The pilot could see Faridkot in the distance on their right. The navigator couldn’t.
‘Approaching waypoint four,’ the navigator said. ‘On my mark head due north from the tri-junction and climb to twelve thousand one hundred feet. Maintain indicated airspeed at zero point six mach.’ Then he quickly assured himself that they were in position and gave the pilot the cue to begin.
The twin Rolls-Royce turbojets roared as the pilot released their shackles. The navigator was pushed back and down into his seat as the aircraft started climbing flat out and headed due north. Screaming across the Chaant salient at twelve thousand one hundred feet and heading to bisect the imaginary line between Khem Karan in India and Kasur in Pakistan, they heard a loud squeal from one of the instruments in the pressurised cabin, a radar warning receiver; they had been spotted by Pakistani ground radar.
The navigator started the count on the chronometer strapped to his left wrist. Then he confirmed their position one final time.
‘Throttle back to zero point five five Mach,’ he said, his voice as calm as if he were ordering a peg of whisky at the mess.
Eyes pressed to the prismatic eyepiece attached to his seat on the left, he then made minute adjustments before triggering shutter release in almost symphonic precision. The medium format camera mounted behind him gazed deep into Pakistani Punjab through a telephoto lens the size of a ten-year-old child, capturing a high-oblique photo every six seconds. The radar warning receiver continued emitting a squeal every ten seconds.
‘On my mark head east bearing eighty-two degrees, reduce altitude at five hundred feet per minute to level off at eighty feet.’
When the camera had expended the film canister, the navigator tore his eyes off the eyepiece, confirmed their position once again, and gave the pilot his cue.
The pilot put the aircraft into a turn back towards the border beyond Khem Karan and began reducing altitude at a leisurely pace.
‘Switch the damned thing off, will you?’ he said.
The navigator flicked a switch to silence the squealing.
The aircraft finally levelled off at eighty feet. They were now flying towards Pathankot. In the rear, the navigator loaded a fresh canister of film, adjusted the aperture and shutter in anticipation of the next target, and returned to charting their progress.
Beyond Pathankot they flew in Jammu’s direction, keeping low behind the Shivalik Hills wherever possible to hide from Pakistani radar. Often called the Cranberry, the aircraft manoeuvred well. With the navigator calling out upcoming features and evasive turns in advance, they avoided close calls. By the time they crossed the Chenab north of Jammu, the meandering river swollen with summer melt, the pilot had switched over to a prearranged radio frequency that would connect them to two MiG-21s patrolling further north. Serving as the Cranberry’s eyes, they would scan the area with their Sapfir radar for PAF patrols and screen the solitary reconnaissance aircraft once it re-entered Indian airspace. The Cranberry itself was unarmed.
‘Switching on radar warning receiver,’ the navigator noted.
Roughly north-west of Jammu, where three tributaries of the Chenab come together in a feature reminiscent of a traffic intersection, on the navigator’s mark the pilot opened the throttles completely, pulled back on the yoke as far as it went, and set the Cranberry on the steepest climb it would ever attempt.
‘We are over it,’ the navigator remarked in a clipped voice, noting that they had crossed the Line of Control. The two had flown together for more than half a decade, anticipated each other’s actions instinctively, and had grown tired of each other’s voice. Conversations tended to be laconic.
The flight plan took them along a route believed to have minimal presence of air defence assets, and their altitude put them effectively out of reach of any anti-aircraft guns that were not directly below. As with any plan based on intelligence estimates, there were plenty of caveats. The biggest one was that intelligence was, even in the best circumstances, “almost correct but not quite”. So the pilot remained on edge, nerves and sinews taut, ready to fling his precious aircraft out of reach of the Pakistani 57mm guns that would seek them out.
He was startled momentarily by the familiar squeal. It was too early into the climb, and premature discovery worsened odds that were already bleak. The target required them to venture deeper than they ever had, and if Sargodha scrambled interceptors so early, the Cranberry had no chance of taking photos and returning in one piece. While the pilot weighed the risks, the radio crackled to life.
‘That’s us, gentlemen,’ the lead MiG pilot said after communicating the code that identified him to the Cranberry. He had swept the area with radar, looking for PAF patrols. ‘All clear.’
‘Bastard could have warned us before doing that,’ the navigator remarked to the pilot, taking care to make sure he wasn’t transmitting on radio. The Cranberry continued on in silence. It wouldn’t transmit unless absolutely necessary.
The MiGs could only see a dozen or so miles around themselves with their radar, though, and any threats beyond that range were effectively invisible. Augmenting their efforts were ground radar stations further south along the border with Pakistan, additional pairs of eyes that routinely kept watch over the skies above PAF airbases. They would look out for the lone aircraft as it ventured deeper into hostile skies and would relay details of any interceptors they spotted.
At fifteen thousand feet the warning squealed again. It would continue intermittently for the next five minutes. This had to be the Pakistanis. The navigator reset his chronometer. Straining against the controls as the aircraft climbed under fourteen thousand pounds of thrust, the pilot levelled at twenty-five thousand feet nearly seven minutes after they began their climb. They were fifteen miles inside Pakistan Occupied Kashmir and headed northwards, covering a mile every seven seconds. It was too fast for the camera to function properly: The emulsion of the film, the shutter speed of the camera, and the aperture were all carefully calibrated based on tens of factors, and if the aircraft travelled too fast, the photos would be blurred and useless.
The navigator scanned his instruments in a frenzied manner now and marked their position far more frequently. If they overshot the desired position, then the aircraft would have to travel deeper into PoK to get the orientation right, and each extra yard in that direction would eventually demand its pound of flesh. Glancing at the chronometer, he realised that enough time had passed since the squeals had begun for Sargodha to have scrambled its interceptors, Mirage Vs that flew almost thrice as fast as they did and, unlike their thirty-year-old reconnaissance aircraft, carried air-to-air weapons.
‘Sargodha must be airborne by now,’ he spoke.
The pilot acknowledged with a grunt.
While the navigator was working the whiz wheel, the radio crackled. ‘Two interceptors headed your way from Sargodha. Amritsar estimates time to intercept at five minutes.’
He reset the chronometer and returned his attention to the wheel. The target demanded excruciating precision. Nestled as it was in the foothills of the Pir Panjal range, any photos would have to be taken either from near the Cranberry’s service ceiling, which would make it a sitting duck for interceptors, or from a lower altitude through a gap between two peaks. Their window of opportunity was narrow, and missing it would yield them high-resolution photos of sheep and shepherds on bare mountainside.
‘Deploy the dive brake and reduce airspeed to zero point five Mach on my mark. Mark,’ he said to the pilot.
Aware that the navigator had to get a number of things just right for the photographs to be useful, the pilot didn’t bother with an acknowledgement. He wouldn’t speak unless absolutely necessary. Instead he throttled back and deployed the dive brake, a flap on the wings that stood out and caused the Cranberry to rapidly bleed airspeed.
The navigator’s eyes were glued to the eyepiece as he sought the target, all the whi
le praying that he hadn’t cocked up their location. When he saw the edge of a mountain and man-made structures beyond it precisely where they were expected to be, he triggered the shutter release.
‘Three minutes,’ the lead MiG-21 pilot said over the radio, informing them of Amritsar’s estimation of the Mirage V’s time-to-intercept. ‘We are approaching your egress from the north.’
The chronometer confirmed the navigator’s instinctive fears: the interceptors were flying faster than anticipated.
‘Afterburners?’ the pilot remarked, having intuited the problem.
‘And more,’ the navigator added.
The Mirages were flying unusually light, that was the only reasonable explanation. What mattered to the pilot was the reason, which he could only speculate: were they flying light because they were carrying minimal fuel, because they weren’t carrying missiles, or because Indian intelligence had horribly underestimated the capabilities of the aircraft? His instinct was to dive and flee, but training and experience had taught him to tune out that voice and focus, instead, on evaluating their options. Those options were narrowing rapidly with each passing moment.
‘The LoC is sixteen miles bearing seventy-five degrees,’ the navigator said. ‘On my mark. Mark.’
There was no need to comment on altitude. The pilot knew the flight envelope of the aircraft better than anyone, possibly even the aircraft’s designers, and the navigator knew the envelope would have to be stretched if they were to survive.
His colleague opened the throttles wide, banked sharply to the right, and set the aircraft into a steep dive. The airspeed indicator lurched, then began spinning rapidly as the aircraft shuddered, fleeing for dear life. As the pilot wrestled with the controls to keep it on course, the navigator continued calculating their position and reading out the distance to the LoC in decrements of one mile.
The pilot held the dive for as long as he dared.
‘Levelling off. Brace,’ the pilot warned the navigator.
Then, breathing in short, forceful bursts and flexing his legs and abdomen to counter the G-forces that were about to cause blood to rush to his feet, the pilot pulled back on the yoke. The air rushing past the aircraft pressed down on the elevators. Airspeed kept climbing. Summoning every bit of physical strength, he pulled harder and harder, deflecting the elevators inch by inch in an exhausting contest of power and endurance until the aircraft bent to his will and began clawing its way out of the dive. That pressed him and the navigator forcefully down into their seats, and made his arms feel many times heavier than normal. His shoulders burned from keeping the arms on the yoke against the G-forces acting on him, and yet he pulled. Noticing a familiar fading and darkening of the periphery of his vision, he finally eased back on the yoke. The Cranberry was just above ten thousand feet and continuing to lose altitude, but not as quickly as earlier. The pilot was soaked. His eyes ached from the sweat that was pouring into them. Everything from his neck down to his abdomen felt like it was being stabbed with a hundred flaming needles, and he had the beginnings of what was certain to be a horrible headache. But he wasn’t done earning his pay, not quite yet.
‘Four miles,’ the navigator intoned in the manner of a surgeon requesting more suction during a minor appendectomy.
The radar warning receiver had clammed up sometime during the dive. Though he had heard the pilot’s warning before pulling out of the dive, distracted by the calculations involving two sets of aircraft, the navigator had been slow to take action and had, as a result, lost vision. He remained conscious, though, and recovered moments after the G-forces eased. Gritting his teeth against the pounding in his chest and right temple, the thirty-three-year-old father of two resumed where he had left off and carried on with the calculations.
‘They’ll try to force a landing,’ the pilot said.
To a demoralised military that was yet to reconcile itself to the brutal outcome of ‘71, a captured Indian reconnaissance aircraft would be a coup. That explained why an AIM-9 Sidewinder had not sneaked up on them yet. Shutting his mind to the possibility of capture, he scanned the instruments and plotted their progress. The aircraft buffeted as it crossed Mach 0.8 and approached critical speed, lurching frightfully like a drunk elephant.
‘Intercept in twenty seconds,’ the lead MiG-21 pilot informed them over radio.
The navigator worked it out instinctively: they would fall short of the LoC by half a mile. It was only a matter of time before a Mirage appeared over their starboard wing.
‘Are we buggered?’ the pilot asked.
‘We are,’ he answered.
They had altitude to trade for airspeed, but it would worsen stability as they crossed critical speed. The risk of losing control and crashing was higher than the pilot was comfortable with, but it paled against the assured oblivion promised by a Sidewinder or even the Mirage’s thirty-millimetre cannon. He didn’t even wish to include incarceration in a Pakistani prison in the list of possible outcomes. Trusting the aircraft and the mechanics at Palam who looked after it, he pushed forward on the yoke. After pitching down, the nose climbed for a moment before dropping precipitously. As it began pitching and shaking violently, he fought the controls, making quick and forceful adjustments to keep it flying towards friendly skies.
‘Ten seconds,’ the navigator called out. As if on cue, the radar warning receiver squealed again. That made no sense to either one of them because the Sidewinder did not need radar lock, it was a heat-seeker. Both thought it odd but pushed the fact into a compartment in their minds—something to be pondered over if they survived—and carried on.
The pilot had run out of courage to dive further, and it wasn’t likely to help much anyway if the aircraft lost its control surfaces. Four seconds. Thirty-millimetre tracer rounds should have been fired across their bow by now, to threaten them into turning back and landing in hostile territory. There were advanced airfields some distance into PoK, and while the aircraft would probably never fly again after landing at one of those, the PAF wouldn’t care.
Three seconds. Surely the interceptors were on their six and at a higher altitude, and it was only a question of when the trigger would be pulled. With the Cranberry bucking wildly, he was under no illusions about their ability to manoeuvre. They were sitting ducks at seven hundred miles an hour.
Two seconds. He craned his neck, trying to get a visual on the aircraft behind him. The Cranberry’s canopy wasn’t the largest, though, and he saw nothing.
One second. What the hell were they waiting for? Twenty seconds had elapsed, yet they continued hurtling forwards in some semblance of control towards familiar ground. The LoC was crossed half a second later.
‘Bogies have disengaged. Suggest you slow down before the aircraft disintegrates,’ the lead MiG-21 pilot advised.
While the pilot of the Cranberry struggled through pain and exhaustion to keep the aircraft stable as it slowed below critical speed, the navigator wracked his brains to figure out the reason for the final squeal.
‘Why would they light us up with radar at the last moment?’ he finally asked the pilot.
‘Must have been the MiGs threatening the Pakistanis with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Sidewinders don’t need radar lock,’ the pilot replied.
The navigator agreed. The interceptors had been at most a mile behind the Cranberry, and had no reason to use their radar.
‘They had us in missile range for nearly half a minute,’ the navigator ventured. ‘What happened?’
‘Either they didn’t get authorisation in time to shoot us down or...’ the pilot replied.
‘Or?’
‘Or they were scrambled into the air before missiles could be loaded. Aircraft don’t sit around on air bases with a full complement of weapons loaded, do they?’
The navigator grunted. Weapons were usually stored separately on base and loaded onto aircraft just before they set of
f on missions. It appeared they had caught the Pakistanis off guard that day, and the Mirages had been scrambled without missiles.
‘They would have had a few hundred rounds for those cannons, though,’ the navigator replied.
The pilot chuckled nervously. ‘Thank god for the MiGs and their radars.’
The last time the pilot had experienced such complete and utter fatigue, physical and mental, he was a flying cadet who had pissed off the wrong people and was paying for it over the course of an unending fortnight.
He had flown forty-seven reconnaissance missions for the ARC before this one, and each time he had walked the film canisters to the development area himself. There was a sense of quiet satisfaction and even joy in seeing the job done properly. And besides, the chances of ground staff messing the delicate film up and requiring him to repeat a mission were lower that way.
This time however, he said, ‘Have the ground staff collect the canisters and take them to development.’
‘I’ll carry them myself,’ the navigator replied. ‘We have to go next door for the debrief anyway.’
The pilot sighed. He wanted to find a warm bed and spend the next week lying in it. But the debrief couldn’t be avoided. His bed would have to wait. Perhaps it was time to walk into an Air India office, and give fair consideration to the positive effect its “milk runs” had on a reconnaissance pilot’s life expectancy. The hair-raising episodes would be missed—he would have to be utterly dishonest to claim otherwise, even to himself. But there wasn’t much hair left on his scalp these days anyway.
***
The imagery analysis landed on Mishra’s desk on Wednesday morning. Blown up to quarter imperial size, the high-oblique photos were accompanied by maps marked with each target’s approximate location and a note detailing the analyst’s conclusions. A non-trivial amount of mathematics, primarily trigonometry, had gone into estimating the dimensions of major structures in each photo. Mishra took the photos and maps and visited Almeida. The thick green curtains were drawn and the office of the Chief of the Europe section was dark and musty. The table lamp threw warm yellow light on Almeida’s desk. The files piled around it cast long shadows on the walls. Almeida himself sat deep in his chair, sunken like his cheeks. The beard looked patchy. Or perhaps it was just the light, Mishra thought.
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