Sword of Shiva - Страница 10

The memory of the rocket attack on the Qinghai railway flickered through his brain again. He saw himself swing the fiberglass tube of the Chinese rocket launcher up onto his right shoulder. Felt the firing trigger retract under the pressure of his squeezing finger. Heard the whistling hiss of the exhaust gasses as the anti-tank rocket had leapt from the launch tube and streaked toward the side of the nearest railroad car.

The growing hiss in the air… It was almost exactly the same sound, but louder. Much louder. It was…

Jampa’s thought was interrupted by an enormous dark shape that flashed past the half-open doorway, hurtling down the street toward the center of the village. The air current from the big thing’s passage washed over Jampa with a warm chemical stench that reminded him somehow of burning kerosene.

The thing, whatever it was, flew about chest-high above the ground. In its wake trailed the strange whistling-hiss, the noise now grown to a painful volume.

Was it some kind of rocket? It couldn’t be. It was too large. Nearly the size of a telephone pole.

Jampa was thrown sideways as the unknown flying thing reached the center of the village and detonated, splitting the night air with fire and a growing circle of destruction.

Jampa lay on the floor, his half-stunned brain trying to process the idea that the impossibly large thing was some kind of rocket after all. His eardrums were ringing from the aftermath of the explosion, but he could still hear the roar of the fireball and the screams of people thrown out of their beds by this deadly and unexpected assault.

He could hear something else, too. More of the whistling-hisses. Not just one of them. Many.

That was crazy. Who would fire missiles at a tiny Indian village? Who would bother? Who would waste that kind of expensive military hardware on a little town that most people had never even heard of?

And suddenly, Jampa knew the answer. He understood it with a clarity born of his years as a teacher, and a man of science.

He climbed painfully to his feet, and staggered to the doorway. The door hung drunkenly from a single unbroken hinge.

Two more dark telephone pole shapes streaked past the little house, each followed a second or two later by more explosions and more screams.

This was his fault. Death was coming to the village of Geku, and it was all Jampa’s fault.

The idea had been so simple. So obvious. Strike at Chinese targets on the Tibetan side of the mountains, and then retreat across the border into India. The Chinese government wouldn’t dare follow a handful of insignificant insurgents into the legal territory of another major nation.

And many of the locals in the northern Indian provinces were sympathetic to the cause of Tibetan liberation. The Indian villagers would gladly give sanctuary to Jampa, and Nima, and their fellow brethren of Gingara.

The plan had always worked, until now. The Chinese counterstrikes had always stopped at the Indian border.

What was so different this time? Something had changed. Something major. Jampa had no idea what sort of political shift had occurred, but it was clear that the old rules were suddenly and irrevocably gone.

Whatever the cause of the change in tactics had been, this unfolding catastrophe was almost certainly in retaliation for Jampa’s rocket strike on that accursed train.

Another shockwave slammed Jampa against the doorframe. His head bounced off the wooden upright with a bone-jarring whack.

His knees buckled. He was sliding to the floor when the next Chinese cruise missile darted out of the gathering gloom, and crashed through the wall of the shepherd’s little house.

Jampa was less than two meters from the warhead when it erupted. He saw no more, heard no more, was no more.

And the man who had fired the first shot of the coming war was no longer there to witness the barrage of missiles that continued to fall from the sky.

CHAPTER 9

MINISTRY OF DEFENSE

SOUTH BLOCK SECRETARIAT BUILDING

NEW DELHI, INDIA

SATURDAY; 22 NOVEMBER

7:32 PM

TIME ZONE +5 ‘ECHO’

Indian Defense Minister Sanjay Nehru was on the phone when the door to his office flew open. The heavy door swung rapidly on its well-oiled hinges, bounced off the burnished oak wainscoting, and nearly swung closed again before the unannounced visitor stopped it with an outstretched hand.

Nehru’s eyes jerked toward the door in surprise. He was not accustomed to having people barge into his office without invitation. When Nehru got a look at the intruder, his shock transformed instantly to annoyance. It was that junior captain assigned as an aide to General Singh. What was the young idiot’s name? Kumar? Katari? Something like that.

The young captain was breathing heavily, as though he had been running. He brought his palms together below his chin, and bowed his head quickly. “Namaste, Sri Minister. I apologize for the interruption, but General Singh requests your presence in the Operations Room as soon as possible, and we couldn’t reach you by telephone.”

Nehru had ignored the plaintive bleating of the phone’s call-waiting signal. It was well outside of working hours on Saturday evening, and after half a day of slogging through mind-numbing paperwork, he was trying to enjoy ten minutes of conversation with his favorite nephew.

He covered the mouthpiece of the receiver with one hand. “Well don’t just stand there,” he snapped. “What is so bloody urgent?”

The young officer had to pause for a half second to catch his breath. “Reports are just coming in,” he said. “Missile strikes…”

Nehru hung up the phone, all thoughts of his nephew gone from his mind. “Missile strikes? Where? Are you trying to tell me that we’re under attack?”

The captain nodded. “Yes, Sri Minister. So far, the only known target is Geku, a small village in the Himalayas. Based on first-look analysis, approximately a hundred cruise missiles from an unidentified launch point in South Western China.”

Nehru was stunned. China? That made no sense at all. It was crazy.

“There has to be some kind of mistake,” he said. “Some sort of radar error, or a garbled report.”

“I don’t think so, sir,” the officer said. “We’ve got satellite imagery. It looks like the entire village has been destroyed. There are no signs of survivors.”

Defense Minister Nehru glared at the young officer. “Why would the Chinese attack a flyspeck of a village on our side of the mountains? Was there some kind of provocation?”

The captain shook his head. “No provocation that we’re aware of, sir. And nothing of strategic value in the area of the village, as far as we’ve been able to tell.”

“Then why are the Chinese attacking us?”

“I’m sorry, Minister,” the captain said. “We don’t know. General Singh requests…”

Nehru nodded quickly and gestured toward the door. “Yes. Fine. Tell General Singh I’m on my way. And inform him that I want a full defense staff briefing in ten minutes.”

“Yes, sir,” the captain said. He did an abrupt about-face and strode toward the door.

Nehru reached for the phone on his desk. He had to call the Prime Minister immediately. His fingers stopped before they touched the receiver. “Captain!”

The young officer paused in the doorway and looked over his shoulder. “Yes, Minister?”

“Tell General Singh to order a full military alert. Mobilize all air, sea, and ground forces. Maximum readiness.”

His voice became quieter, but it took on an edge of steel. “If what you are saying is true, the Chinese have committed an unprovoked act of war against Republic of India,” he said. “I don’t know what those fools are up to. But if they want a fight, they’re going to get one.”

CHAPTER 10

FLIGHT LEAD

INAS 303 SQUADRON — BLACK PANTHERS

BAY OF BENGAL (WEST OF ANDAMAN ISLANDS)

SUNDAY; 23 NOVEMBER

0512 hours (5:12 AM)

TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’

In hindsight, no one would ever know what made Lieutenant Ajit Chopra pull the trigger. The pilot’s motives, whatever they might have been, died with him when Chopra’s Indian Navy MiG-29K was blasted out of the sky over the Bay of Bengal.

In the days and weeks following the First Battle of Bengal, swarms of investigative journalists would try repeatedly to link Chopra’s actions with the previous evening’s missile strike on the village of Geku. Given the pilot’s relative youth and the legendarily all-eclipsing power of young hearts, more than one media pundit would speculate that Chopra had met and perhaps fallen in love with one of the young village women who had been killed in the barrage.

Internet rumors began to spring up, identifying Lieutenant Chopra’s lost beloved as a poor but beautiful girl named Mira. The tragic love story of Ajit and Mira would become the modern web’s equivalent of Romeo and Juliette, forwarded in thousands — and then hundreds of thousands — of heart-rending emails by uncounted numbers of breathless romantics.

Internet legends tend to grow in the telling, and the compelling tale of doomed young Indian lovers was no exception. Increasingly elaborate email threads offered careful descriptions of Mira’s death scene as a murderous Chinese missile shrieked down from the heavens to blow her family’s small (but well kept) home into oblivion. Similarly florid descriptions told of Agit’s exquisite emotional agony as he turned his Russian-built jet fighter toward a ship of the Chinese Navy, and wreaked teary-eyed revenge upon the godless warmongers who had slaughtered his beloved Mira.