On the way back, Papa had the NCO stop at the airport. Fifteen minutes later, they were on their way to Risalpur. He had booked tickets for Omar and Haniya on a PIA flight to London that departed in ten hours.
‘What’s the rush?’ Omar asked.
‘Not here!’ the old man exclaimed. ‘I’ll tell you when we get home.’
This returned Omar back into the state of nervousness that he had wallowed in before stepping into the Garrison Officers’ Mess. His stomach grumbled, suddenly regretting the extra helping of Nihari and Naan. More than once he thought of asking the NCO to pull over next to a field but decided, each time, to hold on for a few more miles.
When they finally reached home, he rushed to the toilet and let his bowels evacuate over five minutes of bliss. When he stepped out he saw Haniya hurriedly packing her bags. Papa and Ammi were in the study, arguing before that portrait of Zia.
‘Why do we have to leave today?’ Omar asked, deliberately interrupting them.
Ammi whirled around to face him, a curious mix of rage and sorrow in her eyes.
‘We expect an escalation of...lawlessness over the next few days,’ Papa remarked in a grim tone. ‘Bhutto is unlikely to contain it. If it spreads, the two of you may find yourselves trapped here. It’s best that you leave today.’
‘Will you be safe?’ Omar asked, regretting the question a moment later when the Brigadier narrowed his eyes and looked the upstart up and down.
His manner made it clear that he wouldn’t answer the stupid question. The decision made when he booked their tickets was final, and dissent would not be brooked. Omar took heed and trudged to the guest room to pack his belongings. The documents Papa had given him—copies of WAPDA plans and transmission and distribution figures—went into his suitcase first and were soon buried under fresh and soiled clothes. He was relieved that the reason for the urgency wasn’t him personally, but felt ill at the thought of another dash down the Grand Trunk with the NCO at the wheel.
***
Their flight landed at Heathrow to news of a coup in Pakistan. Bhutto was under arrest in Islamabad, and General Zia-ul-Haq was in charge. Omar recalled the vacant, emotionless eyes he had seen in the portrait and shuddered at the thought of such a man wielding absolute power after having deposed the nastiest politician of his era. A few moments later, the realisation that Bhutto was finished sunk in. It was the same reprehensible Bhutto who had let fanatics butcher his own countrymen—including his mother and grandfather—for months and then, after their passions had burned out, had passed the execrable Second Amendment. Omar smiled. History was about to wipe away a revolting streak of faeces.
After they reached home, Haniya crashed into bed. Worried about her parents’ safety after Papa had practically scared them half to death with graphic talk of disorder spiralling out of control, she had spent the entirety of the flight awake while Omar slept contentedly after they landed at Tehran for a stopover. News of the coup was a relief. Obviously, Papa had known about it the day before. That meant he was on the right side of it and would be safe.
While she slept, Omar unpacked. Retrieving the documents from the bottom of his suitcase, he exited the flat as quietly as he could and made a phone call from a public phone down the street. An hour later, in a corner of Regent’s Park away from the touristy bits, he handed them over to Nissa.
‘I hope your father-in-law wasn’t in the pro-Bhutto faction,’ she said while skimming through their contents. ‘That faction will be purged.’
That annoyed Omar. Nissa had no business taunting Papa that way.
‘He knew of the coup in advance, and got us out of the country before it took place,’ he replied hotly.
Nissa’s eyes widened a bit, but the moment passed quickly.
‘Congratulations,’ she said. ‘Bhutto’s days are numbered.’
Omar’s eyebrows knotted. There was more to that statement than a mere political setback.
‘He won’t survive,’ she answered the unsaid question. She looked up at him and smiled. ‘Thank you for this. We’ll keep in touch.’
Walking back to his flat, Omar felt as light as a feather. Despite having travelled for almost twenty-four hours, there wasn’t a hint of fatigue. But as he stepped back into the flat and slipped into bed, cosying up against Haniya’s warm, soft body, he felt unsure.
Now what, he wondered.
EIGHT
Unlike the senior clerk at Karachi Electric who had happily delivered hundreds of relevant and not-so-relevant documents in return for a few cases of Black Label and a shopping bag containing a wad of greenbacks, Omar’s father-in-law and his former colleague at WAPDA showed considerable discretion. They only gave Omar the information that he claimed was essential to his research on predicting economic parameters using electricity consumption as a surrogate. Not a scrap of paper more. The experience of wading through the mountain of Karachi papers came in handy and Sablok and Arora were able, within a week of receiving the WAPDA papers, to identify fourteen general locations worth investigating.
‘Fourteen is too many,’ Arora remarked. ‘Mishra might laugh us out of his office if we asked him to have fourteen sites investigated.’
Sablok chuckled. ‘He won’t laugh us out. If he’s in a good mood he’ll smile, tell us he’ll consider it, and forget all about our request. I do agree: fourteen is too many. We must filter them. At Trombay Dr Amin had provided me guidelines that are followed when deciding where to build nuclear plants. We could group the sites into three based on those.’
When the time came to apply Dr Amin’s siting criteria, Arora retrieved a fat file of pre-independence documents from the Archives.
‘These should have been transferred to the Geological Survey of Pakistan in 1947,’ he explained. ‘But a certain Case Officer rushed to the Calcutta headquarters of the Geological Survey of India a few days before they were supposed to be dispatched. He bribed the guards with twenty rupees and spent three nights in the building identifying useful documents and placing them, entirely by mistake of course, in the pile of documents that were destined to remain in the Dominion of India. He hit a few other departments in a similar fashion before time ran out. The Archives are full of mistakes like this made by that enterprising officer of the Bureau, Captain.’
‘If they were stolen—’
‘Misplaced,’ Arora corrected him.
‘Why did the Bureau give them up when the Wing was formed?’
‘The Bureau never knew they existed, Captain. The Case Officer who misplaced them brought them over to the Wing with him.’
‘Then their existence cannot be common knowledge, either in the Bureau or in the Wing. How did you find out about them? Were you that Case Officer?’
Arora laughed heartily, his belly shaking for the better part of a minute.
‘No. I found out because that Case Officer told me,’ Arora replied when the convulsions had died down.
‘Friend of yours?’
‘In a manner of speaking. He happens to head our section today,’ Arora replied.
The documents were dense with information on various aspects of Pakistan’s geology surveyed between 1852 and 1947. The meticulous investigations and detailed reports on numerous earthquakes from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries proved invaluable, as did the notes on each region’s geology, helping them whittle the list of highly probable locations to four: three on the plains of Punjab that fulfilled every requirement, and a marginal at the foothills of the Pir Panjal range in the northern part of Punjab that was prone to minor quakes. Arora wanted to eliminate the last one, but Sablok recalled Dr Amin’s words about engineering measures to mitigate minor risks, and convinced him to leave it on the list. The remainder were classified as either “Less Probable” or “Very Unlikely”. Once the classification was done, Arora drafted a memo summarising their analysis.
On the fifth of
July, a Sunday, they were invited to brief the two Section Chiefs. To Sablok’s great disappointment, Almeida proposed a meeting in his office at Main, where all he kept was some gin, instead of at his flat where he kept much more. At a little after 8 a.m., Sablok began walking them through the assumptions. The memo remained in Arora’s briefcase for now.
‘Captain, how did you arrive at these conclusions? Please explain to me as if I were a child,’ Almeida insisted.
Sablok took a minute to compose his thoughts.
‘A centrifuge facility needs two inputs in great quantities: electricity and water,’ he began. ‘We received information from the two major power companies in Pakistan—Karachi Electric and WAPDA. Both sections worked together to—’
‘Never mind the vote of thanks, young man. Get to the point,’ Mishra said, cutting him off. It had taken a lot of effort to reach that stage, and he was getting impatient going over familiar ground.
‘An electricity network has transmission substations and distribution substations. A transmission substation provides power to multiple distribution substations, and each one of them, in turn, provides electricity to many consumers. To use an analogy everyone here can relate to, the regional offices provide cases of booze to alcohol shops who then provide bottles to alcoholics.’ Seeing Mishra glower, Sablok added, ‘Not insinuating anything, sir.’
That was when Arora stepped in.
‘We looked at each transmission substation’s electricity reading over the past five years. Those that had spiked abruptly in the last two years were shortlisted. Then we looked at the distribution substations fed by each of the shortlisted ones. To continue the Captain’s analogy, sirs, we were looking for a legendary drunk’s location. So first we checked the regional offices’ records—’
‘What kind of children do you know, Arora? Never mind. I am sure each one of us gets it. Please skip the metaphor and move on,’ Almeida remarked.
‘We found fourteen substations that showed spikes that fall between the lower and upper ranges of our estimate.’
‘How did you determine how much electricity a centrifuge facility would consume?’ Almeida asked. It had been months since Sablok’s visit to BARC, and he had forgotten about it.
‘The scientists at Trombay did, sir. The detailed calculation—’
‘No need for that. I just needed to make sure that the two of you had not cooked something up on your own. If actual experts have opined on the range then I have no questions about the calculations. Please proceed.’
‘So, we had fourteen across Pakistan. At Trombay, we also consulted a senior engineer who told us about certain geological criteria that could make a location unsuitable. Using those criteria—availability of water, the incidence of earthquakes, how sandy the soil is, et cetera—we were able to narrow the list to four.’
Arora then told them about the four probables. It took the two veterans remarkably little time to formulate questions aimed at discrediting the analysis, and Sablok and Arora found themselves defending their thesis for more than an hour.
‘What is to prevent the Pakistanis from diverting electricity from some towns or areas to supply it to this facility?’ Mishra asked.
‘There are limits to how far electricity can be transmitted from a distribution substation, sir. The energy losses are tremendous beyond a certain distance. Long-range transmission invariably happens, for that reason, at high voltages over the transmission network,’ Sablok replied.
‘No, Captain, that’s not what I meant. To use your...interesting analogy, what is to prevent the booze shop from cutting sales to ten existing customers to divert those bottles to the legendary drunkard? That sort of a redistribution wouldn’t cause a spike, would it?’
‘It wouldn’t,’ Sablok conceded. ‘But it would lead to severe resentment among those deprived of electricity, and that would show up in the reports we receive from Residents each month.’
Mishra wasn’t willing to give up easily.
‘Well, suppose they tapped six or eight different distribution substations and diverted electricity to the centrifuges for three hours from each. That’s not a lot of time. I’m sure Bhutto—he was in charge when this was planned—I’m sure he wouldn’t care if some Karachi and Hyderabad neighbourhoods went without power for a few hours each day. After all, he was prepared to eat grass...’
‘I am sure Zia is testing Bhutto’s ability to digest grass these days,’ Almeida quipped, drawing hearty laughter from Mishra.
Sablok waited for it to die down.
‘To be able to tap seven-eight distribution substations would mean that the centrifuge facility was located in an urban area. The chances of that are very low. Would you build a top-secret nuclear weapons facility on the outskirts of Delhi or Bombay, sir?’
‘Suppose I built the facility two hundred kilometres away from Delhi but drew power from Delhi’s distribution substations...’
‘Sir, the distribution network in Pakistan operates at thirty-three thousand volts. The transmission network operates at five lakh volts. Pulling the quantity of electricity needed for the centrifuge plant from the distribution network would mean technical losses that are two hundred and twenty-five times greater than if they just built a transmission substation for the centrifuge facility and connected it to the grid,’ Sablok explained.
‘And would Bhutto have given a damn about it?’ Almeida asked.
‘Pakistan suffers from electricity shortages just as we do, sir. A plan that wastes so much of a scarce resource wouldn’t get approved,’ Arora replied with more confidence than he really felt.
‘The bigger problem is heat, sir. If the losses are two hundred and twenty five times greater, that means the cables are going to heat up proportionately. So you will have cables failing—the insulation will melt away and then you’ll have a short-circuit. Would you depend on such a risky power supply scheme to power the most critical strategic asset your nation has, sir?’
Mishra shook his head. ‘It was just a hypothetical, Captain,’ he replied. ‘What is the source for all these figures and this risk assessment?’
‘We consulted the electrical engineering faculty at IIT Delhi,’ Arora answered for him. ‘They assured us that such a scenario—cloaking a large consumer by stealing from many distribution substations—was not feasible.’
‘What if they’ve built a power station specifically for this centrifuge plant? That won’t require them to divert power from anywhere else, would it?’
‘That is a possibility, sir,’ Arora replied.
‘Of course it’s a possibility. If I could raise it after a short discussion I’m sure Bhutto’s engineers have thought it through. Perhaps they’ve even implemented it,’ Mishra said.
‘We asked the faculty at IIT, sir. Building a power plant dedicated to this facility is definitely one of the possibilities. But that would take much longer than connecting it to the transmission network. Assuming the Pakistanis started planning to build the power plant when Khan fled to Pakistan, they’re unlikely to have it running for another few years.’
‘Are you certain?’ Mishra asked.
‘We are,’ Arora lied.
‘Perhaps we are all barking up the wrong tree,’ Almeida suggested.
‘Perhaps we are, sir. But this is the only approach we have. Everyone here knows the efforts that have gone into finding these four locations. They deserve to be investigated. After all, if we don’t bark and check, we won’t know if it is the wrong tree or not,’ Arora forcefully remarked.
Mishra held up his hands. ‘Alright, you’ve convinced me. Do you have exact locations?’ he asked.
‘We have exact addresses of the substations, sir, but the facility could be many miles from any one of those.’
‘Give me the details. We’ll find them if they’re there,’ Mishra said, bringing the operative part of the meeting to an abrupt end.
***
At first light on a cloudy Tuesday, while Delhi slumbered, an English Electric Canberra the colour of winter haze took to the skies from Palam.
‘Visibility is bound to be excellent where it matters, gentlemen,’ their meteorology officer had assured them.
They punched through the clouds a few seconds after take-off.
‘Level turn at ten thousand feet to waypoint one coming up in fifteen seconds,’ the navigator spoke into his microphone.
He sat in a separate compartment behind the pilot, monitoring seven dials in a single, repeating movement of the eyes that had become second nature over years. Occasionally he paused to consult the whiz wheel—a slide rule of sorts that helped calculate fuel burn, ground speed, wind correction and a host of other flight parameters—and marked the progress of the aircraft on one of the aeronautical charts spread before him on the navigator’s desk. If the conditions required it, he would read out corrections for the pilot to make.
The pilot acknowledged his instructions and executed them, setting the aircraft on a course for Faridkot in Punjab.
As they flew over Hisar, the navigator confirmed their position. The previous evening, after their commander had briefed them about the mission, the pilot and the navigator had spent four hours planning every aspect. The entire flight plan was then marked in painful detail on the charts the navigator now referred to. There were twenty-eight waypoints in all. The navigator had marked a time estimate against each one. He checked the chronometer on his left hand and, after confirming that they were within three seconds of their planned arrival at Hisar, he marked their precise arrival on it.
‘Begin descent on my mark and level off at one hundred feet,’ the navigator said.
Even though he knew the flight plan down to every second, the pilot acknowledged the message and reduced altitude in the calm manner of an aircraft coming in for landing before levelling off at one hundred feet. He didn’t bother to inform the navigator that they had levelled off. The navigator had all the instruments he needed for figuring that out himself. The pilot’s primary job was to fly the plane, and his attention was focused on flying around settlements in India’s bread basket and dodging the occasional tree.
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