no longer needed!

  Ansari thought and sighed.

  Now that the two countries were officially at war, all bets were off on such operations. Indian SOCOM teams were already in Tibet. But Gephel and his team were black as far as operations were concerned. Ansari wanted this thing done and dusted so that he could return back to his parent unit and do some good in the actual war.

  He grunted at that.

  Actual war. That’s a good one. Try telling that to Gephel and his boys. They have been in a brutal war for months…

  As he watched Gephel and his men approaching the base of the snow-covered peak, he thought about Colonel Younghusband and his small group of officers and soldiers who had travelled across these very peaks back in the beginning of the previous century. It was when Great Britai had attempted to bring Tibet under its sphere of influence.

  That attempt north of Kongra-La had failed as a result of political resistance by the Tibetan officials despite the undeniable truth of military imbalance. Their stubbornness had seen Lord Curzon, then viceroy to India, dispatching a larger force of men under the command of Brigadier Macdonald and a political mission under Colonel Younghusband to try and force the issue by force. It was back then that the rabble of Tibetan peasant-soldiers who stood opposite the Gorkha and Sikh Battalions under Macdonald, were soundly defeated and massacred on the road to Lhasa.

  And here we are today, facing one of the world’s largest land armies across the same terrain...

  The bottom line today was that the Chinese were bringing down Divisions from the staging area in Gyantse towards the Chumbi valley on the Indian border.

  And they had to be stopped.

  Ansari thought about that as he walked towards the line of men trudging into the base camp of the army battalion. Each member of the team had beards by now and looked completely exhausted. But they had a smile on their faces.

  So. Some PLA squad did get whacked on their way home.

  Home?

  They were home before they came down south.

  Ansari ordered other soldiers nearby to assist the team members to get back into civilization, in a manner of speaking. He walked over and patted Gephel on the back. The bearded man turned around and smiled.

  “Ansari! What are you doing here?” Gephel said joyfully.

  “You didn’t think I would be here?”

  “I thought we had lost you to the big-wigs in New-Delhi,” Gephel said. And then took a deep breath. “But it’s nice to see you again, my friend. It’s good to smell the scent of freedom out here, even if the mountains all look the same from both sides of the border.”

  Ansari nodded in silence. He didn’t know whether that was true or not, but he knew Gephel had indeed seen it from both sides…

  As the other team members disappeared into the camp, Ngawang walked over to Gephel and Ansari.

  “I wonder what that chap General Macdonald would have thought if he had to face us instead of the peasants he massacred!”

  Ansari laughed at that and neither Gephel nor Ngawang knew why. He explained after a few seconds of uncontrolled laughter:

  “Just a while ago I was thinking about the same thing. I will say this though: all he had to do was face those Tibetan peasants armed with bloody matchlocks while he used field artillery and crack mountain troops. He still ended up needing a Brigade of men and thousands more people maintaining a threadbare logistical artery on a three hundred kilometer march to Lhasa. Your people ask us now why we didn’t go into Tibet in 1950 when the Chinese invaded. Guess what: back then the Chinese army was a two-hundred-fifty Division force. We couldn’t even spare a Brigade back then from the other requirements of the nation to help create an expeditionary force. But that was fifty years ago. Now things are different,” Ansari concluded. His two Tibetan charges nodded in silence.

  “Perhaps,” the battalion commander noted. “But we still have less than a Brigade guarding these northern passes. When Lef-tenant-General Suman decides to divert some units to help me protect these northern passes better, I might feel better about our adventures into Tibet!”

  The Colonel emphatically waved towards the darkened peaks north of his camp. Ansari, dismissed that line of thought:

  “I don’t think you have to worry about these peaks, sir. We are monitoring the Chinese pretty closely on this. They are aiming for the killing blow to our military ability, not land grab. The last thing they want is unnecessary diversion of resources for tracts of land they cannot maintain in the long run. These peaks are natural watersheds, and will remain unchallenged.”

  KASHGAR AIRBASE

  SINKIANG AUTONOMOUS REGION

  CHINA

  DAY 3 + 0820 HRS

  “This is not working,” Feng said quietly.

  Chen nodded silently as both men watched the large sized screen inside the operations center showing the ongoing battle between four J-11Bs and four J-8IIs from the 32ND Fighter Division and a mixture of Indian Su-30s and Mirage-2000s from Srinagar and Avantipur airbases.

  Losses had been registered on both sides as the BVR engagement had disintegrated into a melee at close range. On both sides the battle was being watched by AWACS aircraft.

  Two Indian aircraft including one Mirage-2000 and one Su-30 had been destroyed so far. In return, all four J-8IIs had been lost during the initial stages of the BVR engagement while the J-11Bs had suffered two losses. The last two J-11B pilots were currently trying desperately to disengage from the battle by pulling closer to the Aksai Chin sector where the few handful of surviving S-300 batteries could provide cover…

  The role of the PLAAF during the ground offensive of the PLA into Ladakh had been to provide air cover against Indian air attacks. Unfortunately, the powerful S-300 defensive belt in the Aksai Chin set up by Feng, Chen and Wencang had been chopped down by the elaborate attacks of the IAF the night before.

  The only recent significant gains were the complete destruction of airstrips at Daulat-beg-oldi, Chushul and Fukche by the PLA long-range artillery systems. Other tactical Advanced Landing Grounds or ALGs had also been made inoperative but they only affected the army.

  As it stood now, the PLAAF’s ability to defend the PLA Divisions surging into Ladakh was critically reduced. In fact, IAF Jaguars were striking deep and hard into Chinese territory even inside south-western Tibet now. The war for the skies of Ladakh was close to being lost, and both Feng and Chen could see it.

  And once that happened, it was only a matter of time before the PLA force
s on the ground began to feel the real heat of the reverses in the skies above them.

  Such an outcome was unacceptable.

  “What are our options, Feng?” Chen asked.

  They heard the radio communication between their AWACS controllers and the two J-11B pilots as the latter successfully disengaged from combat after entering the S-300 defensive belt in northern Aksai-Chin. Feng pressed his fingers on his lips as he thought about that.

  “Not many, sir. It’s only a matter of time now. We don’t have nearly the kind of airbase infrastructure needed to base the numbers that would be needed here. This was exactly why I had proposed the S-300 defensive belt to begin with. One S-300 battery supported by carefully placed Su-27s and J-11s on patrol could hold off fleets of Indian fighters. But once we lost the initiative after Zhigao’s disastrous operation two days ago, we lost a crucial piece of our structure,” Feng said, and then reflected on that with brutal honesty.

  So is it all Zhigao’s fault now?

  You are not to blame for anything at all?

  “Indeed,” Chen added. “That fool cost us this sector! Had it not been for him, we would still be maintaining control of the skies in this sector!”

  So there it is. All of this has been pinned on Zhigao now.

  Feel better?

  Feng shook off his inner voice and told himself quietly that Zhigao had indeed been to blame for some of this, if not all of it. And that he was not to blame for the wall that Zhigao would soon find himself in front of.

  “We need to spread the Indian fighters out. They cannot be everywhere at the same time!” Feng said.

  Chen caught the cue on that one and nodded agreement:

  “Yes! It’s time the skies over the Indian northeast really caught fire from the dragon’s breath!”

  BANGALORE

  INDIA

  DAY 3 + 0930 HRS

  The drizzle and the gray, low-hanging clouds over the city were not helping matters along. Pools of water on the tarmac were reflecting the moody skies above. Ground crewmen were pushing the first Light-Combat-Helicopter or LCH as it was universally known, into the cavernous interiors of the parked Il-76.