Chimera

From there they would board fixed wing aircraft to take them to Korla. The PLAAF operations center at Kashgar was now no longer considered safe and Chen had ordered its evacuation. Once there, they would be based alongside the operations staff of the 26TH Air Division and would have effective fighter cover from the 19TH Fighter Division forces based at several airbases nearby.

The problem was that Korla was over a thousand kilometers to the northeast. In effect, moving to Korla meant that entire south-western Chinese airspace was now effectively abandoned.

But not lost yet!

Feng reminded himself that the airspace was not being handed over to the Indians. And heavy fighters such as J-11s based at Urumqi and Korla could easily patrol the region with airborne radar coverage.

But challenging the skies was very different from owning them. They could now no longer intercept each and every Indian mission over that region of Chinese airspace. And that was bad news for the PLA forces in Ladakh…

“You ready?”

Feng turned around to see Chen walking over from his staff car. Feng sighed and released his anger. His fists became loose again and blood rushed to his knuckles. Chen nodded as he understood the emotion.

“Nothing to be done here, Feng,” he said and looked at the firefighters hosing down a blazing section of the terminal some distance away. “At least not by you and me. We are needed in Korla. Let’s go.”

He patted Feng on the back and then waved to the flight-crew of the Mi-17s to start pre-flight. Both men walked over to the nearest helicopter and walked on board through the open rear ramp. A few minutes later the first of three Mi-17s lifted off the helipad and nosed down towards the northeast, picking up airspeed as it left Kashgar behind…

NORTH OF DOTANANG

NORTHERN BHUTAN

DAY 9 + 0900 HRS

The 11TH Para-SF Battalion and a BMP-II equipped mechanized-infantry platoon had fought their way to Dotanang and seized the village without much of a fight. There was a reason for that. The PLA Battalion there had simply melted away to the north just as Misra’s forces had reached the southern end of the village.

It had been a tactical withdrawal that had been conducted professionally by the Chinese. Now the Indians in Dotanang were fully expecting to be struck by a Chinese counter-attack on the village and were digging in…

The valley became abuzz with noise as a Nishant UAV flew over the valley north of Dotanang. The sunlight glinted off the top armor of the BMP-IIs parked on the narrow muddy roads of the village and was easily spotted by the UAV operators as the electro-optical pod on board looked around for Chinese activity further north.

The flight-crew followed the snow-covered dirt path along the small river that went north into the valley. The drone had advanced a good half-dozen kilometers north of the village when flashes of light suddenly erupted all around and lines of tracers flew by. The valley below suddenly erupted with rapid thud-thud-thud noises as the airspace around the drone lit up with shrapnel.

The drone operators at Haa-Dzong to the south initiated evasive maneuvers and the drone banked to the side, turning south while climbing. To no avail. The sky around it was awash with red-hot shrapnel and tracer fire. Several of these ripped through the wings and perforated the boxy fuselage. The drone broke up under the impacts and disappeared in a small fireball on its way down into valley…

* * *

“Oops! There go our eyes in the sky!” Vikram noted from his position, two kilometers north of where the drone went down. The tracer fire stopped as the wreckage slammed into the trees a few kilometers north of the village and a column of black smoke rose into the blue sky above. The valley went quiet once again.

“So now we know the Chinese have some decent anti-air capability north of here,” Ravi said as he tucked his Tavor rifle tighter into his chest.

He heard a grunted agreement over the comms.

“Yeah, no shit!” Pathanya said finally as he lowered his binoculars. “We could have used that information five minutes ago!”

He keyed his comms: “Vik, get the IMFS out and see if you can spot the guns that fired on our bird. Their tracer rounds gave us a pretty clear idea where they are on the road. Let’s confirm it.”

“Roger. Deploying IMFS,” Vikram said and pulled back from the boulders he was using as cover on the ledge overlooking the valley below. He put his rifle on the rocks and motioned to Sarvanan to cover him. He then pulled down his backpack and removed the IMFS.

“Okay reds, let’s see what you have down there,” Vikram said to himself as he crawled on his stomach over the boulders and set up the IMFS. Visually there was not much to see. The trees on the hillsides pretty much denied any direct sighting. He switched to infrared and depressed the button for white-hot so that all high temperature sources were shaded down from white in order of decreasing radiated temperature.