Looking suitably scared, Minhas asked if any other area around Kahuta was also patrolled like that.
‘Any other fauji paltans nearby?’ There were none.
‘They stay at that factory. The rest of the land is okay for grazing all the way up to Manjan.’
‘For now,’ the oldest among them observed darkly. ‘Those greedy sons of pigs are never satisfied.’
***
Mishra allowed himself a chuckle when he distilled Baig’s and Minhas’s observations for Marbles, answering the pilot’s questions about air defences: Kahuta had none. Minhas had confirmed after a week’s worth of walking that there were no anti-aircraft batteries stationed nearby, especially to the east and north. Baig’s asset too had explained that the only security presence at the facility was a company of soldiers with guns, the kind they carried with them. There were no large guns pointed at the sky.
‘They’re worried about being discovered by American and Soviet spy satellites,’ Marbles remarked. ‘It’s hard to conceal anti-aircraft defences, whether guns or missiles, and still maintain operational readiness. This is good for us, of course. It’s one variable that favours our effort.’
Mishra then handed him a detailed mission report written by the crew of the ARC Canberra that had photographed Kahuta. Their notes about the interceptors from Sargodha were highlighted.
‘We won’t need to fly high like they did, of course,’ Marbles commented after reading through it. ‘But we still don’t have details about the target.’
‘It’s only a matter of time,’ Mishra replied.
TWELVE
‘How well do you know all the electric at your nuclear factory?’ Baig asked.
Feroze Akmal frowned at him in the fading light. It was dusk, a chill wind blew from the north. Baig felt the need for a large bottle of brandy to overcome the cold air that reached in through heavy wool clothes, sending the occasional shiver through his body. There was a time when, during a visit to Srinagar in December, he had jumped into the Dal and paddled about, emerging half an hour later with a refreshed mind and body. Now his joints ached if it rained a bit, even in the middle of summer. He stomped his feet and walked, keeping pace with the younger man as they strolled away from the market.
‘It isn’t a factory, chacha.’ The sigh that accompanied those words carried with it the weight of all the little frustrations that accumulated when ambition was consistently denied. Baig chuckled.
‘To illiterates like me, a place of work is either a farm or an office or a factory. We do not know better.’
‘You’re not illiterate,’ Feroze protested.
Baig brushed it off. ‘When I see young men like you, who already know so much at an age when I knew only of bricks and cement, it makes me feel ignorant. If only I had studied like you did...’
They walked down the desolate road in a silence disturbed only by footsteps, each one of which sent little clouds of dust reaching for the sky before falling helplessly back to earth. Swollen by rains in the mountains up north, near Panjpir Rocks, the river marked the boundary of Kahuta. Halfway across the narrow bridge over it, Baig stopped to lean on the rickety railing and watch water the colour of overboiled tea rush past. It roared weakly at the howl of the wind.
‘Well, are you any good at it?’ Baig had to shout to be heard.
His companion eyed him warily. Baig’s stories about life abroad had begun many weeks ago and, over time, had become a parody of themselves through repetition. Even though he had found them fascinating at first, Feroze was beginning to experience a kind of fatigue each time Baig spoke of London, the city that was many lifetimes away. Baig’s frequent questions about his work, which he invariably followed with promises of getting him a job, now felt like taunts. He wanted to walk away but he had nothing better to do in the godforsaken place. If he went home early, his mother would talk about some cousin or the other who had finally become old enough to marry him. He would tell her off, she would argue, they would both lose their temper, and the evening would be wasted. If he went to his father’s shop, he would be expected to sit at the counter and wait for a customer. Nobody ever visited a hardware store in a small town in the evening, but his father would never accept that fact. And if Feroze made a habit of sitting at the counter then father would suggest, with hints that he supposed were meant to be subtle, that as the only son Feroze should take over the shop. He couldn’t tell his father off, but they would certainly bicker.
‘Yes,’ he finally replied. ‘I know the cabling of the plant like the back of my hand.’
Faisal Baig smiled. The cutting edges of his yellowing teeth had become flat from a lifetime of grinding. Handing the young man a letter from his own pocket, Baig asked if he had a holiday on Sunday. Feroze nodded reflexively. He hated Sundays, hated having to stay home. His attention was captivated by the profile of Elizabeth the Second on the dark grey stamp. The letter inside asked Baig in chaste Urdu to bring the young man he had mentioned to Islamabad. Experienced electricians certainly were in short supply, it continued, and he would rather recruit a good Pakistani lad than let one of his colleagues foist Indian baniyas upon them.
‘Tell him to keep news of this to himself, though. If his colleagues or superiors find out, they may get his passport cancelled, or make adverse remarks to the British consulate,’ Nawaz Effendi wrote in warning towards the end of the letter.
***
The remainder of the week crawled by. At work Feroze kept his head down as always, and the only change was the enthusiasm with which he volunteered for maintenance inspections all over the plant. The inspections were unpopular due to all the walking and crawling they required. The older members of the team happily chalked his keenness to youthful naiveté, and let him go in their stead.
Early on Sunday morning he met Baig at the bus stop and the two of them caught the bus to ‘Pindi. There was only one other person who got on the bus at Kahuta. An hour later, they made their way up Murree Road to the capital. In a tony neighbourhood just before the diplomatic enclave, they alighted at a red light and walked down Ataturk Avenue before disappearing into one of the smaller streets that sprouted from it.
Baig led the way. He often seemed lost and had them retrace their steps or walk around in circles in search of the address. The young man followed, wide-eyed and drinking in every inch of the posh neighbourhood. Where Kahuta was dusty all year round and its streets were lined with garbage, the streets here were spotless. Mansions rose behind tall walls on either side, and he could see at least one car behind each gate. If London didn’t work out, he thought, Islamabad wouldn’t be too terrible a second choice. There was that little inconvenience of money, though. Nobody in Pakistan would pay an electrician the kind of salary that was needed to buy a mansion in Islamabad.
A little after 11 a.m., just as the sun began making them uncomfortable and the young man had thoroughly lost his sense of direction, they reached a compound with tall mango trees shielding an opulent bungalow from the road, and were escorted in by a servant dressed smartly in a navy blue sherwani and grey karakul. Inside, they waited a few minutes in a large tastefully furnished room till the owner arrived to greet them.
Nawaz Effendi was a broad-shouldered man of fifty with genial eyes and a clean-shaven, rotund face. His paunch spoke of prosperity, but his rough hands suggested that he hadn’t been born into it. He hugged Baig and was effusive in his welcome. A servant came in with platters of chocolate from somewhere in Europe, and tea was served in fine bone china cups.
‘Don’t drop the cup,’ Baig whispered to Feroze. ‘It costs more than you make in a month.’
Scared, the young man gulped the tea in one go and carefully placed the cup and saucer back on the table before them. Then, at Baig’s urging, he bit into a bar of dark chocolate offered by Effendi’s servant and grimaced at the bitterness that engulfed his tongue.
Baig and Effendi remi
nisced about old times for a while, then Baig pointed to Feroze and introduced ‘the electrician son of my very good friend from Kahuta’ in glowing terms.
‘Bloody bastard! Everyone becomes your very good friend after two pegs,’ Effendi replied, catching Feroze off guard.
He sat in silence and did his best to appear inconspicuous while the older men sparred verbally. Perhaps it was ten minutes, maybe more, before the host turned to him and asked how long he had worked as an electrician, and thus began an interview that blew hot and cold. When Baig took pity on Feroze and tried to intercede, Effendi told him very curtly to eat some more chocolate, drink some more tea, and shut his mouth.
Feroze looked up to see Baig—that rich man who strutted around Kahuta like a king—shrug meekly, powerless to affect events further: it seemed that this was as far as the retiree could take him.
A nod of Effendi’s head and a servant left the room to return, a few minutes later, with crystal glasses and a tall, dark bottle on a brilliant silver tray.
‘I hope this chap at least knows how to drink like a civilised person,’ Effendi said as the servant poured. ‘Otherwise...’
Feroze accepted the glass and, remembering a scene from some English movie he had once seen, waited for Effendi to take a sip before bringing his own glass to his lips. He gagged a bit on the first drops and, swallowing quickly, burned his throat.
But he drank. And the questions kept coming, and the servant kept replenishing his glass. Three large ones later, he was beginning to run out of answers. So when the servant brought a few sheets of paper and placed them before him, and Effendi told him to draw detailed schematics of the nuclear plant that he worked at, relief washed over him.
‘Convince me that you actually know how it works,’ Effendi added.
Hunched over the coffee table, the young man did the best he could. First, he mapped the major features: the Admin block, the centrifuge hall, the substation, the workshop, the stores, and the security barracks. Then, on a fresh piece of paper, he drew the layout of the centrifuge hall and the electric cabling that powered all of it. The last diagram described the electrical circuit to an individual centrifuge. He was grilled on each one, and he answered between sips of his fourth drink.
‘Are you married?’ The question came out of the blue.
He shook his head.
‘Excellent,’ Effendi continued. ‘Europe will be so much more fun.’ The two friends guffawed at this. The interview appeared to be over.
In the adjoining room, they sat at an ornately carved sandalwood table that filled the air with a hint of its sweet, woody aroma. It was soon overpowered by the sikandari raan that the servant served. The tension of the past two hours dissipated, and Feroze found himself smiling and, later, laughing along at their jokes. Meat in his stomach stemmed the woozy feeling that the alcohol had left him with, and he was about to crack a dirty joke himself when Effendi turned to him and quipped, ‘What are you laughing at? You don’t look like you even know your way around a woman’s body.’
The young man fumbled for an answer, but the host cut him off and addressed Baig.
‘Make sure he is a bit more experienced before you send him to the British consulate for a visa, or he might soil himself at the mere sight of those goris.’
Effendi offered for one of his chauffeurs to drive them to the bus stand, and they gratefully accepted, leaving a little after 2 p.m. Instead of heading to the bus stand, though, Baig had the chauffeur drive them around a bit before alighting in one of the seedier parts of the city. There he dragged the young man into a narrow lane lined on both sides by grimy buildings. After speaking with a man standing outside one such house, Baig led the electrician in. As a fragrant woman took the young man by the hand and coaxed him towards a mellow room, Baig shouted words of encouragement.
‘Go on!’ he said. ‘Your new boss wants this done.’
***
On Monday Mishra dispatched Sablok and Arora to IIT Delhi.
All night long, they had pored over the contents of the diplomatic pouch from Islamabad, searching for vulnerabilities. Even though the IAF was confident, and Mishra had no reason to doubt Marbles, the waters of South Block were murky and many dangers lurked in their depths.
‘Given the opportunity we could fly up to Rawalpindi and trim Zia’s moustache,’ Marbles had suggested, half in jest.
‘Opportunity. I fear that’s where we will flounder,’ Mishra had remarked.
The obvious concern was that the IAF was leashed by a political will that was, at that moment, suspect. A leadership that was paranoid about persecution by its own intelligence agency could not be relied upon, he reasoned, to take that very agency’s advice into consideration. There had to be a contingency plan in place that did not depend on the Prime Minister’s mood. He would keep it between his subordinates and himself, and if things went awry then the three of them would hang for it. The Director and Mishra’s Division Head wouldn’t know, and the emaciated Wing would limp on without a Section Chief and two case officers.
‘An armed assault is out of the question, sir,’ Sablok had opined when Mishra quizzed him about the possibility. ‘The company that guards the facility is well-entrenched. I’m sure they have built defensive fortifications. We would need at least three companies’ worth of trained and armed men to be massed quietly within a few kilometres of Kahuta. And we have neither the men nor the money to pull it off. Sabotage is the only option that remains if the IAF can’t bomb the facility to bits.’
But the sheer scale of the facility was daunting. The electrician had asserted that they already had two thousand centrifuges online, with another thousand scheduled to be deployed by January. Dispersed as they were over an area of tens of thousands of yards, one man couldn’t hope to plant enough explosives to disable them all without being swiftly discovered and executed.
At four minutes past 3 a.m., while Mishra wracked his brain to find a way around all the constraints they faced, Arora noisily cleared his throat.
‘Aren’t these things rotated by motors?’ he asked, referring to the centrifuges.
Mishra stared at him, his expression blank. His grandmother’s favourite idiom came to mind: when the entire Ramayan has been recited, the dullard asks who Sita was. He was about to say something nasty when, reading his thoughts, Sablok affirmed that each centrifuge was indeed driven at very high speeds by an electric motor.
‘We had a problem at my apartment a few weeks ago,’ Arora carried on, oblivious to Mishra’s seething rage. ‘There was no water for days. A voltage problem caused the motor to rotate too fast, destroying the pump. A few in neighbouring buildings were damaged too. Problem with the transformer, apparently. Could something like that work for us?’
While Arora and Sablok made their way to the rectangular campus on Hauz Khas, Mishra rushed to make his appointment at Vayu Bhavan. Over the next hour, he briefed Marbles about the target. Based on the electrician’s schematics, Sablok had marked various buildings on the reconnaissance photos taken by the ARC Canberra, labelling key geographic features as well. Marbles studied them for a few minutes. The size of the centrifuge hall gave him pause.
‘A smaller target would have made life easier,’ he said. ‘The MiG-21 can carry two 500kg bombs at a time. Flying low, hugging the terrain on the way in to remain invisible to Pakistani radar, one jet could have destroyed a small building and sped back on full afterburners. Two other jets carrying air-to-air missiles would have gone along to deal with any interceptor that Sargodha scrambled. Given a couple of minutes’ head start, however, the MiGs would outfly Sargodha’s Mirage Vs easily. That’s not possible here, though.’
‘Why? Is the target too large?’ Mishra asked.
Marbles nodded. ‘It will take at least ten 500kg bombs to destroy a structure as large as the centrifuge hall entirely. We will need an entire squadron of MiG-21s. And hiding a squadron from Pa
kistani radar will require an act of God...Would partial destruction suffice? Say, if we targeted the control centre...’
Mishra shook his head.
‘There is no telling where the control centre is located within the centrifuge hall. Besides, if they are scaling up so effortlessly, there is no reason to believe that they couldn’t just rebuild that small part and resume operations. The strike has to be incapacitating, and that means destroying all or most of the centrifuges while killing as many technicians as possible. It has to hurt Pakistan. After that, India’s diplomats can point out the nature of the facility and internationalise the issue.’
‘You do realise that this will lead to war, don’t you?’ Marbles remarked a few minutes later, between sips of warm tea: Earl Grey, no milk.
Mishra indicated that he had considered the possibility.
‘Well, if you say you’ve considered it then you must have thought of a way to get the Prime Minister on board because to be completely frank, I don’t believe the executive has the bottle for such action or its consequences. Convincing the Prime Minister and his cabinet will need a miracle.’
***
Upon their return to Main, Arora picked up a letter from the mail room. Dispatched from Panaji. Almeida had passed away some days earlier at the medical college in Bambolim; cancer of the pancreas. The letter had been sent by his lawyer, as part of Almeida’s last request. A few documents had been left at the lawyer’s office for Mr Arora, the letter said, and would Mr Arora be so kind as to visit the lawyer’s chambers at his earliest convenience?
Mishra was yet to return. Arora asked Sablok to type up a brief about their visit to IIT, then stepped out. His Fiat stood in the parking lot at Main. Ignoring it, Arora began walking.
It was a bright autumn day, and the footpaths were littered with yellow leaves. White Lambrettas and brick-red buses lumbered past. Arora found himself going back in time with each footstep. It was a year after Independence. A young Jagjit Arora had finally heard about his sisters and parents, formerly residents of Lahore. All hope of seeing them ever again was extinguished. His wife’s family had suffered a similar fate.
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