Chimera

“Okay, people. Listen up. Here’s what we are going to do. Divert any available air and ground support to Adesara that we can lay our hands on to help him wither the Chinese assaults and hold Daulat-beg-oldi. Tell the Galwan and Kongka-La Brigade commanders that there is to be no retreats. They will stand and fight and keep our supply lines to northern Ladakh open. If any one of these sectors falls, the entire line will get rolled up or starved for supplies and then overrun. We are not letting a repeat of 1962 happen on my watch. Is that understood?”

He looked around at his staff and noticed no questions. So he turned to his operations chief again.

“Contact the air-force and tell them to allocate as high a concentration of their strike aircraft as they can to the DBO sector. At least that’s one mistake we won’t carry over from the last war.”

EAST OF DAULAT BEG OLDI

LADAKH

DAY 2 + 1120 HRS

“Here they come!”

Sudarshan lowered his binoculars as he stood on top of the turret of his lead BMP. He looked around. The eight BMP-IIs under his command were still there, still in loose formation. They were parked amongst the now vacant defensive positions of a Chinese Border Guards company headquarters.

Most of the Chinese soldiers from this position were still in their trenches or the open ground nearby, lying in their pools of blood or shredded to bits by the auto-cannon rounds…

Sudarshan’s light armor force had just completed their diversionary movement. This had covered the deployment and subsequent attack by the NAMICA platoon against the Chinese armor columns to the northwest, behind them. That attack had been successful, as Sudarshan could now tell based on the dozens of thick black smoke columns rising into the gray winter sky.

But that battle had cost him all of his T-72Ms…

In the meantime the Chinese second wave was skirting around the burning hulks of their assault force from the north, instead of the south. Sudarshan smiled as he thought about that.

They know the severe anti-tank threat that exists south of the Chip-Chap River.

My boys, to be exact!

But Sudarshan was not exactly having a free reign to the south. His force was now about to be engaged by the scattered groups of Chinese ZBDs that had made up the Chinese third line of armor.

And there are a lot of them for our comfort…

To that end he had ordered a stop to his south-eastern advance into Chinese held territory after they had smashed the thin line of Red Border Guards units in the sector. They had slid into this southern flank like a knife entering the Chinese gut. His force had mauled its way past the LAC and was now standing beyond it.

Not for long though…

The approaching dust clouds were now less than four kilometers away and were splashing across the frozen Chip-Chap River much in the same way his own force had done not so long ago.

Sudarshan brought up his helmet mounted comms mouthpiece and ordered his driver and gunner to get ready. He jumped back down the hatch into the commander’s position and closed the hatch behind him. The other seven vehicle commanders did the same.

With a large rumble of their diesel engines, the entire force executed a reverse move up the small wall like mound that the Chinese here had been using as cover. Once back on the reverse slope to the west, they stopped with a jerk and moved ever so slightly until each vehicle was in a hull down position. The soviet designers of the BMP had placed a lot of attention to making the vehicle low profile, even at the cost of top-plate armor protection. And while the BMPs were extremely unfit to take on the role of direct attack against enemy armor, its light weight and high mobility gave it a lot of advantages. The NAMICA variant of this basic chassis was one technological solution around this vehicle.

Even at the tactics level, it offered some advantages.

If the commanders chose to see it, that is.

But stealth was not one of the advantages Sudarshan had. The snow all around them was contrasting around their hot vehicle engines and burning hot auto-cannon barrels. The Indian vehicle crews also knew that the Chinese had their own UAVs overhead and had probably detected their entire force via thermal optics. In fact, the movement of the twelve ZBDs maneuvering east of them showed clearly that the Chinese commanders knew exactly where Sudarshan and his advance element were. But they could only see where he was, not what he was doing…

Within fifteen minutes the ZBDs had spread out in a loose line-abreast formation and had begun advancing his force.

Sudarshan watched and waited.