Let Bhutto Eat Grass 2

by Shaunak Agarkhedkar

  ‘Are cities outside Pakistan as large as Rawalpindi, Chacha?’ he once asked Baig, who had often bluffed about having visited friends in London.

  In response, Baig cultivated his awed wonder, telling him about the Queen’s palaces and the wealth of the city, things that he had heard when Elizabeth the Second visited India in ‘61.

  ‘Are the people friendly?’

  It was late in the evening, and they sat on the hardware store’s roof eating peanuts, waiting for Akmal Senior to wind up for the day. The bottle of whisky that Baig had brought along waited impatiently.

  ‘The men are...reserved. But the ladies, oh!’ Baig replied, a glint in his eyes. ‘One of my friends married an angrez mem after moving to London.’

  For the next fifteen minutes, he spun a yarn full of innuendo, titillating the youngster with the odd allusion to his own fictitious escapades during an alleged two-month stay on the banks of the Thames. By the time the exhausted father locked up, the son was hooked. Faisal Baig would spend the next few weeks reeling him in with stories of adventure abroad. Highlighting the differences between factories “there” and “here”, Baig subtly elicited details about the facility the youngster worked in. He was careful to hold back, and never gave the impression of being interested. Always the fond chacha or uncle, patiently listening to his nephew’s tall tales even though he was bored with them. Baig’s stories about the land of the Gora sahibs were beginning to dry up when Feroze provided details about security precautions at the “factory”, and let slip, in a moment of braggadocio, that it wasn’t really a factory as everyone believed.

  ‘Then what is it, a Kanjar Khana?’ Baig asked, chortling in the manner of someone faced with the absurd.

  That irked the young man’s ego.

  ‘We are making big bombs there, chacha,’ he responded forcefully. ‘Really big bombs. Have you even heard of nuclear? These bombs can flatten entire cities. Only America and Russia have them. And now Pakistan will have them too. Because of us. All of us working in that place you call a Kanjar Khana...’

  He continued for nearly five minutes. Baig listened carefully as some of his suspicions were confirmed and others were contradicted. His face, however, registered suitable awe and approval of the young man’s efforts.

  ‘If I had known earlier that you worked in nuclear,’ he said later, ‘it would have been so much easier.’

  ‘What would have been easier?’

  ‘Getting you to London! Just like we face an evil neighbour, they too are facing those godless communists. Nuclear is their only hope, but they need skilled people, good people, pure people to help them. Why, just the other week, a friend of mine wrote about it to me in a letter...he works in nuclear just south of London...the same person who is married to an Angrez. Oh! Why didn’t you tell me earlier, Feroze? And they pay so well...thousands of Pounds Sterling.’

  The young man first pleaded, then cursed himself for not opening up earlier, and finally wondered if the opportunity was out of his grasp now. After much persuasion, Baig agreed to write to his friend on Feroze’s behalf.

  ‘They may need you to prove your knowledge of nuclear,’ he warned. ‘Are you prepared?’

  ‘I could ask my superiors to provide a note certifying my knowledge,’ Feroze replied with all the innocence of an overawed child.

  ‘Kanjar!’ Baig snapped at him, calling him a whore. ‘If you tell your superiors that you are looking for a job in London, would they help you or make trouble for you?’

  Feroze made to reply but stopped short of arguing.

  ‘Why would they trouble me?’ he asked instead.

  Baig took a deep breath, then spoke in a tone full of irritated patience, ‘isn’t it hard to find talented youngsters in Pakistan? And you already have so much knowledge.’ He paused for a few moments, then continued, ‘You do have knowledge, don’t you? You aren’t making a fool of your chacha by telling him tall tales, are you?’

  ‘No, no chacha, why would I do that to you? I really know all that,’ Feroze quickly replied, desperate to win back the old man’s confidence.

  ‘If you know all that then why would any boss let you go? If he does, won’t he have to find someone else who knows all you know and can do everything that you do? And what if the superior wanted that job in England for himself?’ Baig asked, planting and nurturing paranoia in a fertile mind.

  A couple of days later Baig visited Islamabad. For personal work, he told his friends with a wink. It led some to conclude that he was visiting a mistress, others to assume it was a whore, and one middle-aged man to declare emphatically, as if from personal experience, that it was probably both.

  After wandering through F-8 Markaz and buying a few essentials, Baig slipped into a grocery store and stepped into a small storeroom at the back. Using the typewriter placed on a table barely large enough for it, he slowly typed everything he had found out about the facility followed by thoughts about the asset he had cultivated. He hated this part of the job—the writing. When he was done, he burned the pages he had just typed. Then he left the shop with a bagful of dry groceries that the grocer handed him on the way out. A few minutes later the grocer stepped into the storeroom himself and removed the polymer tape ribbon from the typewriter, replacing it and hiding the expended one in his own pocket.

  In the evening, the grocer slipped the ribbon into the grocery bag of another customer. By nightfall it found its way to the Resident.

  Around the time the grocer was closing shop, Baig visited one of the galis in an older, poorer part of Islamabad. He had been there on a few occasions earlier when he had found himself flush with operational funds. An NCO at his dhaba had mentioned the address with a wink. There was this woman he had been with who, tiring of the streets of Karachi, had, a few years earlier, set up in the capital. Baig would visit her twice, staying for hours each time. Then he would return to his hotel and stay there till a chalk-mark on a car parked opposite his modest hotel told him it was time to return to Kahuta after collecting an envelope from a drop-box.

  ***

  ‘The ship of the Indian state is a magnificent, lumbering vessel,’ Mishra’s boss in the Bureau had once said to him over rum and peanuts, ‘that is piloted, more often than not, by demagogues who know nothing of navigation. The bureaucrat overcomes this by drowning them in details. But we owe our assets a tiny modicum of safety, a sliver of a chance. We must take the other path and hide all specifics.’

  Even though those words hadn’t convinced Mishra to read Plato, they had left their mark. And so, at the scheduled hour, Mishra sat in the anteroom outside the Prime Minister’s cabin, two soundproof walls separating him from where his superiors sat explaining Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme to the top man himself. Unlike the other occupants of the waiting room—Secretaries and Under Secretaries of some ministry or the other, who sat cradling fat files secured with red tape—Mishra carried a blank writing pad and a two-rupee fountain pen, having left all documents about the Kahuta operation back in his safe at Main.

  His job that afternoon was to answer questions that his superiors couldn’t, and he waited for a note to be sent out with a question for him. The briefing was expected to take between an hour and two, and he had spent an entire weekend reading each relevant document, right from the PIA cable that Sablok had flagged in ‘74, to the Islamabad Resident’s latest report. Orders had already been cabled in response to the last document, but money to execute those orders was in short supply because the Prime Minister had begun scrutinising and rejecting requests. For five months virtually no funds had been sanctioned and the Wing’s black budget was already in the red. The meeting would indicate how badly the Indian state wished to prevent Pakistan from arming itself, and until Mishra was convinced of their resolve, he wouldn’t yield the brass tacks.

  Forty minutes after his boss and the Director had stepped into the sanctum of the Indian executive, Mish
ra sat in his boss’s car and the two set off for Main.

  ‘We have conditional approval to plan,’ his boss told him while steering the car out of the parking and east onto Rajpath. ‘I will set up meetings for you at the Sena and Vayu Bhavans for gauging their capabilities and the options they afford us. As for in-country sabotage, I suspect you have already instructed the Resident to begin planning. Carry on.’

  ‘And what about funds, sir? How weighty a chequebook do I carry for this?’ Mishra asked.

  ‘Ah! That’s the conditional part of the approval. Funds will not be sanctioned before he orders the execution of any one of the plans that we provide.’

  Mishra baulked at the timidity and suspicion such restraints demonstrated. Funds were the lifeblood of any operation. He couldn’t promise a heavenly fortune and get work done without delivering a taste of it first.

  ‘Idealists are screw-ups, sir. Capable assets cost money. Planning an operation deep inside hostile territory without spending any funds or even knowing how much money is available is a ridiculous way to fight one’s mortal enemy, sir.’

  ‘That’s the problem with people like us, Mishra. We know they’re the enemy. Not everyone shares that sentiment. For some, this is all just a big family misunderstanding that began on the 16th of August 1946, and people like us continue to fan it.’

  ‘I’m sure the olive greens would love to hear this although, given that their institutional memory goes back to ‘62, they probably already know how I feel,’ Mishra remarked, drawing a sardonic grin from the Division Head.

  ‘They’ll tell you to do what they’ve always done: bash on regardless.’

  ***

  Mishra had a decade on the Air Commodore who met him on behalf of the top man in sky blue, but it might as well have been a lifetime. Where Mishra’s features could best be described as amorphous, a virtue in his profession, the fighter pilot who answered to the curious call sign “Marbles” was angular and clean-cut. He also had a good six inches or so on the spy-master, a difference further exaggerated by his footwear and the peaked cap he wore.

  In a small room deep within the bowels of Air HQ, Mishra began by asking about the IAF’s strategic air interdiction capabilities.

  ‘That depends on the direction in which you ask us to fly, Mr Mishra,’ Marbles said.

  ‘The west, obviously. Somewhere north-west of Mirpur,’ Mishra replied. Marbles stepped out of the room to instruct the Sergeant standing guard outside. The Sergeant returned a minute later with a large map of the western sector, which Marbles spread out on the table.

  When Mishra and he were alone once more, Marbles spoke, ‘I cannot answer the question without more information, sir. So would you please mark or show on this map the general area, if not the specific target? After all, NW of Mirpur can mean anything from Murree to Peshawar.’

  Mishra reminded him of the sensitive nature of the discussion. Marbles nodded, scowling. He was annoyed at being patronised.

  ‘Believe it or not, sir, we do know a thing or two about security in this building,’ he replied, his tone cold as ice.

  The strain of running a section with practically no money was beginning to show. Mishra had spent a couple of weeks almost entirely at Main, with an hour of shut eye here and there his only escape from deciding which of his children may survive and which must starve to death.

  ‘Then you will appreciate the imperative of keeping our discussion to yourself. This is all very preliminary; once we have determined that interdiction is possible, broader consultations may be needed.’ After that Mishra placed his right index finger, by now twisted at the second joint permanently, on a point on the map about twenty miles east of Islamabad. The pilot stared, first at the finger, then at the map. Using a ruler he brought out from a drawer, he estimated distances to the international border and the Line of Control along different bearings. When his gaze returned to Mishra’s finger, which was now resting at the edge of the map, Mishra quickly pulled his hand back and rested it out of sight on his own lap.

  ‘How did you break it?’ Marbles asked in a casual manner while continuing to measure distances.

  ‘Arthritis. Well? Can it be done?’

  ‘It won’t be a walk in the park, that’s for sure.’

  ‘But is it doable?’ Mishra pressed.

  ‘Everything is doable, sir. It is merely a question of the cost we are willing to pay for it. We do have the capability, but it will be hairy.’

  Mishra smiled for the first time in days.

  ‘Thank you. If you had to undertake such a mission yourself, what kind of aircraft would you deploy?’ he asked.

  ‘We are getting ahead of ourselves. Let me make it clear that when I say we have the capability, I am speaking in very narrow terms: we have aircraft with suitable endurance, and pilots with appropriate skills. But that is not the Alpha and Omega of a mission. We haven’t accounted for other variables: the disposition of enemy air defences, whether their interceptors are on alert, average scramble times for them, and so on. These can easily degrade our own ability to hit the target and fly back in good order. Then there is the target itself: how large is it, is it fortified, how dispersed is it, is it isolated or part of urban clutter?’ He paused for effect. ‘Do you see the complexities involved now? Unless we know the answers to most of these questions, and I’m sure you know much more than you’re letting on, sir, we cannot begin to plan for it.’

  ‘So where do we start?’ Mishra asked. For once, he would have liked a simple answer, an immediate and apparent plan that could be put up for sanction post-haste. But there were no clear-cut solutions in this job, there never had been. Everything was murky and formless.

  ‘We can begin with details about the target, sir.’

  ***

  A week later, Baig had set up four drop-boxes around Kahuta. On his way back from Islamabad, he had waved on two buses and a jeep to hitch a ride in a truck. The driver told him that he delivered an assortment of dry goods to shops in towns and villages between Lahore and Peshawar. They had hit it off in a matter of a few miles. Halfway to the destination, Baig embarked on a profanity-laden rant about Pakistan Post who had, he claimed, misplaced three of his letters to his banker in Islamabad.

  ‘I had to spend hundreds of rupees to correct the mistake the bank made,’ he added. ‘And I had to travel to Islamabad and waste a week!’ He paused, then grinned slightly. ‘Well, to be honest, I didn’t exactly waste it, you know.’

  The inflection conveyed Baig’s prurient sentiments perfectly and the truck driver, like many nomads deprived of companionship, felt more than a tinge of jealousy.

  ‘A city woman, huh?’ the driver asked.

  Baig nodded.

  ‘I know city women. They smell like Lux,’ the truck driver said wistfully. ‘Their clothes, oh! They dazzle the eyes with brilliance. And the softness of their bodies.’ Then he paused and shook his head before adding, ‘I can’t afford them anymore. Not enough money to be made driving a truck. And everything has become so much more expensive. Even women.’

  Baig never failed to marvel at the ability of people to open up to complete strangers while maintaining pretences with those they knew. He had seen this often and had used it quite a few times to elicit intelligence. The driver ended on a doleful note, euphemistically suggesting that his fare was strictly rural nowadays.

  ‘Perhaps we could help each other,’ Baig replied. ‘It is critical for me that my business letters reach Islamabad. Those Kanjars at the Post Office cannot be trusted.’ At this, the driver nodded sagely. ‘If you carried my letters back to Islamabad and brought me letters from my associates, then I would gladly pay you for the trouble. A little extra cash doesn’t hurt, does it?’ Another nod.

  ‘How much money?’

  ‘Enough to afford city fare every week,’ Baig replied. ‘And I’ll even give you an address in Islamabad...the sof
test skin...and she owes me many favours, so...’

  By the time he alighted at the market in Kahuta, a four-mile detour for the driver from the Grand Trunk, he had found himself a private courier who would make weekly visits.

  ***

  The first letter the truck driver carried to a shop in Islamabad a week later informed the Resident of the location of the four drop-boxes, as well as how frequently Baig would service each one. It took the Resident an hour to work out the exact details woven as allusions to what appeared, at first glance, to be a business transaction. A postcard was dispatched from a village near Peshawar the next day, addressed to Sarfaraz Minhas, care of a small shop in a village outside Kahuta. Less than a week later, Minhas retrieved an envelope from beneath the flooring of an abandoned hut that now served as shelter from sun and rain. Befriending shepherds in his village, he began taking long walks with them early in the morning, traversing green hills to the north of Kahuta where their sheep grazed. Noticing that they avoided one particular area, he asked if no grass grew on those slopes.

  ‘It does,’ one of his companions, a teenager with large, chipped front teeth, replied while chomping noisily into an apple. His goats and sheep were scattered all around them, feasting on patches of grass. ‘But the haramzade faujis began beating us up when we went there. So we stay away now. You stay away too. They are madmen.’

  ‘They didn’t just beat me,’ another added. ‘Those sons of whores took three of my fattest goats. Their officer laughed when I complained, then threatened to shoot me. Bhenchod. I hope they choked on the flesh and rotted!’