LASHKAR

by Mukul Deva

  ‘Another hour or so and you could have taken him straight to the morgue,’ the stocky Air Force surgeon told Dhankar when he came out.

  Dhankar gave him a relieved smile. ‘He is a hard man to kill, doc.’

  IQBAL

  Omar started when the cell-phone jangled to life. He was huddled in an armchair watching the news-anchor taking viewers through the death of the Maulavi once again. The television camera took in the large crowd gathered in front of the Savita Nagar mosque. The crowd was angry and chanting slogans. Omar jerked up and stared at the phone. Then he noticed the number the call was originating from and his mind went numb.

  Omar had been sitting in the living room sipping his tea when he first switched on the television. By this time the news teams had reached the scene of the Savita Nagar blast and details of the horror were being telecast on every channel. Omar watched in horror as the cameras focused on the headless corpse of the Maulavi again and again. His mind whirled. He knew beyond doubt that Iqbal had killed the Maulavi. Somehow he knew this as clearly as he knew that he was going to be the next to die. He picked up the phone which was still ringing persistently.

  ‘Omar?

  A frisson of fear tingled his spine. ‘Iqbal? Why?’ he asked in a whisper throwing a quick look around the room to ensure he was still alone. ‘He was a man of God. How could you…?’

  ‘No one who preaches death can ever be a man of God. He was a plain and simple terrorist. In fact he was the shaitan himself.’

  ‘What the hell is wrong with you, Iqbal? I understand how you feel about the loss of your mother and sister, but it was not intended like that. No one targetted them…’

  ‘That is the point, Omar,’ Iqbal broke in harshly. ‘Can’t you see that, you stupid bastard? It could have been anybody. No one knew who would be maimed and who would die when the bombs went off. Or what, if anything at all, any of them had to do with the jihad. That is why it is wrong.’

  He paused briefly; his anger making him unable to speak. Then he continued: ‘I believe, Omar. I believe. I believe in our God. I am ready to go to battle for him. Kill for him. But not women and definitely not children. If we are the true God’s Lashkar then we should meet the enemy head on. We should fight them to death. Kill them, but not like this. Not women and children…’

  ‘You…it is because of wimps like you that that the jihad will fail.’

  ‘Jihad!’ The vehemence in Iqbal’s voice shocked Omar. ‘Do you even know what jihad means? You are always busy spouting the Koran, do you even understand the meaning of the word?’

  ‘Of course I do!’ Omar recited authoritatively: ‘”It is the right and duty of every true believer to defend ourselves, our religion and our community from those who seek to destroy us.”’

  Iqbal gave a harsh, disdainful laugh. ‘I am sure that even a fool like you knows that jihad means to strive…to strive for purity within oneself and goodness in society.’ His tone hardened suddenly. ‘But stupid shits like you…’

  ‘You are mad!’ By now Omar was literally shaking with anger. ‘Don’t you try to teach me religion, you crazy fool…’

  ‘It is stupid bastards like you who ensure that the real beauty of Islam is never seen by the others! The antics of fanatics like you give Muslims the world over a bad name. We are the true believers, but because of lunatics like you where ever we go today all we arouse is suspicion, hatred and violence…’ Iqbal’s voice trailed off. As though the fight had gone out of him. Or as though he did not care to explain himself any more.

  ‘Tell me, Iqbal, what makes you any different? You have killed also. What makes you think what you have done is right?’

  ‘The man I killed was responsible for many deaths. He deserved to die.’

  ‘Really? Our brethren are being killed in the thousands in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Iraq and all these other places. What of them and the people who are killing them? Who has to decide who will live and who will die? What gives you the right to decide who deserves to die? At least we are fighting for a cause. You have just killed in cold blood for totally personal reasons.’

  ‘Omar, you bloody fool, are you blind? Can’t you see that you are fighting only because you have been conned into it? Those scheming Pakistani bastards, whose only aim is to destroy our country and the fabric of our society because their own has failed, are taking you for a ride. In the end, that is all there is to it.’

  There was a very long pause. Omar could hear Iqbal breathing heavily into the phone. Then he heard the sound of a train hooting in the distance. Omar’s mind registered the sound. He is at the railway station. I wonder which…?

  ‘I am going to kill you, you know that, don’t you, Omar?’ Iqbal spoke again breaking his chain of thought. ‘Just as I am going to kill all the others who had anything to do with these blasts. I want you to know, Omar. I am going back to the training camp…to where it all began. I am going to find the man who started it all and I am going to kill him.’

  For a long time after Iqbal had hung up Omar sat holding the phone. He had to find a way to get word to Maulana Fazlur Rehman. He had to warn them and get them to stop Iqbal before he did any more damage. Omar knew that Iqbal was heading straight for the training camp at Muzaffarabad. And that he couldn’t go there without going to Hari first. Omar got up and headed for his room. It took just ten minutes for him to throw some things together in a rucksack. Talking to his parents and getting them to understand that he had to leave immediately took much longer. Despite all this, at 1605 hours when the Jammu Tawi Shalimar Express pulled out from the Delhi railway station Omar was on it.

  The flight from Delhi was almost an hour late, but it got Iqbal to Srinagar just twenty minutes after Omar’s train left Delhi for Jammu. Omar did not know this of course. Just as Omar did not know that Iqbal had wanted him to hear the train in the background when he had spoken to him on the phone earlier that day.

  Bluff and counter-bluff. The deadly endgame had begun.

  0435 hours, 31 October 2005, Bahawalpur, Pakistan.

  Except for the occasional stray, the streets of Bahawalpur were deserted when Mohammed Sami and Tony Ahlawat entered the town. An early winter fog shrouded them in semi-darkness as the two commandos swiftly made their way towards the target area. Despite the poor light it did not take much time for the two men to correlate the layout of the town with the satellite pictures and the map they had used to prepare for the mission. Moving at a steady pace it took them about twenty minutes to reach the target. Casing out the area and confirming the suitability of the operational base took another ten. ‘That looks like a decent spot.’ Sami pointed to a flat-roofed house with an old, uninhabited look.

  ‘You check out the left flank,’ Tony said moving swiftly to the right part of the building. The two men met back at the same spot a few minutes later. ‘Let’s do it.’

  Sami pointed at a pile of debris and rusted junk lying on the roof. ‘Couldn’t be better for us.’ The two men moved to the side of the roof and peered out. The target was perfectly laid out in front of them.

  ‘Field of fire is good. Let’s set up.’

  By the time the call of the muezzin rang out for the Fajr prayer the two commandos were comfortably ensconced in suitable fire positions.

  ‘Get ready. The prayers are over,’ Sami hissed as people started emerging from the mosque. Most of them came out and started to leave. However a few diehard fanatics still hung about listening to the man who stood outside the entrance waving his hands and talking non-stop. ‘That guy haranguing the crowd, isn’t that him?’

  The man Sami was referring to was one of the three terrorists released by the Indian Government after the hijacking of the Indian Airlines flight from Kathmandu to Delhi. He had been handed over to the hijackers at Kandahar.

  ‘Definitely him,’ Tony Ahlawat agreed looking at him through his binoculars.

  ‘I think so too.’ Sami followed the target through the sniper scope of his rifle. The man was standin
g in the midst of a crowd as he gestured and postured grandly. The Maulana needed only the slightest opportunity and a one-man audience to start dispensing his pearls of wisdom. ‘The guy really loves the sound of his own voice, doesn’t he?’

  The Maulana’s penchant for discourse was a well-known habit. It had been duly noted by a host of intelligence agencies the world over, who made it their job to monitor such personalities. Accordingly, this fact had found due mention in the RAW file maintained on him. The file was always kept up to date. The RAW had been more than happy to pass it on to the Crisis Management Committee when they got the orders from the PM’s office. Today they were banking on this particular personality trait of the Maulana to cut short his stay on earth.

  Neither man wished to kill any more than was essentially required, but that morning they had a mixed bag of luck. The target was present and out in the open. That was the good part. But as their weapons zeroed in on the target there were almost fourteen people around the Maulana. It was unrealistic to hope for a clear shot with all those people clustered about him in such close proximity. That was the bad part. The good part was that one of the fourteen men present in the crowd around the Maulana was Maqbool Zargar. He was among the terrorists who had been released along with the Maulana by the Indian Government after the hijacking. Of course, that morning when the two Force 22 officers pulled the triggers of their weapons almost simultaneously they did not know they were going to get two for the price of one.

  Sami used the same model of sniper rifle used in Karachi by Dhankar. It was a standard American make, found in abundance in this neck of the woods; a legacy of the American support extended to the mujahideen in the fight against the Russians and of the ISI support for the jihadis in their fights in numerous battlefields the world over.

  Sami sighted carefully as he pulled the trigger of the rifle. He was hoping he would get lucky despite the crowd. Tony, the back-up, just in case his luck did not hold true that morning, held the GP-25 Grenade Launcher.

  The 40 mm GP-25 is a self-cocking, under-barrel grenade launcher that can be fitted on all types of full-sized Assault Kalashnikov rifles. It is a versatile weapon that always found huge favour with the Russian Spetsnaz. There was a fair sprinkling of them present in this region, most of them war booty captured from the Russians during their Afghan misadventure. They were capable of firing a grenade up to a range of 400 metres. They could fire two types of grenades, the VOG-25 fragmentation grenade and the VOG-25 fragmentation ‘frog’ grenade that would airburst at a height of 50 to 150 centimetres above the target and spray the target area below with metal shrapnel. Both types had a 14 second fuse. A trained soldier could fire a grenade every 4 to 6 seconds.

  Captain Tony Ahlawat was a lot more than just a trained soldier. Firing rapidly he got three grenades to fly through the early morning air in quick succession as Sami sent off a well-aimed bullet towards the target. The first grenade hit the target just a fraction of a second after the bullet.

  Overall, for the Force 22 officers, luck was just middling that morning. Though the sniper rifle did manage to strike the Maulana, because he was busy mingling with the crowd and constantly moving about, it hit him high in the upper right arm. It was nowhere near fatal. The Maulana felt the shock of the bullet strike home and stared at it in horror and disbelief. His hand moved instinctively towards the wound as the excruciating pain followed a microsecond later. His hand had just about managed to reach the wound, when the grenades came into play.

  The first grenade overshot the small knot of men and hit the wall of the madrassa behind them just as its 14-second fuse ran out. It was a simple fragmentation one. As it exploded some fragments sprayed into the small crowd, but did not account for anything much beyond some cuts and bruises.

  The second grenade landed bang on the head of the man closest to the Maulana. He literally lost his head as the grenade exploded. A satisfyingly large number of fragments also cut into the Maulana. Most of the fragments were quantitatively and qualitatively large enough to dispatch him to his maker although the one that won that honour was the fragment that lacerated his left eye.

  The third grenade fired by Tony was a ‘Frog’ or the aerial airburst variety. It detonated approximately sixty-five centimetres above the small cluster of men surrounding the Maulana. It accounted for three more dead and wounded almost everyone present. One of the three who died was the ill-fated Maqbool Zargar. The other two were misguided youth who had just arrived from a peaceful London suburb to further their education in the Maulana’s terror academy.

  The two Force 22 men dropped their weapons and raced down from the roof of the building they had chosen to launch the strike. Moving swiftly, but without showing any undue haste, they quickly escaped into the winding, narrow lanes. Their luck held good. Somewhere in a less-populated alley the thin latex gloves came off and found their way into their pockets. They had almost reached the outskirts of the town by the time the police arrived on the scene.

  ‘Shit! What a bloody mess.’ The Inspector commented when he saw the pile of bodies being sorted out by the ambulance people. ‘Who the hell could be behind this?’

  ‘Just about anybody, sir. Times are bad.’

  ‘True. Hmmm…’ The Inspector surveyed the scene with a critical eye. He was an old hand. Even so, by the time they managed to re-construct the crime scene and find the sniper rifle and the grenade launcher Sami and Tony were well clear of the town and heading back for the dune where their wheels awaited them.

  Given the number of terror groups that had a free run in Pakistan, it took a while before the police managed to get information of the other killings at Mari, Karachi and Multan and pieced together the fact that this was more than just a gangland killing by some rival group. The state police responded with the usual profusion of checkposts that broke out like a rash along the roads leading in and out of these towns.

  Sadly, the search operations lacked a discernible sense of direction.

  By the time the local police managed to lock down Bahawalpur, Sami and Tony were already well on their way out. ‘That is the one.’ Tony pointed to a cluster of dunes about 200 metres away. The two men altered course slightly to jog towards it. It took them about ten minutes to recover the motorcycle from the sand. Tony jumped on to the pillion seat as Sami gunned the engine.

  ‘Go easy, man. It shouldn’t take us more than two hours to get to Akbar.’ Akbar was the designated link-up point. It lay almost plumb south of Fort Abbas.

  ‘That should be about it,’ Sami said pointing in the direction they had to travel. ‘Hope Akbar is clear.’

  Two hours later the two men came to a halt at Akbar. Once there, they went to ground again as they waited for the safety of the night. It would have been madness to try and get across the border in daylight.

  ‘Wonder how long it will be before those two get here,’ Tony said as they settled down to wait.

  ‘They should be here soon. Either way we pull out at sunset.’

  ‘Yup…Wonder how the buggers are doing though…’

  Sami opened a packet of food. ‘Knowing them the poor fucker they went after will be six feet under by now.’

  Tony smiled gazing in the direction of faraway Multan.

  ‘Here…’ Sami tossed an absolutely unpalatable ready-to-eat at Tony. ‘Poison yourself.’ The two men munched the rations in silence, washing them down with a swig of water.

  ‘I’ll take the first watch,’ Sami said after they had eaten. ‘You get some sleep.’

  Tony nodded, ‘Sure, we’ll need to be on the ball tonight,’ he replied as he made himself comfortable in the sand.

  It was during Tony’s second sentry duty shift that the Pakistan Rangers patrol found them.

  0605 hours, 31 October 2005, Multan.

  Ibrahim Azhar, the man who had masterminded the hijacking of the Indian Airlines flight from Kathmandu to Delhi to get the leader of his terrorist cell freed from an Indian prison was a zealot of the highest order. He k
new beyond doubt that Allah had blessed him when he had set him on the path of jihad.

  He was a smart, if brutal and shortsighted leader. Though lacking strategic vision he was a sound tactical man and a firm believer in planning things meticulously. That is why the hijacking operation had gone like clockwork. That, and the fact that Salim’s hidden hand had been guiding him at all times. The hijacking had established him as a hero for dozens of misguided youth who flocked to join the jihad.

  ‘His one fault is that he follows an unvaried routine when he is home.’ During their briefing the Force 22 Intelligence Officer had read aloud from the file maintained on him by RAW. ‘These days he is home. We have a confirmed sighting of the man as of 2240 hours last night.’

  ‘In fact, that is the reason why we have picked him out from amongst the twenty of India’s Most Wanted,’ Anbu had added. ‘Immediately after the Fajr prayer the man heads to the park for a morning walk. He has been doing so all these months. No reason why he shouldn’t do it tomorrow.’

  Clearly Allah was not watching over Ibrahim Azhar that morning when he stepped out of the mosque and headed to the park behind the house for his morning constitutional. As usual, he was surrounded by four bodyguards who accompanied him as he proceeded at a leisurely pace.

  Pradeep Katoch and Vikram Tiwathia had reached the park well before sunrise. They now watched the small entourage coming up to the park and compared the face of the man in the centre of the group with the picture that they carried. ‘It’s him.’ Pradeep gave the thumbs up to Tiwathia – the designated commander for this mission.

  The two commandos turned their attention back to the group of men who had now entered the park and were walking briskly down the jogging track that ran along the sides of the park. They had concealed the souped-up Claymore mine in a cluster of rose bushes just ahead of the third tree along the jogging track where it waited patiently to put a fiery end to its target.