Chimera

He stood up, walking past the road now crowded with army soldiers. There were no soldiers inside the airport though. They had been ordered to stay away until the ordinance disposal teams had swept it. They had been working on for an hour now and were almost done.

“Heck of a mess, old boy!” a voice said from behind.

Saxena turned to back to see an army Lieutenant-Colonel accompanied by two fully armed soldiers walking up to him, leaving their AXE utility vehicle by the road. The officer was wearing his standard army disruptive-pattern camouflage uniform. His name tag said: ‘Fernandez’. Saxena snapped off a salute, jerking loose some of the dust off his uniform with the sudden motion.

“Sir!”

“Easy there, son!” Fernandez said. He glanced at the collapsed terminal and the smoking wreck that was the control tower. He whistled softly.

“Hell of a bombardment you guys went through. Casualties?”

Saxena looked around at the screams and the mumbled pain of the soldiers all around.

“Considerable, sir. We… uh, lost a lot of the air-force personnel trying to evacuate as much of the supplies and logistical equipment on the tarmac as we could before the attack. My F-A-C team has suffered near total fatalities,” Saxena choked as he completed that last bit.

Fernandez patted the young officer on his back.

“Nasty business, son! But this is our job! Your team members did their job as they were trained to do. You did the same,” he said and continued:

“For now, let’s get this business straight. You haven’t met me before. I am the commander of a Pinaka M-B-R-L battery northeast of here. We saw the attack on the airport from our locations. I suggested to General Potgam that I head over here to assess the damage since I was the closest senior officer here at the time. When someone higher up comes along, I will be on my merry way. In the meantime, I am in command. Understood?”

Saxena nodded at him so he continued further:

“Now. This airfield,” Fernandez gestured his hands around, “is my logistics node. I need rockets and I need them yesterday. Ground convoys will make their way up with more supplies and feed my units once they are set up tomorrow. But in the meantime we are airlifting them in. Now that means we need this airport operational right away. That’s where you come in. In effect, I am putting my money on you and your boys to open this place for business once again. And I love to win, Saxena. I really do. So what do you have to say?”

Fernandez stared at the young officer in front of him. Saxena managed to pull his thoughts together and focus quick enough to meet the Lieutenant-Colonel’s eyes. Fernandez saw that and realized Saxena had pulled himself out of the shock.

Time to get to it then!

“Okay, son. You know this airbase better than I do. What say we go and have a look-see in there?” Fernandez suggested.

Saxena walked over to the crate he had been sitting on earlier and picked up a Tavor rifle that he had taken from one of the dead officers from his FAC team. Fernandez was already getting the army personnel organized:

“Get those trucks moving with the casualties to the medical center at Haa-Dzong! Now! They still have helicopters operating out of there. They can get these guys out. Move! Move! And somebody find the Para detachment C-O. Either he’s dead or he’s somewhere in there. And get the comms up and running. Last thing we need is a Chinese spec-ops team rushing this location from the northern hills. Warlord has RPVs overhead, but I wouldn’t trust them completely to keep us safe. I want every paratrooper who can walk and fire his weapon to re-establish perimeter around this airport. Now, gentlemen! Go! Go! Go!”

As everybody started to move with a purpose around the place, Fernandez grabbed the nearest radioman he could lay his hands on…

“You! Is your radio working?” he thundered.

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“Good. You are coming with me then!” Fernandez ordered just as the noise of truck engines filled the air. Fernandez looked at Saxena who was waiting with his rifle slung over his shoulders.

“Let’s go, son. Lead the way.”

The three men walked carefully through the debris of the terminal, bypassing the demolished equipment and the building structures. Fernandez looked up and saw the night sky where there should have been a roof. Slight snow was beginning to fall through. They made it through to the other side and reached within view of the tarmac…

“Damn,” Fernandez observed.

Yeah.

Saxena agreed in thought as he walked around a burning wooden supply crate that had originally been carrying flares. The shattered wreck of the Mi-26 lay sunk inside a huge bomb crater on the tarmac, bellowing a pillar of black smoke. The only identifiable piece of the fuselage left in one piece was the tail boom. It lay on the grass a few hundred feet away.