Chimera

The IAF was out in force in the Ladakh skies for the first phase of operation Phoenix. At the vanguard of the forming aerial armada were the Mig-29s of No. 28 Squadron deployed from Leh and Avantipur. They were tasked primarily for air-defense. Two-hundred kilometers to the south, a single Phalcon AWACS from No. 50 Squadron was also deployed in the skies above Himachal-Pradesh, providing airborne eyes and ears for Air-Marshal Bhosale at the WAC.

Then there were the two large groups of Su-30s just west of Khurana’s Mig-29s. One of these groups had eight Su-30s from No. 17 Squadron “Golden Arrows” and was on standby to support the Mig-29s should the PLAAF appear in force. These were also tasked with the job of protecting the Phalcon in case the Mig-29s were fully committed into the fight. Nobody at WAC wanted nasty Chinese anti-AWACS surprises at this time…

The Indians weren’t the only ones in the skies, of course.

Khurana was checking the output of the RWR. It was showing some ground-based, long-range Chinese radars in Aksai-Chin and to the north beyond the Karakoram pass. Then there was a single Chinese KJ-2000 AWACS aircraft flying far to the north. No fighter emissions were being detected. Chinese ones, that is.

A hundred kilometers to the west beyond the Siachen glacier, two Pakistani F-16 radars were active and tracking the Indian aerial armada gathering over Ladakh. That was potentially worrisome. The Pakistanis were acting aggressive already, and the war between India and China was less than a day old.

Khurana’s radio squawked with the chatter between the Phalcon controllers and the other group of four Su-30s now approaching the Aksai Chin…

OVER LADAKH

DAY 1 + 1810 HRS

The new set of four Su-30s, also from No. 17 Squadron, was now heading directly for the LAC. But they were not about to go straight into the kill-zones set up by Feng with the S-300s. These four aircraft were armed for a very specific job. And as such, they were not even going to enter the kill-zones over the Aksai Chin.

Each aircraft was armed with a single Brahmos Block-I ALCM under their fuselage pylon specially modified for this role. The four aircraft were spread out in line abreast formation and were barely a thousand feet above the peaks of the Ladakh Mountains below as they streaked towards the border. Just beyond the Chinese fuzzy detection range of the S-300 radars, the aircrafts accelerated to very high subsonic speeds and punched off their deadly cargo. The long tube shaped missiles fell cleanly off the four aircraft and ignited their motors…

By this time the four aircraft were already pulling tight pitch-out man oeuvres and headed back out of the Chinese radar detection.

The targeting information had been fed to the missile on-board flight computers before the aircraft had left the airbase at Pathankot. And they had been launched from one-hundred-fifty kilometers out, allowing for a time-to-target of around two minutes. The four missiles streaked across the Ladakh peaks with a massive shockwave thunderclap following in their wake…

They were detected immediately after release by the Chinese radars in the Aksai Chin and multiple S-300 systems engaged the four inbound missiles. Even with the phenomenal speeds and low reaction times involved, the S-300 proved to be a worthy opponent. These systems had been placed east of the highway through the Aksai Chin only because of the clear line of sight the plains provided to the defenders. Feng had done his homework.

Once the Brahmos missiles cleared the peaks between Galwan River to the north and Mobdi-la peaks to the south, they had entered relatively clear terrain in full view of these deadly defenses. With more than a dozen interceptor missiles targeting the four inbound Brahmos missiles, losses were inevitable…

Two of the four Brahmos missiles were destroyed by several interceptor missile hits. The remaining two, however, streaked past the defenses and slammed into two Big-Bird radar systems for an S-300 battery in the central sector. The result explosions destroyed both radar systems completely, shutting down the anti-missile radar capability for that sector of the highway. But Feng had designed the system to be robust and had included overlap with other nearby batteries and redundant auxiliary radar systems that went active minutes after the primary ones went down.

Back on board the Phalcon, Verma noted that there had been a temporary shutdown of radar activity in the central sector of the Aksai Chin. But several minutes later it had closed up again as new radar sources coming online were tagged by the onboard EW sensors.