Dragonfire

by Humphrey Hawksley

  Local time: 1700 Thursday 3 May 2007

  GMT: 0900 Thursday 3 May 2007

  Jamie Song waited until Teng Guo Feng, his Ambassador to Islamabad, was on the secure line, then picked up the receiver. ‘Did they receive the imagery?’

  ‘Khan himself was in the war room,’ said Teng. ‘Parliament is in emergency session, and Khan’s been summoned to the PM’s office.’

  ‘Good,’ said Jamie Song. ‘Speak to him now and tell him two things. Firstly, we are having some success in intercepts on the SIGINT from the Indian military command and will let him have them shortly. Secondly, advise him that if our support is to continue, he must follow closely your political advice on how he handles his accession to power. No witch-hunts. No revolution. No personality cults. No personal corruption. If China is to stay with him, he has to win international recognition and respect. Only then will he retain power.’

  General Headquarters, Rawalpindi, Pakistan

  Local time: 1430 Thursday 3 May 2007

  GMT: 0930 Thursday 3 May 2007

  ‘The Prime Minister called,’ said Captain Masood softly, unwilling to disturb his boss’s train of thought.

  ‘Did he now?’ said General Hamid Khan. He remembered an afternoon less than a month before when protesters had marched on the Parliament building. The Prime Minister had demanded that Khan give the order to open fire with live ammunition. ‘We must teach them a lesson they will not forget,’ the Prime Minister had said.

  ‘Let us wait and see what happens, sir,’ Khan had patiently replied. The demonstrators delivered their petition and left peacefully.

  ‘What moral excuse would I have for obeying that instruction?’ Khan confided in Masood afterwards. ‘Pakistani soldiers are not going to protect the ruling classes by killing Pakistani people.’

  Now, the Prime Minister seemed intent on interfering in military affairs again by demanding that Pakistan withdraw from the Kashmir conflict. If Khan agreed to that, the streets would run red with the blood of the forces of Islam on the rampage. Kashmir was the outlet for their aggression, yet the Prime Minister could not see it.

  Khan picked up another phone and dialled the number himself for the Chief of Naval Staff, who was in Karachi. ‘I think the present government—’ he began.

  The naval commander interrupted: ‘You need explain no more.’

  He then spoke on the encrypted military line to the three-star generals in command of IV Corps in Lahore, X Corps in Rawalpindi and II Corps at the central military headquarters near Multan, known as the strike corps. He offered a face-to-face meeting with the Chief of Air Staff in Rawalpindi, but was asked to wait on the line. Then, without introduction, the voice of the air chief said: ‘No.’ The line went dead.

  Khan found the Deputy Chief of Air Staff at the huge Sarghoda airbase in the centre of the country, mixing with the F-16A pilots of No. 9 Squadron. ‘The Prime Minister has called an emergency session of Parliament,’ said Khan. ‘We expect him to order our withdrawal from the Kashmir front.’

  ‘To save his own bloody cronies and US dollar accounts,’ replied Air Marshal Yasin Kalapur, a former fighter pilot. ‘I bet his bloody wife’s nagging him about not being allowed to the London sales any more. Good luck, General.’

  Khan got Masood to call up a map of Pakistan on the computer screen in his office. He watched as Masood used green to colour in sections of the armed services upon which he could count. In Pakistan, the army controlled almost all military power. Technically, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was his senior, but that role was adviser to the Prime Minister. Hamid had a line of command. The Chairman did not.

  Hamid had spoken to three of the army’s nine corps commanders. The air force would hesitate, but the Deputy Chief of Air Staff would bring it into line. The navy, less important in the first hours, was on board. He anticipated confrontation in Rawalpindi because it was the headquarters of many different sections of the military. He did not rule out exchanges of fire and casualties. But the cantonments around Chaklala were Khan’s home turf and within twenty-four hours he expected that the trouble would be over. He shaded in neutral grey the corps commanders he had not contacted at Mangla, Gujranwala and Bahawalpur, and he marked two areas in hostile red, Quetta and Peshawar, both near the Afghan border and both corps commanded by men who supported the civilian administration.

  Khan turned to Masood. ‘What time will all cabinet members actually be in the Parliament building?’ he asked.

  ‘At sixteen hundred, sir.’

  Khan closed the country map and brought a city plan up onto the screen. He examined the images from the surveillance cameras around the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, the Supreme Court Building and Parliament House, gleaming modern buildings with landscaped lawns, sprinklers and balustrade driveways. Unlike the monuments to modern government in New Delhi, the architectural symbols of Islamabad had not been built by the departing colonial power. They were the creation of corrupt leader after corrupt leader. While citizens scraped for food and soldiers fought in the mountains of Kashmir, the country’s leaders lavished money on buildings no Pakistani needed. Khan loathed the ruling oligarchies with their foreign education, property and bank accounts. But he also loathed what seemed to be the only alternative: Islamic revolution and the repressive fanaticism which he had seen in Afghanistan and Iran.

  Constitution Avenue, Islamabad, Pakistan

  Local time: 1600 Thursday 3 May 2007

  GMT: 1100 Thursday 3 May 2007

  Hamid Khan arrived for his meeting with the Prime Minister wearing full battle dress and travelling in an armoured personnel carrier. He led a column of ten M113 tracked vehicles down Constitution Avenue to the Parliament building, from X Corps’s 11 Brigade, the unit responsible for security in the capital. The column broke into the administrative nucleus of Pakistan, throwing a military cordon of roadblocks around it, sealing off the heart of the capital with a ring of battle-ready armour. Troops took up positions with heavy machine guns. Khan ordered an APC every 200 metres and a main battle tank at the junctions.

  The cordon ran right along Ataturk Avenue Ramna 5, north through Ataturk Shalimar 5. Two T-59 tanks blocked the junction with Kyayaban-e-Iqbal, then the cordon of APCs ran around the back of the Prime Minister’s official residence, joining the narrow Nurpur Road and Fourth Avenue right down to the start of the diplomatic enclave, where Khan deployed another tank. Infantrymen with bayonets fixed to their G3 rifles were positioned as a human barrier between the armoured vehicles.

  He avoided going into the diplomatic enclave itself and ran the cordon west along Isfahani Road, past the Australian, French, Japanese and Egyptian Embassies until it got to Khayaban-e-Suhrawardy. Troops moved into the main government buildings. Parliament House, the Cabinet Offices, the telephone exchange, the state-run television and radio complex and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs all fell within Khan’s cordon. The most substantive roadblock was across the highway into Islamabad from Rawalpindi where four T-59 tanks, their 105mm gun barrels horizontal, were parked across the road. An infantry battalion and two Huey Cobra helicopters were positioned behind them, with pilots ready in the cockpit.

  Khan turned his 12.7mm machine gun towards the Parliament building. Commandos of the elite Cherat Special Services Group jumped out of the APCs and rushed in to reinforce troops who had just secured the building and its grounds. Not a shot was fired. Not an order was shouted.

  The strange quiet which had suddenly enveloped the government buildings was broken by the roar of six F-16 fighters, screaming in at less than 500 feet from their base in Sarghoda. The pilots dipped their wings, circled and flew back again before heading north towards the Muree Hills.

  Khan jumped down from his APC. He strode into Parliament House. Commandos, led by Masood, covered him from behind as if breaking cover on the front. He threw open the double doors to the Parliament chamber and walked to the front, his men covering every terrified member with their small-arms, then spreading right rou
nd the chamber and taking positions against the walls. Their machine pistols had full magazines, but no bullets in the breech, to prevent any soldier becoming trigger-happy. Khan himself was unarmed.

  ‘Sit down, everybody. Sit down,’ shouted Masood in both Urdu and English. ‘Don’t panic. This is a military takeover. We apologize for any inconvenience caused. You are requested to stay calm, stay down and listen to what we have to tell you.’

  Khan mounted the steps to where the Speaker sat and turned to face the Parliament chamber: ‘Mr Prime Minister, please lead your cabinet team down to the exit door at the right of the chamber,’ he said. ‘Parliamentary staff, please assist my men in their job and do not attempt to resist. The remainder of the members must stay in their seats. Mr Prime Minister, will you lead your team. Now.’

  The Prime Minister had to be yanked out of his seat by his right arm. He was paralysed more by shock than any desire to resist. Other members shuffled in an obedient line towards the exit. Only one, a Deputy Finance Minister, shouted in English: ‘This is a disgrace. I warn you, you will never get away with it.’ He was wrong. Fifteen minutes later, he was begging for his life.

  With the cabinet held at gunpoint in the lobby area outside, Khan turned his attention back to the members. ‘I have taken over government, not for power or personal gain, but to save our country from bloodshed,’ he said. ‘Outside this lavish building, ordinary people are living difficult lives. You, the ruling classes, have let them down. When a citizen comes into contact with the government he faces indifference and extortion. And when they march on Parliament to complain, the Prime Minister commands my troops to shoot them with live ammunition.

  ‘No longer are Pakistani soldiers going to protect the ruling classes by killing Pakistani people. This afternoon, the government of Pakistan was the enemy of the people. As from this moment it will be their friend.

  ‘The educated youth believe that the solution to our problem lies with Islam, not in the ritual sense of beards, bombs and Jihad, but in the faith, discipline and loyalty which the religion brings to people all over the world. Those are the guiding principles of military life. They will now become the guiding principle of our whole country.’

  Khan’s speech was met with complete silence. No applause. No objection. He stepped down from the platform and spotted Masood hovering in the doorway, his expression indicating that all was not well.

  Outside the Parliament building, the members of the cabinet were being loaded into two trucks to be held in custody in a military barracks. The Deputy Finance Minister, Ahmed Magam, was refusing to climb up.

  ‘No! No!’ he was shouting. ‘I am not getting in and you will not force me.’ His voice was raised and as Khan approached he identified uncertainty on a few of the soldiers’ faces.

  ‘Get up,’ snapped Khan.

  ‘You will hang for this,’ spat Magam.

  A cabinet colleague put a hand on Magam’s elbow. ‘Come on, man,’ he said. ‘Let’s do what they say.’

  Magam shook off the hand and pushed his way past a soldier, who hesitated enough to let him get through. Khan took a pistol off the nearest soldier, put a round in the breech and held it at Magam’s head. ‘Get back in line. Now.’

  Magam took the first half-step of a run. Khan tripped him, pushed him to the ground, face down, and fired a live round in the air inches from the minister’s head. Khan stepped back. ‘Do you want to die?’ roared Khan, emptying the breech, then reloading it again, so that the minister could hear the mechanism move.

  ‘No,’ Magam whimpered.

  ‘Do you want to live?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Again. Tell me again.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, please.’

  Khan secured the safety catch on the pistol and gave it back to the soldier. The minister, shaking, was helped to his feet by colleagues and climbed into the truck.

  Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London

  Local time: 1530 Thursday 3 May 2007

  ‘One shot fired, apparently,’ said John Stopping. ‘To persuade a recalcitrant minister not to stretch his luck. Otherwise a flawlessly exercised takeover.’

  Top of the British news agenda of the day were the domestic issues of the single currency and Northern Ireland. The Foreign Office was concentrating on Christopher Baker’s upcoming weekend visit toWashington, but the headofAsia– Pacific, who was in fact travelling, asked for a special meeting on the Pakistani coup. John Stopping had been asked to chair the meeting in his place. Stopping was a former Ambassador to Pakistan, and was still chair of the JIC.

  The BBC lunchtime radio news had led with the coup in Pakistan, but television gave it thirty seconds voiced over library pictures of the ousted Prime Minister on a previous visit to Britain. Hamid Khan had declared martial law. He banned all reporting and blocked the transmission of all pictures. Few people in Britain knew the Prime Minister, let alone the military strongman who had taken power, and the firing of a single warning shot did not arouse national outrage.

  Nevertheless, Pakistan had muscled itself to the top of the Foreign Office agenda, and Stopping turned to Martin Andrews, the young head of the South Asian Department.

  ‘Obviously we’re watching things closely,’ said Andrews. ‘But a military takeover was not unexpected. Pakistan is regarded as a failed state and something had to give. We don’t expect it to change Pakistan’s foreign policy agenda, although clearly the Foreign Secretary will express concern when he gets to Washington.’

  ‘And who is Hamid Khan?’

  ‘An Armoured Corps officer, Chief of Army Staff and former Deputy Head of the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, or the ISIA. We’re requesting more from Washington. He was one of the key figures involved in the CIA’s war in Afghanistan in the eighties. When that finished, he turned his attention to the insurgency in Kashmir and was largely responsible for filtering guerrillas across the LoC onto the Indian side in the early nineties. Three years ago he manoeuvred his way to get the job of Commander X Corps in Rawalpindi in charge of operations in Jammu and Kashmir and the Siachen Glacier. It put him at headquarters and in the most politically and militarily sensitive area, a perfect platform from which to get the top job.’

  ‘Is he a rabid fundamentalist?’ asked the head of the Hong Kong/China department.

  ‘No.’ Andrews shook his head. ‘He appears to be a pragmatist. He is not the hunting, shooting and fishing Sandhurst type. The key elements to bear in mind are that, given India’s steady movement away from secularism, it is inevitable there would be a lurch even further towards Islam. After all, Pakistan was created as an Islamic state. I sense that Khan has moved in to prevent the extreme sort of revolution which took place with the Taleban in Afghanistan.’

  ‘The comparison is a bit far-fetched, isn’t it?’ said the head of the Far East department.

  ‘That’s what they said about Iran. We ignored it and we lost a valued ally in the Islamic world.’ Andrews paused while the man in charge of the Far East accepted his point. ‘In the villages, there is a growing cry for Pakistan to produce its own Ayatollah Khomeini. I think the country has judged democracy as a failure.

  ‘The political class is thoroughly corrupt. Western-educated leaders such as Benazir Bhutto turned out to be disasters. Her successors simply came from different landowning oligarchies. The ruling elite takes what it can get and puts nothing back. Since Zia ul-Haq came to power in the late seventies there has been a creeping Islamization. Subsequent governments have used it to retain legitimacy. The political classes have clung to secularism because that is where their vested interests lie. But the centre of gravity has been shifting for some time. What has become clear is that the political class is incapable of bringing about change.’

  ‘You sound as if you rather admire Khan,’ said Stopping.

  ‘I don’t know him,’ said Andrews. ‘But I know where he is coming from. The country is living beyond its means. The religious parties are well organized – particularly in the cities,
but they perform badly at the polls because the votes are controlled by the landlords. The army is the only professional institution of any size which works and Khan has stepped in before the conditions created another Iran. Of the two hundred and fifty-odd brigadiers in the Pakistan army, there are thirty known fundamentalists. Of about twenty-five lieutenant generals, there are five fundamentalists. We should be thankful that Khan is not among them.’

  ‘So does it mean that we should regard Khan as an OK thing for the time being,’ said Stopping, ‘as long as he keeps his revolver in his holster?’

  ‘On probation, perhaps.’

  ‘I suggest we let things settle over the weekend, then test the waters with the Foreign Secretary on Sunday on the way to Washington.’

  Stopping shuffled his papers to get to the next item on the agenda. ‘Now. China,’ he said, turning to the head of the Far East department. ‘I understand we have some intelligence from within Zhongnanhai – from who else, but the Japanese.’

  Foreign Ministry Building, Beijing

  Local time: 0030 Friday 4 May 2007

  GMT: 1630 Thursday 3 May 2007

  Jamie Song was driven out of his office compound with the pressing voice of the American Ambassador in his ear on his mobile phone: ‘Jamie, let’s keep it informal, but we must meet.’

  ‘Reece, it’s after midnight.’

  ‘Drop by the residence for a drink. Give me fifteen minutes of your time.’

  ‘Things are tricky at the moment.’

  Jamie Song and Reece Overhalt trusted each other completely and that is partly why each had got his job. Overhalt was a key player in defusing the earlier Dragon Strike crisis, when both Washington and Beijing had gone on to nuclear alert. When he left as Chairman of Boeing, it seemed only sensible that he should go to Beijing as Ambassador. In the interim, he helped Song float Oriental Software successfully on the New York Stock Exchange, sealing an already longstanding friendship which stretched back to post-graduate days at Harvard. Both China and the United States were aware of the huge ideological and cultural chasms between them, and if any two men could keep the lid on simmering issues it would be Overhalt and Song.