Chimera

“Very well. Get your requirements listed out. Your Il-76 will land at nine in the morning. Also, before I forget,” Subramanian pulled into his coat pocket and removed what appeared to be a small cloth circle about five-inch in diameter and tossed it to Dutt. On it was stitched the background of the Himalayan peaks with white tops and brown bases with the frontal silhouette of a helicopter gunship in black. Around the outer perimeter of the circle was stitched:

199 HU: The Himalayan Gunners

Dutt rubbed his thumb over the stitching and smiled. Subramanian laughed grimly.

“That came into my office an hour ago. Now your group has a name and a unit. For now. Live up to it. Show us what your machine is capable of doing. But more importantly, show it to the red bastards!”

THE VILLAGE OF DOKUNG

NORTHERN SIKKIM

DAY 3 + 0600 HRS

“They are here much earlier than expected,” Ansari noted as he lowered his binoculars.

“Yes, they are. I should ask them how they managed to pull that off,” the Colonel commanding the local army battalion replied as he removed his night-vision goggles. Ansari laughed at that.

“Indeed! Probably whacked some Chinese outfit along the way, I bet!”

The twelve darkened figures were slowly clambering down the high snow-covered peaks of the Himalayas as they entered Indian Territory.

Ansari smiled at the sight. They had been right about Gephel and his teams all along. Here were twelve men coming back after weeks of operations in the arctic cold weather of Tibet. These men were the bearers of cold hard information about the Chinese in Tibet. It was Ansari’s job to debrief the team, make sure they had good food and to make sure this operation was closed out permanently.

Kongra-La sits at the tip of northern Sikkim and is approached after moving up the magnificent valleys of the north-south running Yumtang River. Ansari’s team had arrived at the village on board a Mi-17 that had taken off from a small army helipad at Mangan, north of Gangtok and flown northwards up the Yumtang valley which gradually increased in altitude from four-thousand feet right up to sixteen-thousand feet above sea-level.

The peaks surrounding Kongra-La were all above eighteen-thousand feet. Gephel’s team had walked through these peaks on their way into the plains of Tibet months ago as all other passes were sealed off by the PLA. They had walked through the most brutally cold winds and rocky terrain before entering the Tibetan plateau.

There was no food to be salvaged in the barren terrain of Tibet just north from these mountains until the fertile Gyantse valley, which was extremely well populated by PLA units at any given time. As a result, all food items had to be carried along by the team members. So the teams had to be extracted frequently in order to resupply and rearm them. And since all of the travel was on foot, most of the time inside Tibet teams was spent on the ingress and egress to the target rather than the target area itself.

Couldn’t be helped back then…

And now it is no longer needed!

Ansari thought and sighed.

Now that the two countries were officially at war, all bets were off on such operations. Indian SOCOM teams were already in Tibet. But Gephel and his team were black as far as operations were concerned. Ansari wanted this thing done and dusted so that he could return back to his parent unit and do some good in the actual war.

He grunted at that.

Actual war. That’s a good one. Try telling that to Gephel and his boys. They have been in a brutal war for months…

As he watched Gephel and his men approaching the base of the snow-covered peak, he thought about Colonel Younghusband and his small group of officers and soldiers who had travelled across these very peaks back in the beginning of the previous century. It was when Great Britai had attempted to bring Tibet under its sphere of influence.

That attempt north of Kongra-La had failed as a result of political resistance by the Tibetan officials despite the undeniable truth of military imbalance. Their stubbornness had seen Lord Curzon, then viceroy to India, dispatching a larger force of men under the command of Brigadier Macdonald and a political mission under Colonel Younghusband to try and force the issue by force. It was back then that the rabble of Tibetan peasant-soldiers who stood opposite the Gorkha and Sikh Battalions under Macdonald, were soundly defeated and massacred on the road to Lhasa.

And here we are today, facing one of the world’s largest land armies across the same terrain…

The bottom line today was that the Chinese were bringing down Divisions from the staging area in Gyantse towards the Chumbi valley on the Indian border.

And they had to be stopped.