Chimera

The distant rumble negated the need: the missiles had struck.

“Oh god! How did they miss them?” the WSO shouted.

“Probably there was nothing they could do,” Dutt replied. “The Chinese must have been engaging our boys above to provide cover for their missiles. There are only so many things we can handle at any given time. Some targets are bound to get hit.”

The WSO sighed: “God help the boys at Thoise!”

Sure enough, the encrypted R/T frequency they had switched to was suddenly alive with chaotic and confused calls from what seemed like a hundred different sources on the ground at Thoise.

OVER SOUTHERN LADAKH

DAY 7 + 2230 HRS

The water in his hands slipped between his fingers as he continued to stare beyond it. When he looked up, he could see the tired eyes staring back at him from the mirror glass above the sink. He rolled up the shoulder sleeves of his olive-green flight-suit and then washed his face. But the thoughts did not leave.

Did we just fail?

Did I miss something?

No. We did our best. We… I… threw everything we had at them. There were bound to be leaks. But damn it to hell!

Verma stood straighter inside the small washroom of the crew-rest area on board the Phalcon. He rubbed his forehead with his wet hands as the events of the last few hours played back yet again in his mind.

There must have been something that we could have been done differently!

“Nothing we could do, buddy! We did what we could,” the Group-Captain piloting the aircraft stood in the doorway to the tiny room. He threw Verma a small towel. Verma wiped his face and then pulled himself straighter as he walked out of the washroom. Both senior officers saw the various operators at their consoles in the cavernous interior of the aircraft.

“So why does it feel like we failed?” Verma asked.

“This is war! There are going to be casualties. Get used to it. Just make sure that we kill more of them than we lose ours. And so far you are doing well. We lost three of our own tonight and brought down at a dozen of theirs. Older J-8IIs and a handful of J-11s make for a decent total. They threw their fighters as cover for their cruise-missiles. Same shit they have pulling for the last week! They are willing to trade the lives of a dozen of their pilots in exchange for shutting down one of our logistical centers. The bastards are committed. And so are we. There was no way we could have concentrated on the missiles with those buggers charging at us. And a few missiles got through to Thoise. Tough shit. Get used to it!”

The pilot looked at his wristwatch and patted Verma on the shoulder before moving to the cockpit. Verma watched the pilot walk away and sighed.

No. We have to do better!

NORTH OF PARU

BHUTAN

DAY 7 + 2300 HRS

Fernandez stepped out of his command trailer on to the fresh snow outside. He had the chewed-out remnants of his last cigar from hours ago still in the corner of his mouth. He looked around and saw his Pinaka launchers deployed in the valley hundreds of meters away from each other and hastily painted white for camouflage by his men. It didn’t look pretty, but pretty wasn’t his business.

Then there were a dozen other vehicles also scattered into the valley. A line of trucks bringing in more ready-to-fire rounds were continuously making their way on the mud roads from the airport. Heavily loaded vehicles made their way in, off-loaded and then drove back to the airport to pick up more rounds.

As Fernandez watched, men from his unit were currently using logs and ropes to pull out one such truck that had sunk into a patch of mud-snow slurry on the road. He chewed out his cigar in disgust.

The problem for him at the moment was not Chinese attacks from the ground or the air. His main problem was resupply. This should not have surprised anyone, but what surprised him was that it did surprise many people up the chain of command. Many of those simply could not grasp the rate at which his unit was using up rockets.

And the attack on Paru had only messed things up more. He realized that there was no need for the Chinese artillery to go head-to-head with his deadly Pinaka systems in order to disable his offensive capability. All they had to do was choke off his supply of ready-to-fire rockets and his launchers would simply become mute observers to the war.

The air-force was doing the same to the Chinese in Tibet, attacking Chinese highways and roads. The problem there was that for every road they struck, there were many others that existed on that flat terrain up on the Tibetan plateau. That was a major advantage for the PLA right now.