Chimera

He brought up his rifle to aim but an enemy bullet ripped through his arm. Other rifle sounds from the nine enemy soldiers filled the air and threw up snow all around him. He turned and saw his arm bleeding profusely as the pain shot up to his head. He cursed and that turned out to be his last breath as another bullet caught him in the neck and exited from the back. His body slumped into the snow with a thud…

* * *

…Tarun lowered his Dragunov sniper rifle and looked above its optics to see the two bodies in the snow, a few hundred meters east.

“Looks like I got myself somebody important!” he exclaimed over the gunfire as Spear team got into the assault on Barshong.

“No shit! You want to keep firing though!” Vikram shouted from a dozen meters away as he took cover behind a boulder and removed another clip from his harness chest pocket after dropping the first one from his Tavor rifle.

“Spear! Keep up the advance!” Pathanya shouted over the team’s comms and ran a few dozen feet down the slope to another rocky cover position. A handful of PLA survivors near the headquarters started returning fire and bullets began ricocheting around nearby rocks.

The Indian paratroopers of the 11TH Para-SF Battalion under Colonel Misra had landed behind enemy ridgeline defenses east of Barshong on air-force Mi-17s. They had arrived just behind the rocket artillery barrage from Lieutenant-Colonel Fernandez’s Pinaka unit at Paru. That barrage had eliminated a good portion of the PLA Highland Division headquarters seconds before the assault.

But now they had to move fast and secure Barshong before the three hundred PLA soldiers on the eastern ridges realized that they had been bypassed and began arriving in force here…

Pathanya looked up and saw the sunlight from the west glinting off the Searcher-II UAV overhead in the blue sky. He removed the SATCOM radio speaker from his chest harness and pushed it under his boonie-hat to his ears:

“Warlord, this is Spear-One! Do you copy? Over?”

“Roger, Spear. We copy all.” Joint-Force-Bhutan headquarters chimed back on the radio.

“Spear has successfully bypassed enemy defenses and is at objective Bravo! Main force has arrived and is rolling in. We confirm loss of one of our birds. We need you to initiate bombardment of eastern ridge and suppress enemy positions! Over!”

Pathanya put the speaker back into its slot in the harness and looked around. Vikram, Tarun, Sarvanan, Ravi and the others were already past his position and were advancing under steadily reducing fire from the PLA positions. He saw the paratroopers overrunning the enemy headquarters and taking no prisoners. Soon the sounds of Chinese QBZ-95 rifles were subsiding…

He jerked his head up as the sky filled with the screech of diving supersonic rockets and the PLA positions east of Barshong disappeared in a line of smoke filled explosions. A cloud of brown dust rose into the sky for hundreds of feet. The rumble from the explosions passed through his feet several seconds later.

Pathanya got on his feet and advanced down the slope to catch up with his men. He saw Vikram and Tarun walking cautiously towards the three dead bodies lying some distance away. Vikram slung his rifle on the chest and pulled out his thigh-holstered sidearm as they slowly approached the bodies. Tarun looked over to Vikram who nodded. So he lowered his Dragunov rifle and knelt beside the center body and turned him over. It was an old man with white hair and a black star on his digital-camo uniform. Tarun whistled and stood up on his feet.

“What is it?” Pathanya said as he jogged over.

“The Highland Division commander,” Vikram said soberly.

Pathanya looked over the grimaced face of the dead Chinese officer and sighed. He looked around as the hills to the east rumbled again as a second salvo from Hotel-Six ripped the PLA positions there to shreds even as more Mi-17 noises filled the air from the south.

“Okay. You two,” Pathanya pointed to Vikram and Tarun, “make sure to check all of his pockets for papers and anything else you can find. The intelligence boys will be very interested in knowing what this man carried with him. If possible, we will get his body out on one of the outgoing birds, so mark the position. I am taking the rest of Spear and meeting up with the Paras in the village so that they know we are still alive. Understood?”

Pathanya received nods from the two men so he trudged off in the snow down the slope. He walked past the burnt tree trunks spewing smoke and past the bullet riddled bodies of the dead PLA soldiers. He saw Indian paratroopers in the ruins of Barshong as they pursued the last enemy survivors retreating west towards Mount Chomolhari, leaving the Highland Division staging area in northern Bhutan to the Indians…

THE SOUTH CHINA SEA

DAY 13 + 1600 HRS

“Tally ho!”