Chimera

As the mushroom cloud over the airport dissipated and smoke and debris settled around the airport, the blue skies above no longer had circular contrails, only straight ones heading radially away…

KASHGAR AIRBASE

SINKIANG AUTONOMOUS REGION

CHINA

DAY 1 + 1630 HRS

Feng was finding himself in a difficult situation with Major-General Zhigao. The latter man had reminded Feng exactly what he thought of his posting to Kashgar minutes after he had landed at the airbase. But Chen outranked them both, so if he ordered them to work together, there was little choice in the matter. Zhigao had left Feng to his work without further ado after the initial meeting in his office. With that behind him, Feng had hoped his existence here would prove easier. But that was not to be.

As he had come to discover in his few hours here, Zhigao was not a realist. He was a supreme optimist in his own abilities as commander. And that was dangerous for both himself as well as the men under his command. Feng noticed that Zhigao had more bluster in him than battlefield competence. The lack of the latter was not uncommon within the PLAAF, as Feng, Chen and Wencang all knew. The Chinese had not fought an air war since the Korean War. They had certainly not done so against any decent air-force in the last few decades. They had a whole lot of shiny new equipment and young officers trained on the technical aspects.

Instead, many within the PLAAF had actually bought the propaganda they had grown up on and embedded it into their mindset. The Indians, in their minds, were nothing more than weak fools unable to withstand the might of China, the armed forces and economic might. The Tibetans were subhuman. The Chinese air-force of the new century could easily sweep aside any threats. The list went on. And unfortunately for Feng, his current sector commander, Zhigao, was a product of this class.

And while Zhigao exuded reckless confidence in the face of danger, Feng often had to fight his own mind from becoming defeatist. That was the other end of the spectrum for him. He had to respect the enemy, in this case the Indians, but could hardly do so at the cost of his own country and its air-force. Accepting Indian dominance over a technological niche area was not an option. It was his job and duty to find ways around such problems and defeat the Indians on their own turf.

He also understood that men like Zhigao often made to high ranking positions more on political backing and corruption than real potential as combat leaders. This was especially true of the PLA, which controlled the lion’s share of the vast military-industrial empire within China. Men like Zhigao within the PLA often spent more time running their corners of this empire than in their operations centers. How much of that was true for Zhigao was anybody’s guess. But one thing was clear to Feng: he had to tread lightly unless he wished to have himself put against a wall for some trumped up charges like lack of belief. Laughable perhaps, but it had happened to several middle-ranking officers over the years that had run afoul of their bosses. Chen would not always be around to save his skin.

As he stood inside the operations center at Kashgar, supervising the PLAAF operations near the Aksai Chin in Ladakh, Feng understood that the outcome of the battles to come would be dependent on whether he could erode Zhigao’s boundless optimism while improving his own aggression towards the Indians…

A Lieutenant-Colonel walked over to him and handed him a folder with some satellite imagery of airbases in Kashmir and Ladakh that had been hit by the Chinese cruise-missiles thus far. He opened the file and glanced through the images… and frowned.

“Is that all that they achieved?”

“Yes Sir. Leh is operational again as far as we can tell. We did manage to do some damage to their ability to bring in larger transports. You can see that in the third image: the runway is damaged to the point that the Indians cannot bring in Il-76 or C-17s transports into Leh for some time. But the Mig-29s are back. See this one parked outside their undamaged hardened shelters in image four, taken a few hours after our strike. Our attacks also destroyed two Indian cheetah helicopters as seen in image five and six,” the Lieutenant-Colonel replied.

Feng nodded. He knew exactly why the hardened shelters had not been hit. Their guidance systems were not nearly accurate enough for that level of precision targeting.

“The destruction of those helicopters is inconsequential to us. The same is true for their transport aircraft. I am very sure that our land forces have enough capability to not be worried about their force-reconstitution abilities. But what worries me is that we were unable to prevent fighters operating from this airbase and the others for too long,” Feng said just as Zhigao walked into the operations center.