Chimera

And they had done a good job collecting men similar to him, he had realized once he had a chance to meet them at a remote training base in the northern state of Uttar-Pradesh. He had met Major Ngawang there. Once they had inserted into Tibet, he had carried out his objectives with clarity, vision and determination. But over the last few weeks he had begun to see that the overall plans had failed. The rebellion was faltering and Tibet would once again return to the iron grasp of the Chinese sooner rather than later. Once winter set in, it would signal the end of the last sputters of resistance from the rebels. And what then?

What he and his team had seen over the past day here was highly symptomatic of this reality…

The combined force of ten men under Gephel had been holed up in the hills northwest of the village for the past day. They had watched the botched attempt on the PLA convoy by the rebels that had left the lead truck burning under the force of an improvised roadside bomb. Other such devices had apparently not worked as they should have, and sure enough the rest of the convoy had stopped and dozens of soldiers had deployed into the houses bordering the road. It then became a house-to-house fight between an overwhelming PLA infantry force and a small rebel unit.

But for all their flaws, the Tibetan rebels had fought bravely. That was something Gephel could concede. Of course, from a military standpoint it had not been enough. In modern warfare, it usually never is. The Tibetans within the eastern outskirts of the village had been wiped out to the last man. More rebels had converged from the east to help their besieged comrades, but they too were now retreating in a running battle with that PLA battalion. The PLA for their part had been caught by surprise initially, but that hadn’t lasted long. There were now APC convoys coming down the road from the northeast with their headlights switched on in a show of defiance. Artillery had pounded the hills east of the village for an hour before a fresh PLA infantry Battalion had begun advancing across the river towards the eastern hills. The original Battalion that had been ambushed was now on holding status in the western outskirts of the village, clearing the remaining houses.

“Incoming…” Ngawang reported as he watched a PLA mortar platoon getting ready to drop smoke cover for their advancing troops.

“Organized, disciplined… and predictable,” Gephel said as he made mental notes about the PLA tactics, equipment, logistics, command and control and ISR capabilities.

That was when a burst of gunfire rang out from one of the extreme western houses in the village. It caught everybody by surprise, Gephel and Ngawang included. They refocused their binoculars to find a section of PLA troops returning fire on a small house near whose door an officer now lay in a pool of blood. The tactical orientation of the Chinese forces had been eastwards thus far. Now there was confusion everywhere. There were several more grenade explosions that left three more soldiers dead on the main street of the village…

“Oh Shit!” Gephel said to no one in particular.

Although his team was not under fire, the fact was that the Chinese would soon begin advancing into these hills and more eyes would be facing this way now. The team ran an extreme risk of detection now more by accident rather than design. Sure enough, the first mortar shells were now hitting the foothills just below them. Gephel lowered himself behind cover and picked up his rifle with one hand; stowing his binoculars with the other while he shouted out orders:

“All right, we need to get out of here before they start searching these peaks. Move! Move! Move!”

IAF PHALCON AWACS,

OVER WESTERN LADAKH

MAY 15, 1848 HRS

“Inbound. Single-ship contact detected bearing two-one-nine heading southeast. Range two-one-zero kilo-mike. Angels thirty,” the radar console operator reported over the intercom. Wing-Commander Verma, the flight operations commander, was already walking over to the concerned console and peered at the computer screen over their shoulders.

“Type?”

Verma mentally absorbed the details from the screen. The operator shifted the interface screen to initiate inbound track. A second later the computer ran over the flight profile parameters with a known intelligence database before displaying the result on a corner of the screen.

“Possible J-10 variant. Designating inbound contact November-two-four. Track initiated,” the operator was already moving through the protocols but Verma remained lost in his own analysis.

“Might be a close formation two-ship flight. The reds don’t usually fly single aircraft patrols.”

“Could be, sir. Difficult to tell at this point. The contact is trying to keep within the peaks as best as he can. Once he gets closer we can differentiate the radar signature,” the operator did not look away from his monitor screens.

“Point of origin?”

“Bearing suggests dust-off from Kashgar, but we show no J-10 deployments that far west.”