Chimera

Kongara watched the gunners of the various vehicles on either side of his own firing continuous cannon bursts against the dug-in Chinese soldiers. A line of explosions rocked the ground behind the Chinese defenses and the mortar fire stopped. He thanked the friendly UAVs above directing friendly artillery fire from the powerful 155mm howitzers for that…

His eyes suddenly spotted what looked a fast, stubby, thin cylinder moving across his view towards some vehicle down the line.

“Oh shit! Incoming miss…!”

His frantic radio call was cut midsentence as a massive white flash of light saturated his NVG systems and a shockwave ran through the interiors of his vehicle with a thunderclap. A moment later the radios were alive with the sounds of chaos.

“Two is gone! Oh my god! Two is gone! We have lost Thunder-two!”

Kongara did not join that chaos. He waited in silence as his sights regained enough vision. He then turned them to the side to see a BMP further south from him burning furiously as it got left behind the advancing line. The Major was back on the air a second later:

“Cut the god damned chatter! Keep the net clear! Keep advancing, damn it! Thunder-One out!”

Kongara rotated his optics back towards the east to see that his gunner was busy engaging visible targets and so were a bunch of other vehicles in the line.

Good.

Kongara restored his composure. They had just lost another vehicle, but the Major was right. They would lose a lot more if they did not put that loss behind them…

By now the sounds of vehicle cannon-fire had given way to chaotic small-arms fire as the Sikh soldiers stormed into the Chinese trenches and bunkers while the vehicles cut down any Chinese soldier who attempted to flee from the terrifying lunge of the Sikhs.

It was a quick and bitter massacre.

As the bursts of gunfire gave way to silence and the Sikhs began mopping up the Chinese Regiment’s position, Kongara noticed that the Major commanding the 10TH Mechanized vehicles had already diverted a group of BMP-IIs along with a couple of the NAMICA tracks to move beyond the positions from the south. This group was now heading into the vast open spaces east of the LAC as their turrets continued engaging some targets at long-range…

The Chinese line south of the Chip-Chap River had been broken.

As silence prevailed and the battlefield lay littered with dead and wounded Chinese soldiers, Kongara could only see Indian soldiers milling about. The 9TH Punjab Battalion commander’s voice came on the net and declared an “all clear” for the line of halted Indian armor in front of the dead Chinese defenses.

Out on the trenches, a handful of captured Chinese soldiers were being herded back. As these captured enemy combatants moved past the parked rows of Indian vehicles, Kongara opened the top hatch of his vehicle and looked around…

With the static positions destroyed, maneuver warfare now beaconed for the 10TH Mechanized Battalion and its sister units deploying into Ladakh.

Kongara jumped off his vehicle onto the gravel and picked up a mound of earth as it dawned upon him that they had just liberated a piece of land that had been under Chinese control for more than sixty years! As the sun began rising from the east and illuminated the very tips of the eastern faces of the Karakoram mountains, Kongara realized that it was a morning the likes his country had never seen before.

NORTHEAST BHUTAN

DAY 5 + 0730 HRS

The smoke was everywhere.

The village was on one of the last road heads in the sector after which there were only mud tracks and terrace-cultivated hills all the way to the northern border. But this village was no more. The Chinese long-range Smerch MBRL units had launched severe attacks an hour ago from beyond the border forty kilometers north and had practically razed the houses and huts to the ground…

The missing Chinese Division in south-central Tibet had finally been found the night before by Indian satellites. It was at the northern Tibet-Bhutan border. The Chinese Highland Division had moved south of the Karo-La in Tibet and had spread its regiments out along the Bhutanese border. Its intentions, as well as those of Beijing, had been made utterly clear: the invasion of Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.

The Royal Bhutanese Army had been deploying into northern Bhutan ever since. The RBA was moving everything it had along with some Indian support, but the elite Highland Division was far better equipped than anything the Bhutanese could throw at it.

And they make this so very clear to us…

Bhutanese Army Colonel Toshum thought as he stepped out of his jeep and walked past the line of trucks parked along the mountain road. Injured and panicked civilians were streaming and running back on the side of the road to the south.