Chimera

He fell back on the muddy road with a thump, still clasping the binoculars. His orders died in his dying breath.

The suddenness of it all seemed to halt the passage of time as all of the stunned PLA soldiers looked at the body of their battery commander laying on the road over an expanding pool of blood…

There was a series of rifle fire bursts from the nearby bushes and boulders up the hillside. Several Chinese soldiers fell to the ground as bullets ripped through their winter uniforms.

The survivors scrambled in all directions to find cover and return fire. The Yitian crew began clambering on top of their vehicle and into the hatches so that they could move the vehicle out of danger. Pathanya spotted the gunner and the driver attempting to get inside their vehicle, turned his rifle slightly and fired a continuous burst. Bullets ricocheted off the metallic hull of the vehicle with distinct pings and sparks flew in all directions. The gunner screamed in agony and his lifeless body fell on top of the vehicle, just a few inches away from the turret hatch.

The driver managed to get inside and close the hatch above him before Pathanya could slap another magazine into his rifle…

Damn! Damn! Damn!

Pathanya dropped the empty magazine from his rifle and slapped a new one in there. The rocks and boulders around him began to get hit with Chinese rifle fire. His team was returning fire and dropping Chinese soldiers quickly, but there were a lot more of them to the north and south and it wouldn’t take them long to get here and overwhelm the handful of Indians.

This had to be taken care of quickly.

Pathanya looked over the top of the boulder he was hiding behind and keyed his comms:

“Vik, Ravi: driver of armor vehicle is inside! Take it out!”

“Roger! Engaging!” Vikram shouted over the gunfire noise.

Further up the slope, Vikram and Ravi had finished disabling all of the Chinese optics on the observation post and had sheathed their knives. Ravi had taken out his rifle and had taken cover behind the rocks. He began taking aim from above.

Vikram grabbed Ravi’s backpack and grabbed the RPG-22 shoulder fired anti-armor weapon. He flipped the safety and extended the telescopic tube to full length, locked it and set it up on his shoulder. From this range, he could aim manually and hardly miss. He took a couple of seconds to aim during which he noted that the Yitian driver had started the diesel engines and the vehicle was spewing out engine smoke.

As the vehicle lurched forward, the Chinese soldiers fell behind it to take cover. The vehicle turned towards Pathanya’s men just as the rocket fired by Vikram flew down the slope trailing smoke, slammed into its frontal armor and exploded amidst a fireball that quickly vanished, leaving large licks of flame rising from the vehicle…

Vikram keyed his comms: “Target destroyed!”

Ravi opened fire from the outpost just as Vikram threw away the disposable launcher and grabbed his own rifle lying on the snow nearby. Both men opened up with short bursts of fire that caught the exposed Chinese soldiers in a cross-fire from an elevated position. They retreated behind the cover of two 4x4 trucks while one of the remaining crews clambered on top of the 35mm gun turrets behind one of those vehicles. Pathanya noted the elevation of that gun turret and keyed his comms instantly:

“Vik! Ravi! Get out now! Incoming fire!”

The Chinese gunner opened up a moment later and the large-caliber cannon rounds ripped through the trees and branches and slammed into rocks near the two Indians. The explosions were powerful enough to shred the rocky cover, filling the air with flying rocks and gravel as Vikram and Ravi scrambled out there and dived into snow on either side.

The 35mm cannon rounds decimated what remained of the position in seconds. But the large muzzle flashes of the guns prevented the gunner from observing the effect of his fire and so he treated it as an area weapon. He shredded trees all over that slope causing a lot of the branches and snow to come crashing down. The thunderous noise of the gunfire removed all coherence from both the Indian and Chinese sides…

Pathanya crouched back behind the boulder and removed a grenade from his belt-holster and hoisted it inside the tube of his rifle’s barrel-mounted grenade-launcher. He nodded to Sarvanan and both men raised their heads over the rocks with their weapons. Sarvanan put the tripod of his INSAS LMG on the rocks and let loose a full barrage of covering fire that sent the Chinese soldiers diving for cover.

Pathanya elevated his rifle upwards and pulled the trigger of his rifle and fired the grenade on a depressed trajectory to its target. The grenade hit the base of the 35mm gun turret and exploded in a metal-on-metal explosion that sent shrapnel flying in all directions and left the gunner lying on his seat riddled with chest wounds.

The anti-air gun turret was thoroughly disabled.