Chimera

As the stunned Indian survivors at the airport looked up, wondering what had happened, a gray-painted canard-equipped fighter streaked overhead on full afterburner.

“Yeah! That was an MKI!” Saxena turned around to face the wounded soldiers nearby: “That was one of ours! Our boys are here!!”

ABOVE PARU AIRPORT

BHUTAN

DAY 6 + 1955 HRS

“Juliet-Tenner at your three!”

“Roger. I have him. He’s not going anywhere.”

The two Indian Su-30 crews to enter southern Bhutan had caught the Chinese pilots at a disadvantage. Instead of waiting for a clean beyond-visual-range annihilation of the J-10s as they climbed out of the valley, the Su-30 flight-leader had decided to mix it up with them at low altitude in order to break their attack runs. The airport below was already ablaze and flames were lighting up the valley in an orange glow. Within the thin walls of the valley, the J-10 had serious limitations in maneuverability. Not so for the Su-30MKIs which were far better suited for this job…

The flight leader had already dispatched one J-10 and its unfortunate pilot within seconds of entering the fray.

The Chinese pilot never knew what hit him. And as the flaming debris of that aircraft hit the ground, the two Su-30s had swept over the airport and were already mixing it with other three J-10s. Their attack on Paru had been halted. Their struggle to make it home alive had begun.

The Su-30 flight-leader flipped his aircraft to the starboard, pulled back on the stick and switching to guns, laced the sky ahead of him with cannon rounds. Most of these found their mark and another J-10’s engine smoked out and the aircraft flew into the valley north of Paru, a dead man’s control on the hands.

“Smack-down!” the flight-leader sent out over the comms as he saw his prey exploding into a fireball within the alpine trees below.

“Two down! Two-to-go! Do you have a visual?”

“Uh, roger that, leader,” his wingman replied. “I see two bandits bugging out to the north and gaining altitude!”

“Huge mistake! Wouldn’t you agree?” the flight-leader concluded.

There was a slight chuckle over the radio.

“Roger that boss! I have visual. I have acquisition,” the wingman depressed the launch button and felt the R-77s falling away, “and I have engaged!”

The two R-77s streaked away trailing a smoke exhaust, tail-chasing the two J-10s on afterburner at ten kilometers…

The results were predictable. Favorable kinetics was available to the Indian attacker. Two near-simultaneous fireballs announced the destruction of the two fleeing Chinese aircraft. The flight-leader was not impressed with the PLAAF pilots and their poor visual-combat skills.

Amateurs!

“Okay. White-Knight-Leader declares the skies over southern Bhutan as all clear. Now let’s go find ourselves that lone Sierra-Uniform bird to the north!”

The two aircraft punched afterburners and accelerating north just as four No. 7 Squadron Mirage-2000s established DCA patrol over Paru. The gap in Indian air-defenses over Bhutan had now been closed. But with heavy losses in aircraft, personnel and facilities, the damage was done.

PARU AIRPORT

BHUTAN

DAY 6 + 2115 HRS

He had been lucky.

Saxena realized that this was the gist of it. It had taken quite some time before the pain in his ears had subsided. Blood had poured out of one ear due to shrapnel wounds. Scratches and burns were everywhere on his body. He had even vomited after the pressure waves from numerous explosions had ripped through the body. He was still somewhat nauseous from it.

And yet, he was luckier than most around him…

Saxena sat on an abandoned ammunition crate near the main terminal entrance of the airport. What was left of the terminal, that is. An army corpsman was tending to his shrapnel wound near the ear.

Other soldiers had arrived from Haa-Dzong and were laying the dead bodies on the side of the road, waiting for the trucks to take them south. As he sat there, he watched the seventeenth body being brought out and laid in a line. Some more were even worse off: their bodies not being recoverable from the debris just yet.

He sighed and looked back up at the smoking wreckage that was Paru airport at the moment. The fires had died away because of the cold and the lack of combustibles left untouched. But the debris was still spewing smoke all around.

“That should do it for now,” the corpsman said.

Saxena nodded to him in silence and the army medic walked away towards the stretchers laid out nearby where another wounded paratrooper had been laid down, one of his legs blown away and the blanket laid over him red with blood near the knees. He was dosed with painkillers and couldn’t feel anything. Saxena looked at him, squinted and then looked back again at the smoldering remains of the terminal building.

Time to get back to work…