Jamil grinned to himself, drinking slowly and biding his time.
We will win,
he thought to himself
. For every ounce of hatred you have for us, we will burn a pound of flesh. Look down upon me. Call me whatever you want. But soon I will make you pay. Your children, your grandchildren; the day is coming.
These were the thoughts that got Jamil through the Vegemite, through the glass of warm, watery Foster’s.
He’d been in Australia for nearly a month now, searching for the the American, Andreas. He was prepared to stay as long as it took.
He remembered Ahmed’s words as he left him at the motel entrance: “Don’t mention his name. Don’t ask questions. People already suspect you of being a terrorist. You’re a tourist. If you hear or see anything, Tweet immediately.”
Jamil sat at his table and sipped his beer. Beneath his windbreaker, he felt the silencer on his HK USP .45 caliber handgun jabbing into his left side, beneath his armpit. Eventually, the students left the bar. The bartender wiped down the bar with a blue rag and walked in and out of the kitchen, whistling the entire time.
Later, a pair of middle-aged men, both sunburned, came in and sat at the bar. They spoke with the bartender about the Great Barrier Reef. The bartender clearly liked the two tourists, who were drinking gin and tonics and laughing. Jamil ordered a second beer, still eavesdropping. These two were easier to listen in on; Cockney accents from working-class Britain.
“So what do people do around here, besides work the tourists?”
“There’s a bunch of stations inland,” said the bartender. “Mainly cattle. Just wait around. The hands get awfully thirsty around dinnertime. They’ll try and push you right offa those stools too.”
“I heard a story about a rancher saving a little girl’s life,” said one of the tourists. “They were talking about it at the hotel.”
“Happened at Chasvur, twenty minutes north of town,” said the bartender. “One of the ranchers climbed a sheer rock face in the pitch-black.”
Jamil heard the words and felt a chill run up his spine. He stepped to the bar.
“Pardon me,” Jamil said to the bartender, interrupting his next story. “Did you just say that a man climbed a cliff in the dark to save a girl?”
“A two-hundred-foot-tall cliff. But that wasn’t the half of it. He did it during a driving rainstorm. Climbed straight up Percy’s Ledge. Bare-handed. An American, I heard. Tough son of a bitch.”
Jamil stared for an extra moment at the bartender. He was about to ask, Who was it? The words were on the tip of his tongue. But then, he realized, he didn’t need to ask.
CHURCH ROAD
NEW DELHI, INDIA
More than five hundred miles south of the Kashmir war front, the air in downtown New Delhi sweltered. The sun beat down relentlessly on the city, on the crowds of people walking, lining the streets, sitting in cafés. Near the Kendriya Bus Terminal, a ruckus ensued along Church Road as the bright red and blue lights appeared in the distance followed soon thereafter by the high-pitched tone of the sirens.
At the lead, several police officers on motorcycles cleared the boulevard of people, forcing them off to the sides of the road. Soon, the motorcade came barreling down the road, cruising at more than sixty miles per hour, the sirens piercing the air.
The motorcycles were followed by vans that contained sophisticated equipment that enabled secure communication between the inhabitants of the vehicles in the motorcade and other parties, such as the Indian Ministry of Defense. Following the vans, four black Range Rovers, lift gates opened, gunmen strapped to the backs, their automatic weapons out, cocked to fire. After the Range Rovers, long, dark limousines were interspersed with more large SUVs.
Inside the seventh vehicle, a long, black, heavily fortified Mercedes-Benz limousine, President Rajiv Ghandra sat in the backseat.
Ghandra, at fifty-four years old, looked younger than his age. He had brown eyes that were framed by a chiseled face and a sharp nose. Ghandra’s longish black hair was parted neatly in the middle. He wore a dark gray suit, a stylish blue button-down shirt, and a blue and red tie. The one unusual aspect to his demeanor, a thin scar above his right eye, only added to the allure that made Ghandra so popular, especially with women.
A former IAF pilot, Ghandra had been elected to Parliament at the age of thirty-one. Now, in his second term as president, he looked as calm and serene as he did the first day of his presidency, completely unflappable, supremely confident, totally laid-back. He stared out the darkened, bulletproof glass of the limousine. His elbow was propped on the armrest, his hand formed into a fist that his jaw now rested on as he studied the crowds.
“Rajiv,” said the man next to him, “you should read this before you go on television.”
The man speaking was Indra Singh, India’s minister of defense. A short, dark-skinned, bald, stout man with an unruly mustache across his pudgy face, Singh had served in the IAF with Ghandra. The two men were also best friends. Singh was the only member of Ghandra’s cabinet allowed to call Ghandra by his first name.
“Did you hear me?” Singh repeated. “The casualty count approaches twenty thousand. They’ll ask you about that. You don’t want to look unprepared.”
Ghandra glanced at his friend, who sat poring over the papers in front of him.
“Thank you,” said President Ghandra. “Do you think I’m a fucking idiot? The last thing I will talk about is body count.”
“Why? Are you crazy? This will be watched by the entire country. The death count is mounting, and all at the hands of El-Khayab. Our countrymen need to become angry. We need their support.”
“They’re already angry.
Look at them.
Be careful how much you stoke the fire because if it gets too hot it will burn the house down.”
“Telling the people that casualties are mounting will rally them, Rajiv.”
“The casualty count is at a pace that scares even me. If this war is ever going to end, there will need to be some sort of diplomatic settlement. If we get the Indian people too upset, that will be a practical impossibility.”
“Your mind is obviously made up,” said Singh.
“I need you to fight the war in Kashmir.” Ghandra patted his friend on the knee. “I don’t need your advice on communicating with the people of India. Had I relied on your political advice, I wouldn’t have been elected dogcatcher of Chennai.”
“What do you really think of my advice, Mr. President?” Singh laughed. He folded his papers and looked out the window. The crowds were packed tight as they came closer to the capitol building. “Still, I’m worried by what you say. We’ve acquired more than ten thousand square miles of Baltistan in less than three days. Are you suggesting we go back to the Line of Control?”
“We’re in the process of possibly losing Kargil and the Mushkoh Valley,” snapped Ghandra. “Have you forgotten that? Pakistan now has as much leverage as we do. Maybe more.”
“We’re not going to lose Kargil,” barked Singh defensively, reaching up and loosening his tie. He was sweating and he wiped his brow with his sleeve. “Northern Command has it under control, or will soon.”
“At what cost?” asked Ghandra. “Our boys are dying by the hundreds every hour.”
“Would you negotiate back to the Line of Control?” asked Singh. “What if you knew we were going to retake Kargil, which we will, I assure you. Would you give up what we’ve taken in Baltistan?”
“To get Kargil back, yes,” said Ghandra. “We’ve taken Skardu and its mountains and yak herders, all the while ceding much more important territory. If we don’t watch out, El-Khayab is going to march right into Srinagar and then where are we? This thing has to cool down at some point.”
“Your words concern me, Mr. President.”
“Why?” asked Ghandra, a tinge of anger in his voice. “Do you think I don’t have resolve? Of course I do. Who authorized the movement toward Skardu? I’m just realistic. Did you read the remarks by the president of France? He’s right. At some point, self-defense becomes suicide. Kashmir is beautiful but the only thing we’ve acquired is a few million tons of copper, some cornfields, and yak milk. Do we really need all of this? The Line of Control has served as an effective buffer.”
“So tell the prime minister to call the insane one and negotiate a settlement,” said Singh. “I don’t completely agree with you, but I support you. If that is to be our destiny, then let’s save some lives.”
A loud ringing noise reverberated in the back of the limousine. On the right door, the phone came to life, flashing red. A second later, Singh’s cell phone chimed loudly.
Ghandra reached over and pressed a button on the console of the car phone.
“Mr. President, General Kashvili.”
“What is it, General?”
“I’m sorry to report, sir, the Pakistanis have dropped a nuclear bomb.”
* * *
At Parliament House, Ghandra’s motorcade entered the underground parking garage, quickly moved in a 180-degree arc, and reexited the building. The motorcade sped up, moving back in the opposite direction. A minute later, the motorcade was joined overhead by a pair of black Mil Mi-35 attack choppers, guarding from the sky. The motorcade barreled down Church Road back toward the Presidential Palace, Rashtrapati Bhavan.
Five minutes later, in an underground parking lot beneath Rashtrapati Bhavan, Ghandra and Singh climbed from the back of the Mercedes limousine. Met by a line of armed soldiers, they walked to a waiting elevator then descended six stories to a secure room designed to withstand a nuclear blast, the “Security Room.”
Gathered in the room was President Ghandra’s war cabinet: Priya Vilokan, the prime minister and head of the country’s Nuclear Command Authority; General Praset Dartalia, the chief of army staff, India’s highest-ranking military officer; Guta Morosla, the secretary of the Research and Analysis Wing; Vijay Ranam, the home secretary; and Rajiv Channar, the national security advisor. An assortment of other aides were also in the room. The large conference table was filled with phones, coffee cups, and computer screens. The walls of the large, windowless room were lined with plasma screens. A series of workstations were staffed by military personnel monitoring Karoo from various altitudes and perspectives.
As Ghandra and Singh entered the room, it went silent. He removed his tie and tossed it to an aide. He stepped to a large plasma screen on the wall displaying a series of grainy black-and-white photographs taken by the pilot of the mushroom cloud over Karoo.
The occupants of the room watched Ghandra as he stared at the photos on the screen. Indra Singh soon joined him.
Finally, Ghandra spoke. “Let’s hear what you have.”
“Yes, sir,” said General Dartalia, the chief of army staff, India’s top military officer. “We believe the bomb was dropped by a Pakistani jet, approximately thirty-seven minutes ago. It was dropped on a remote part of Kashmir, a small mining town called Karoo, population around eight thousand. The town’s inhabitants are presumed dead.”
“Do we have any reports of more bombs?” asked Ghandra.
“No, sir,” said Dartalia. “That doesn’t mean they’re not coming. We’re monitoring by satellite and by radar from every military base in Kashmir and across the LOC. If Pakistan drops another bomb, we’ll know immediately.”
Ghandra finally looked away from the screen, turned to the large conference room table. He walked to his seat at the end, nodded at an aide, indicating that he wanted a cup of coffee.
“Why?” asked Ghandra as he sat down, wiping perspiration from his brow with his shirt sleeve. “What happened? Is it the first part of a larger strike?”
“It’s surgical,” said Morosla, the head of RAW. “A message. If they were truly attempting to harm India, why select this location? They wanted to go all the way and detonate a nuclear weapon, but in a place we wouldn’t care enough about to come back and wipe out their cities.”
“It makes no sense,” said Ghandra.
“El-Khayab is insane, we all suspected it,” said Singh, the minister of defense.
“They’re gauging our response,” said Morosla. “If we don’t respond, this could embolden them. They could launch another, then another.”
President Ghandra sipped his cup. He stood up as he did so, then slammed the cup down on the table, spilling coffee all over the table.
“So what’s your counsel?” asked Ghandra.
“Before I review military options, I recommend we put between ten and fifteen Tupolevs in the air, armed with nuclear-tipped missiles. This will serve as a precaution while we formulate a more appropriate response. We would position these bombers in a high-altitude circuit at the border. This way, should El-Khayab have more nuclear devices on the way, we can decide then if we are to use these weapons and will be in a position to do so immediately. This is solely your decision. Unlike a normal tactical defensive position, the movement of nuclear weapons requires an executive order from the president of India.”
Ghandra polled his war cabinet. There was no dissension.
“Get the Tupolevs in the air, General,” said Ghandra.
Dartalia picked up a phone on the table. “Air Marshal Barbora, this is General Dartalia. I am authorizing protocol four with WAC being the command operative.”
Dartalia repeated the command, then reached forward and typed a series of numbers into the console. He hung up the phone and returned to the table.
“Go on, General,” said President Ghandra.
Dartalia picked up an electronic remote and aimed it at the large plasma screen on the wall. The black-and-white photo of the bomb was replaced by a topographical map of India and Pakistan. He clicked the remote again and the lines that defined the borders of the two countries appeared in bright orange on the screen. The word “China,” at the northern border of Kashmir, appeared ominously in red.
“The following war scenarios have been developed and regularly updated over the past decade,” said Dartalia. “These are hypothetical scenarios, and are intended to predict what will happen under three alternative responses available to India.”
General Dartalia clicked the remote. A large red dot appeared on the screen, where Karoo was located.