Chimera

With their officers yelling out commands and passing orders, the Chinese soldiers picked up the first shells from the small ammunition dumps near each gun and loaded them inside the chamber. They did so in perfect unison that would have made any drill instructor proud. The gun azimuth and elevation was already set. The ammo dumps were ready to resupply with ready-to-fire shells. Further away, the Chinese flight-crews for the unmanned aerial drones had already entered Indian airspace to the south to conduct artillery target designations. With everything ready, time seemed to slow down and an eerie silence filled the mist-covered early morning skies…

A minute later it was disrupted by the shout from the battery commanders:

“Open fire!”

The grounds shook under the thunder of a thousand field guns all along the Arunachal Pradesh border while the skies were filled with rocket fire from dozens of Chinese MBRL systems.

To the south, Indian soldiers on the border, saw the Himalayan Mountains to their north silhouetted by orange-yellow glow. They then heard the screeching noise of rockets flying over their heads to the south just as inbound artillery started hammering into their positions. The PLA 13TH Group Army had just opened the ground offensive against India inside Arunachal Pradesh…

HILLS NORTH OF WALONG

ARUNACHAL PRADESH

DAY 1 + 0805 HRS

“Incoming fire! Take cover! Now!”

Krishnan shouted as he picked up his rifle and ran from where he had been standing towards the line of trenches nearby. His men had dug these out of the hillside and lined them with rocks and sandbags for protection above the riverbank.

As he ran, the line of hills north of the border was silhouetted against the continuous flash of lights while the sounds of the incoming shells sweeping down through the skies became louder. Krishnan and his men had barely jumped into their trenches when the ground shook violently and the dirt and smoke clouds enveloped the air around them in a massive show of light and thunder…

Krishnan was crouching inside his trench along with his radio operator as the latter was contacting the new battalion command post further south. Contact was made with the acting battalion commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Nath. Nath had taken over now that Colonel Malik was nowhere to be found and presumed dead. Brigade HQ had been hit badly as well. And 2ND Mountain Division HQ was still scrambling to make sense of what was happening. So Nath was the acting battalion commander until somebody senior came over to relieve him from that post…

It was almost impossible to hear the other side amidst the thunderclaps of exploding shells. Krishnan took the radio speaker:

“Foxtrot-One, Foxtrot-One, this is — Two. We are under heavy fire from Chinese indirect tube artillery! Requesting priority counter-battery fire-support! Over!”

“Roger! Foxtrot-One copies all! We are getting hit over here pretty bad too! Stand-by!” Nath replied.

* * *

At his end, Nath handed back the radio to his signals officer and turned to face a Major who was on another radio-set talking to the commander of the battery of field guns responsible for providing indirect fire-support for this sector. The Major was not too happy at what he was hearing and looked back at Nath and shook his head.

“Sir, the battery is in bad shape! They just got hit by Chinese MBRL rocket fire!”

Nath’s facial expression now turned red with anger as he stormed over to snatch the radio away from the Major before shouting into it as a cloud of dirt fell on them from a nearby explosion of a Chinese shell:

“What the hell is going on out there? I have men getting hit with Chinese shelling and you are telling me we cannot respond?!”

There was more static on the radio as another shell slammed into a bunch of rocks nearby, shattering them to rubble and showering everybody nearby…

Nath got back on his feet inside the trench and cleared the radio set of dust and gravel before grabbing the speaker again:

“Hello? Quebec-One, do you read my last?”

“Roger! Quebec-One copies all! Sir, we just got hammered by a Chinese long-range MLRS barrage and have taken serious damage to my guns and the crews manning them. I am down to sixty percent manpower and less than thirty percent equipment levels here. My gun-crews are working as fast as they can to get the remaining guns back into action but they cannot work faster than they currently are!”

“God damn it!” Nath threw the radio speaker against the wall of the trench in frustration before turning to face his second-in-command:

“Where’s that Pinaka MBRL battery?”

“The Divisional MBRL battery?” the Major asked in surprise.

“Yes, damn it! Where is it? Is it still operational?” Nath thundered.

“Walong, sir. But that has not been deputed to us yet.”