Dragonfire

by Humphrey Hawksley

  ‘China is worried that we are sending mujahedin to cause unrest across its western border. I have to assure them that we are not.’

  ‘What have you told them?’

  ‘We will try to ensure that no mujahedin, whether they come from the Sudan, Saudia Arabia, Bangladesh or Aabpara, will wage war against the People’s Republic of China.’

  ‘And in return?’

  ‘They will supply us with enough weapons and political support to defeat India.’

  The cleric nodded, then said: ‘You are a clever young man, but I fear our people will not understand you. China and investment are not things they know about. The Islamic revolution is a tide, General Khan, which ebbs and flows. It is flowing towards Central Asia and no one can stop it. Not you. Not me. Any man who tries would be a fool. However, perhaps there is a way we can stem the tide at least for our time on this earth, and it is the only way I can guarantee my continued support.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Give us Kashmir, General. If you give us Kashmir, you will be the hero of the Islamic world.’

  The President’s Office, The White House, Washington, DC

  Local time: 0830 Friday 4 May 2007

  GMT: 1330 Friday 4 May 2007

  ‘Is there anything else?’ said the President of the United States. John Hastings stood up, clipping his fountain pen into his jacket pocket. The weekly meeting with the National Security Agency had been routine. His astute National Security Advisor, Tom Bloodworth, had run through the agenda quickly, knowing that the President had elections to think about and a spate of race riots in Washington itself. After the Balkan campaign and with a secured peace on the Korean peninsula, the President had assured the American people that he would keep his eye more on domestic affairs than his predecessor.

  ‘If individual nations are to mature into modern, developed societies, they must learn to take control of their own affairs,’ he had said in his inaugural speech. ‘Western Europe and America did not reach their present level of wealth and stability without spilling the blood of their own people. Both England and the United States fought horrible civil wars and just because they were many hundreds of years ago does not make the suffering any less for those who took part. We had no NATO or UN to intervene then, and maybe that was the right way to sort out our problems. Since the Western democracies began to see themselves as the policemen of the world, civil war and slaughter has not lessened. The Rwandas, Kosovos and Cambodias continue.

  ‘My words might sound harsh to some. But by trying to help we have, in fact, failed to help. So perhaps if these societies so intent on being enemies with each other know that no one is going to come to their aid, they will think twice about starting a war.’

  So far President Hastings had kept his word. In the first two years of his presidency the television networks had become less interested in covering stories of Third World massacres and refugees. It was an electoral gamble, but not a blind one. Hastings ran for the presidency after resigning his post as the chief executive of one of America’s biggest news networks. He understood the link between journalists and power, believing that underneath the bravado of many top reporters was the yearning to be a politician.

  The first story to test his policy occurred in Liberia, when every man, woman and child in three villages was slaughtered. He refused to answer questions on the massacre, saying he hadn’t been properly briefed.

  ‘Why not, sir?’ shouted a young women from what had been his own network.

  ‘Just as I haven’t been briefed on the 20,614 murders in our own country last year. Nor have I seen the file on the twenty-seven murders which took place in New York last week. That violence is the result of poverty, racism and hatred, no different to the motivation which has created the slaughter in Liberia. The killings there do not threaten American national interests, nor are they a threat to world peace. What do I say to Marilyn Deane, the mother of Brent Deane, aged fifteen, who was gunned down in a Washington DC drugs war last week? What do I say when she asks me to make her neighbourhood more safe? Do I turn round and say: “Don’t bother me now, I’m comforting a mother in Liberia”?’

  With that retort, condemnation of Hastings’s policy petered out and the networks which had been flying crews and satellite dishes into Liberia, anticipating American involvement, pulled out. The massacres continued, but the story ended.

  After their assistants left the Oval Office, the President poured his National Security Advisor a coffee and moved from the coffee table on the blue wool carpet in the middle of the room to sit back behind his desk.

  Hastings leant back on his chair, his head brushing the yellow curtains hanging from the sash windows, looking out over the front lawn of the White House. Light streaming in silhouetted his figure, which was flanked by the Star Spangled Banner and the Eagle emblem. He lifted a pile of papers out of his in-tray. ‘Pull up a chair, Tom,’ he said. ‘I have to sign papers while we talk.’

  ‘I’m not suggesting we do anything about it,’ began Bloodworth. ‘But I wanted to mention developments in India to you.’

  Hastings sipped his coffee. ‘All I remember about India is that it was a very difficult story to ever get anyone interested in. Even when they let off the bomb in 1998. People just didn’t really care.’

  ‘Just before this meeting, Kashmiri insurgents shot down an Indian military helicopter with a Stinger surface-to-air missile,’ said Bloodworth. ‘One that we supplied to the Afghan resistance during the war in the eighties. The Home Minister and the Northern army commander were killed, together with about thirty others.’

  Hastings stopped writing: ‘Will India retaliate?’

  ‘We’re asking her not to, but I fear she will. I’ve ordered top-level satellite surveillance over both countries. Our ambassadors will appeal for restraint and we will keep a watch.’

  ‘Pakistan?’

  ‘It’s on the edge, sir. The Prime Minister has no power. The show is being run by the new Chief of Army Staff, Hamid Khan. He’s a former tank commander. He was on our payroll during the Afghan war to train up the mujahedin against the Soviets. Then he headed up the ISIA, Pakistan’s Intelligence Agency’s operation, to start the new wave of insurgency in Kashmir. He’s certainly no fool and we haven’t ruled him out staging a coup in the near future. Khan would have ordered the Stinger operation to bolster his own position.’

  ‘She’s not going to do an Iran on us, is she, Tom?’

  ‘Not that bad, sir. But Pakistan is definitely slipping from our grip.’

  ‘Goddamn basket case,’ said the President, switching his attention to the documents in front of him, then looking up again. ‘And I guess you want a private chat about Tibet as well. I saw it on the news. The Indians have said sorry and that it was a mistake. The Chinese seem to have responded by shooting up the Tibetan Parliament-in-exile.’

  Bloodworth nodded. ‘Even if it stops there, it means there is a substantive split in the Tibetan resistance movement.’

  ‘I thought the Dalai Lama advocated non-violence,’ said Hastings.

  ‘He does. But others are getting impatient. They see the progress made by people like the Kosovo Liberation Army through violence and think they should do the same.’

  ‘And that was a damn shambles.’

  The President put down his pen and let Bloodworth talk. ‘For months, the Chinese have been asking India to rein in the Tibetans and India has done nothing. Ever since the 1998 nuclear tests, when India named China as her main enemy, relations have been frosty. What I really fear is that the Indians see the Tibetan insurgency as a means of undermining the authority of Beijing. In other words, the Indians are letting the Tibetans do their dirty work for them.’

  ‘And whose side should we be on?’ said the President.

  ‘India is the world’s biggest democracy and in a constant political mess. China has a seat on the UN Security Council, has helped us with the Balkans, North Korea, Indonesia, you name it. Our trade is huge.’


  ‘So we sit on the fence,’ interrupted the President.

  ‘Except I sense our neutrality is about to be severely tested. Our intelligence suggests that Lama Togden, who was lifted from the prison, has not been picked up by the Chinese. We don’t know where he is, but he’s still free and if he gets out alive he’s expected to ask for asylum in the United States.’

  Gongkar County, Tibet

  Local time: 2200 Friday 4 May 2007

  GMT: 1400 Wednesday 4 May 2007

  The men laid blankets on the cold rocks and lowered the stretcher onto them so that Togden could drink water. Choedrak pulled a bottle out from inside his coat, where he had been keeping it from turning to ice. He tilted it to Togden’s lips, chapped and coated with frozen blood, and held his head, while the monk let the water drain into his mouth.

  Swiftly deteriorating weather struck Togden down once they climbed into the high mountain passes. For the whole of the second day he had a fever and was semi-conscious. The men carried him and led their ponies rather than ride in order to keep warm. They wrapped protective cloths around their faces to shield them from lashing rain and snow-blindness. Reports kept reaching them of movements of Chinese troops sent in to cut them off, but Choedrak had prepared the route well. Armed units from the Special Frontier Force welcomed them at many villages. They were hiding out along the mountain roads, waiting in ambush for the Chinese.

  Once they reached the higher ground, it was easier to hide from helicopters. But the weather was appalling. The pursuit continued, and, before dark, they shot down two helicopters with their heavy machine guns. The Chinese also used new microlights, fitted with GPS and aerial surveillance equipment. They buzzed the Tibetans, flying in driving rain, sending back details of their positions. Then ground-attack aircraft roared in with cannon and bombs.

  But the mountains were too dangerous for the pilots to be accurate. They spat fire into the snow and caused avalanches, but never once did they come close to hurting Togden and his party.

  Indian Air Force Base, Lohegaon, Maharastra

  Local time: 0600 Thursday 3 May 2007

  GMT: 0030 Thursday 3 May 2007

  On the radio command ‘Shikar’ the aircraft roared along the runway. The early morning sun flashed through the cockpit onto the instrument panels for the two crew and the distinctive tail-fins of the aircraft from No. 24 Squadron ‘Hunting Hawks’ shook on take-off as one by one the pilots took their aircraft up. Their serial numbers were SB 076, SB 082, SB 083, SB 084, SB 091 and SB 092.

  The mission could have been carried out with different aircraft: the MiG-27s from the ‘Scorpios’ Squadron; the multi-role MiG-29s from the secretive No. 223 Squadron; the French-built Mirage 2000H from No. 1 ‘Tigers’ Squadron; or even the British Jaguars, which had been adapted to carry nuclear weapons. But the six planes lined up at the Indian Air Force base east of Bombay, painted in the national tricolour livery of saffron, white and green, were the cream of the country’s air force. Russian-designed but Indian-built, the SU-30MKI was one of the most formidable combat aircraft in the world. Such was Russia’s enthusiasm for the SU-30 that many other aircraft projects were starved of cash in order to develop it. As a buyer, India’s historic military relationship with the Soviet Union and then with Russia gave it the first option. Once the order was secured, Russia refused supplies to potential enemies, such as China and Pakistan. This was why India had now chosen to make a show of using the sort of airpower that its neighbouring enemies would never now possess.

  The SU-30 series was initially designed as a long-range interceptor, to provide cover for Russia’s naval forces and to patrol the enormous and remote border areas. The MKI export version acquired by India had been built with a multi-role added ground-attack capability, and the problems it had encountered in the late nineties had now been solved. The Russian avionics systems had been replaced by French and Israeli cockpit instrumentation suites, with a special feature of four-liquid colour displays for both the pilot in the front and the gunner and weapons-systems operator, on a slightly raised seat behind for better vision. The division of the workload between the two crew was balanced to ensure maximum range and highest air-superiority endurance. The specialized equipment in the rear cockpit also allowed the aircraft to act as a mini-AWACs and command post. The primary weapon sensor was a Zhuk N001 pulse Doppler multimode radar with a range of 105 kilometres, with which it could track two airborne targets up to 75 kilometres. A secondary weapons sensor was the Infrared Search and Tracking system (IRST), with a 370 kilometre range.

  The aircraft had been specially equipped for this mission, and did not carry typical weapons packages. The air-to-air missile systems were limited because India did not expect enemy aircraft to be scrambled and intercepted during the few minutes the strikes would take. A decision had also been taken not to use free-fall bombs, in order to prevent allegations of indiscriminate attack.

  The pilots retained their helmet-mounted sights for use with close-combat R-77 missiles in a look-and-shoot capability, together with air-to-surface missile and jamming pods for destroying and disabling air-defence systems. Their main attack weapons were the 30mm cannon, for strafing, air-to-surface missiles, including the Kh-31P anti-radar missiles and laser-guided fire-and-forget missiles, and laser-guided bombs.

  When Group Captain Amrit Dhal reached 33,000 feet he sent the single high-frequency radio message ‘Checkmate’.

  Flying at more than Mach 2, they were less than forty minutes from reaching their target. At high altitude, the SU-30MK had a range of 3,200 kilometres, and 7,250 kilometres with air-to-air refuelling. It would not be used this time; the aircraft were due to return to the big airbase in Ambala, just south of Chandigarh, where they would stay until the potential for conflict had diminished.

  After taking off to the east, the warplanes turned north until they reached Srinagar, 1,700 kilometres away. The take-off from Lohegaon was picked up by Pakistani radar operators, but did not prompt any alert. It could have been nothing but a routine operation. At Srinagar, though, the aircraft turned due west and within minutes had burst through Pakistani airspace. The targets were between 3,000 and 4,000 feet above sea level. Five of the aircraft dropped to as low as 2,000 feet above ground as they flew across the Line-of-Control into Pakistani territory.

  General Headquarters, Rawalpindi, Pakistan

  Local time: 0900 Thursday 3 May 2007

  GMT: 0400 Thursday 3 May 2007

  The photographs of the dead were mostly of young men, but many of the bodies were charred beyond recognition. The villages named on the photograph captions were Kohala, Garhi, Mahandri and Jarad, just inside Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Houses were in flames. Patches of scorched grass smouldered and lines of refugees were stumbling away along the tracks, which led to safer areas.

  The list of the victims was too long for Hamid Khan to do anything but glance down it. He noticed a twelve-year-old girl from Garhi and an eighty-two-year-old man from Jarad. The Indian airstrikes killed 140 Pakistanis, most of them civilians. Pakistan sovereignty had been violated. People were fleeing right along the LoC, an estimated sixty thousand, no longer believing that their army would protect them. The frontier, which had kept the two sides apart for sixty years, was no longer recognized as a valid border.

  ‘What are the Indians saying?’ Khan asked Masood, who had brought the photographs into his military bunker office.

  ‘Unni Krishnan,the Chief of Army Staff, said after damage assessment that there may be more strikes. The attack aircraft have returned not to Lohegaon, but to Ambala, which is only a few minutes’ flying time from the front. Our radar has detected ten more SU-30MKs also flying up to Ambala, and Mirage 2000 fighters are expected for any future sorties.’

  ‘Artillery exchanges along the LoC?’

  ‘No substantive increase, sir. But continuing.’

  Hamid Khan stood up and opened the door to his office to look out on the war room. It was dominated by maps of Kashmir, a scene fa
miliar to Khan throughout his military career. Over the years, the war room had transformed: once little more than a meeting room with dog-eared charts pinned on the wall and the changing order of battle written on a blackboard, now it was alive with colourful computer imagery. One whole wall was taken up with Kashmir itself. Smaller areas were magnified to show details of the shelling on Indian towns like Kargil and Drass; reinforcements in the Pakistan city of Muzafarabad, the capital of the nominally independent Azad Kashmir; and the strategic forward sectors of Tatta Pani, Darra Sher Khan, Bhattal Ghambeer, Khoi Ratta and Pir Badher. A special screen illuminated the tightly guarded sector of Kahuta, the site of Pakistan’s uranium-reprocessing plant, a key element of its nuclear weapons programme, which in an air war would be vulnerable to Indian attack. In 1994, both countries had agreed not to target each other’s nuclear facilities. But if the conflict worsened, Hamid Khan would have to assume that the agreement was null and void.

  Khan knew each of the sectors well. He had fought in them, controlled them, watched men die in them, and he understood enough about the Kashmir terrain to know that the war was unwinnable without a political settlement or the complete defeat of either India or Pakistan. As he stepped out, the colonel in charge of the shift walked straight over. ‘The Indian army has ordered the evacuation of two hundred villages along the Punjab border with Pakistan, sir.’

  Khan took the sheet of paper the colonel was holding.

  ‘These are from Chinese satellite surveillance,’ explained the colonel. ‘The town of Khemkaran, population sixteen thousand, thirty kilometres south of the main Lahore– Amritsar road.’ The colonel ran his finger down the blurred image of the main street. ‘We estimate only five hundred people are left there. The people are moving everything away – household possessions, vehicles, if they have them, even livestock.’ He handed Khan another photograph. ‘This is what is coming in.’

  Khan could see clearly the columns of tanks and artillery shuffling west past the refugees to take up their positions on the Pakistan border.