Line of Control- A Thriller on the Coming War in Asia Read online

  LINE OF CONTROL

  A Thriller on the Coming War in Asia

  MAINAK DHAR

  Line of Control

  © Mainak Dhar, 2011

  www.mainakdhar.com

  Paperback edition published by Vitasta Publishers India, 2010

  Line of Control is a work of fiction, and all characters and incidents depicted in it are purely the result of the author’s imagination, or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely co-incidental.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  DEDICATIONS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  LINE OF CONTROL – A TRILLER OF THE COMING WAR IN ASIA

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DEDICATIONS

  Death is more universal than life. Everyone dies, but not everyone truly lives.

  Line of Control is dedicated to the two most important women in my life-my mother, Sunanda, who taught me how to live, and my wife, Puja, who gave me something worth living for.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  While this novel does build off serious and topical issues such as terrorism and the growing instability in Pakistan, it uses these as a springboard to take the reader into a fictional world. One where some of our worst fears do come true, and also one where ultimately we realize that it’s never too late to step back from the brink. This is a work of fiction, and all personalities and events depicted are purely the result of my imagination. However, the military technology and tactics depicted in the book are close to reality, and do depict how a future war in the subcontinent could well be fought. At times, I have taken some liberty with reality in the interests of making the story more fun, but then, this is a novel, not a serious treatise. For example, some unit numbers and bases are real, gleaned from openly available sources on the Internet; others, I’ve just made up.

  Every book has a purpose, and the purpose of this novel first and foremost is to entertain. I thoroughly enjoyed writing this novel, as it allowed me to create a good old fashioned entertainer, the sort we all need in these stressed out times. I do hope you have as much fun reading it as I did while writing it.

  - Mainak Dhar

  www.mainakdhar.com

  LINE OF CONTROL – A TRILLER OF THE COMING WAR IN ASIA

  ONE

  The general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought.

  - Sun Tzu, The Art of War

  The five men moved quietly and swiftly in the dark though they could barely see each other, covered as they were in black battle fatigues. They were familiar with this kind of terrain, though as they proceeded, they felt that this side of the border was slightly rockier. That did not bother them, as they had all spent their childhood in far more treacherous terrain.

  The leader, Ghulam, motioned for the others to pause as they came upon a small hillock. With practiced, expert movements, Ghulam scaled the rocks to reach the summit. He unslung the pair of binoculars from his shoulder and peered into the darkness. He could see no movement, but a small fire caught his attention. That would have to be where the troops were likely to be, most probably using the fire to keep themselves warm in the cold.

  The others followed him up the hill-being especially careful not to make any noise. Ghulam judged the distance to the camp as about three hundred meters. Just a little bit closer and he would be in position.

  Ghulam and his men were now down on their haunches, creeping along the oft-used trail leading to the camp. This trail was obviously heavily used for grazing, as evidenced by the large numbers of dung heaps. At a distance of a hundred meters, Ghulam stopped. He once again looked through his binoculars. He smiled to himself. This was no camp, just a small patrol of four men, which had probably stopped to rest for the night in a small cave on the side of a hill. Probably rookies who had gotten lost.

  As Ghulam scanned the group, he realized that they were not regular Army troops. Their antiquated 0.303 rifles were a dead give-away. Most likely they belonged to some police or paramilitary force.

  Ghulam shook his head at what things had come to. This was hardly a worthy target for one, who as a fifteen-year-old, had fought the cream of the Soviet army and later, fought the Americans in Iraq-but they would have to do for tonight. He knew there would be many more targets for him before it was all over. He began to reach for his Kalashnikov rifle at his side, but then stopped himself. No, that would just take the fun out of what was already turning out to be a bit of a damp squib.

  ***

  Inside the cave Lance Naik Ajeet was getting increasingly irritated with his men. All he had asked was for one of them to guide the group using the detailed map they had, and they had somehow still managed to get hopelessly lost. While Ajeet had established radio contact with the police station, he had decided against trying to walk back in the biting cold of the night. He could see Havildar Santosh still fiddling with the map, and he couldn’t contain his irritation any more.

  `What are you doing now, you buffoon?’

  The Havildar looked up sheepishly and said something about being directionally right, which caused Ajeet to explode into a stream of choice expletives. As he lay down to sleep, he asked Havildar Pandey to stand guard.

  The pot-bellied Pandey managed to stay awake for about thirty minutes, during which he finished off half a pack of cigarettes, but did precious little guarding. Finally, seeing his boss asleep, he decided to take a little nap himself. He lay down, muttering to himself,

  `What will I guard in this godforsaken place? I don’t think that fool with the map even knows whether we’re on this side or that side of the Line of Control.’

  ***

  The men crept closer to the policemen, who were fast asleep.

  Now Ghulam could make out their individual features glowing in the reflected light of the small fire. One of them stirred, causing Ghulam to stop dead in his tracks. But the man just rolled over to his other side and continued sleeping.

  Now Ghulam was at the entrance to the cave. He took out a long and curved hunting knife from his belt, and entered the cave, followed by his men.

  He grabbed the nearest man by his hair and slit his throat, the knife making a sickening grating noise as it cut from ear to ear, slicing through bone and tissue. The man’s eyes popped open as he grabbed at his mangled throat. He tried to cry out, but all that came out of his mouth was a steady stream of blood. In his death throes, he knocked over his rifle standing balanced against the wall. The noise awakened his colleagues, who scrambled to deal with their attackers.

  They never had a chance. The man to Ghulam’s right tried to grab at him, only to be met with a vicious blow that almost decapitated him. By the time Ghulam turned around, the other two guards were already dead, lying in expanding pools of blood. As quietly as they had come, the five men turned around and left, leaving the four Indian policemen dead in the cave, the fire spreading eerie shadows around their bodies.

  Inshallah, all raids would be this easy, Ghulam thought, as he looked back at the cave, the fire now barely discernable in the distance.

  ***

  His hand paused over the intricately carved rook for a second and then moved away.

  `Karim, checkmate.’

  The clean-shaven Air Force officer looked up at his Prime Minister, who as usual, had won.

  `Sir, you’ve beaten me again-but I’ll get back sometime.’

  Illahi Khan smiled slightly.

  `We’ll see. My friend Karim, you were always the fearless one-to go charging in against impossible odds. I, the more careful one-I guess it shows in our chess.’

  Illahi Khan enjoyed his T
hursday evening games of chess with Air Marshall Ashfaque Karim. He found it intellectually challenging and also a diversion from the worries that had been consuming him for the last few weeks. The two men had been close friends from early on in their military careers. While they had serious differences of opinion, especially on religious views, and had gradually drifted apart a lot over the years, the Thursday evening chess game remained a link to their past.

  ` Sir, someday we’ll play a game where it will boil down to quixotic charges. Well, I have to be going, if I’m late again for dinner, my wife’s going to start suspecting who I actually spend Thursday evenings with.’

  Illahi watched Karim get up to leave, not without a trace of envy. Karim had maintained himself well, his washboard stomach and ramrod straight posture belying his forty-five plus years. Illahi, though of a similar age, had softened a lot, especially after leaving active military service. The hawk like, sharp eyes were still there, as was his trademark pointed beard, but his body was not as nearly as fit as it once was.

  Illahi got up and walked to his bookshelves to take out his well-worn copy of the Holy Koran, given to him by his grandfather. He had never been one for the books, but the Koran was not just any book. Since childhood, he had read it almost every day.

  He walked to his CD player and put on some music. The gentle strains of ghazals filled the room as Illahi sat down to read. It was a fairly spartan room, with only a simple sofa, a study table and two bookshelves. But then, Illahi had never been one for creature comforts. Like the chess games with Karim, he cherished every solitary moment he got. They served to remind him that he still had a life beyond trying to make sense of and manage the chaos that was his country. As the thoughts crossed his mind, he silently rebuked himself.

  What do you mean by chaos, Ilahi. This is your country. You chose to take on the mantle. You chose to make the deals you did. Now you just have to play the cards you’ve been dealt.

  Leading Pakistan was not an enviable job at the best of times, and the times Ilahi lived in were hardly easy. The coup in Saudi Arabia, led by an Al Qaeda fanatic called Abu Sayed had provided the flow of money, material support and a groundswell of fundamentalist ideology that had led to another military coup in Pakistan-one that had brought Ilahi to power.

  The phone’s ringing interrupted his thoughts. He leaned across the sofa to pick up the handset.

  As Karim left the room, he heard his Prime Minister utter just three words, `Abu Sayed himself?’

  ***

  More than a thousand kilometers away in New Delhi, Vivek Khosla settled down in his living room, a copy of The Prophet in hand. Gibran had always been one of his favorite authors, and no matter how many times he read it; Khosla could always find wisdom and solace in Gibran’s masterpiece. He had a glass of scotch in his hand as he turned the dog-eared pages. Unlike most Indian politicians who made a public pretence of virtue and engaged in most vices known to man in private, Khosla believed in making the distinction between his private and public faces as small as he could. Years ago, seniors in his party had warned him that such an attitude would never take him far in Indian politics. Well, he had proved them all wrong. At the age of sixty-one, he was relatively young by the standards of Indian politics, and had reached the pinnacle of Indian democracy-he was the Prime Minister of India.

  Khosla had swept to power in the general elections held in 2009 after a tumultuous year, which saw two governments come to power only to fall within months. The past two years had been harrowing experience-juggling fickle political allies, trying to push forward economic reforms in the face of staunch opposition from some of his own party members, and an opposition, which was out to malign the government at the slightest opportunity. Khosla’s greatest successes had undoubtedly been in the economic field, with considerable success on many fronts, and continued the onward progress of the Indian economic juggernaut. However, in the political arena, things had not been as rosy.

  It had been a long journey indeed, and sometimes Khosla found it difficult to accept just how far he had come from his humble beginnings. Born just after India’s independence in 1947, Khosla had been born in a family of refugees from Pakistan who had left considerable ancestral property in Pakistan to escape the communal holocaust consuming the Indian subcontinent. They had arrived in India with almost no money and the daunting prospect of starting all over again. Khosla’s father set up the family business of textile trading in Delhi and though the initial years were tough, the family had regained much of its former wealth within a decade. After a brilliant academic career culminating in a doctorate in Economics, Khosla had joined politics. Though most of his fellow party men were staunchly right-wing, with strong communal overtones, the stories Khosla had heard from his father had convinced him that he would do whatever he could to prevent such fratricide again. Now he was truly in a position to do so.

  The room was large and tastefully furnished, but bore the marks of slovenliness that his staff had come to accept as part of his personality. There were books and tapes strewn across one of the chairs, and Khosla knew his maid would complain again the next morning.

  He stretched out on the sofa and began reading.

  A slight knock at the living room door caught his attention and Khosla got up to answer it. Though he normally had several servants at his official residence, Khosla preferred to be alone on Saturday nights as far as possible, so that he could catch up on his reading. Given his hectic schedule, such Saturdays were rare, which made his insistence on being left alone even stronger. As he jumped off the sofa, the niggling pain in his back reminded him that he would have to see the doctor soon-getting old, Vivek. In his youth he had been quite an athlete, and was still fairly fit for his age, but there were some things he had begun to accept as the ravages of advancing age. Tall and trim, he did cut quite a striking feature, and many columnists remarked that he was quite the most handsome Indian Prime Minister in a long time. The jury was still out on that one, though, especially among those who insisted that the late Rajiv Gandhi would have given Khosla a run for his money in the looks department.

  Khosla wearily opened the door to see his personal secretary, a large stack of files in hand.

  `Good evening, Sir. Sorry to disturb you. Here is the daily intelligence summary, and some other files for your signature.’

  Khosla accepted the well-worn files. They were regulation Indian Government files, which had changed little in the last five decades. At least these days they condescend to give computer printouts. As recently as the mid 1990s, these reports would come typed out by manual typewriters and sealed in brown envelopes the old fashioned way-with a wax Government of India seal. Well, some things in the Indian bureaucracy will take more than technology to change, mused Khosla, as he ripped open the familiar reddish-brown seal.

  He picked up the two-page daily intelligence summary prepared by the Intelligence Bureau and put the other files aside, which among other things reported what the Opposition was up to. When he first came to power, Khosla had taken an idealistic view of the situation, and protested that the IB was not meant to spy on Opposition politicians. But, over time, he had come to accept that one had to do some things one did not necessarily like.

  Khosla scanned through the report as he sat down. As he read, he kept scribbling notes and reminders on the margins. Things looked under control. The usual couple of killings in Kashmir were of course there, but that had become a regular feature in India’s troubled northern state. At least large-scale terrorism was on its way out.

  One particular paragraph caught his eye. Four policemen killed by unidentified attackers. The four members of the J&K State Police were killed with knives while on a regular patrol.

  That did strike him as surprising. Why would anyone kill with knives in an age of rockets and automatic weapons? There had been similar killings in recent weeks, and many believed these were the handiwork of hardened Afghan mercenaries crossing the porous border with Pakistan and striking with the
intent of spreading terror in the local populace and security forces. Need to check what’s up with the mercenaries with Joshi.

  After the Taliban had been swept from power in Afghanistan by the United States following the World Trade Center attacks, the Taliban fighters had melted away. However, with the rise of a new regime under an Al Qaeda affiliate, Abu Sayed, in Saudi Arabia and his active role in spreading fundamentalist terror throughout the region, the need for paid killers had arisen again. Importantly, Abu Sayed could promise these Islamic guns for hire more than virgins in the after-life. His religious inspiration was backed by petro-dollars. Many of these mujahideen, as they were now publicly known, had fanned out across the Middle East, and several had appeared in that old festering wound in India’s nationhood-Kashmir. Abu Sayed had adopted Emir as his nom de guerre, a title that suited his self-image as the leader of Islam worldwide. The Emir had promised a climactic Jihad against the West, and India was beginning to feel the first blows in that struggle.

  Khosla put the papers aside and settled back to read. He turned to a page in his book.

  `And if you would know God, be not therefore a solver of riddles. Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children.’

  Khosla wondered why people could not accept such a simple truth, expounded by the holy books of all major religions. It would have saved thousands of lives over his country’s history.

  ***

  There was an almost palpable sense of gloom hanging over the long conference room, as Illahi waited for everyone to sit down. In front of him were the people who, along with him, could decide the fate of Pakistan, and, he hoped, help him fulfill the difficult task that now lay before him.

  It was a powerful gathering-with the Chiefs of Staff, the Intelligence Chief and the Defense and Foreign Ministers. There was however, one notable omission, without whom a meeting, especially this meeting, could not begin.