Crisis
Twelve hours after the bombing of Lahore. Lin Huaisheng sat in a room at the base watching the television news. Like everyone else in the world, he was stunned that in this day and age India would escalate a conflict so brazenly: forming an emergency cabinet and dropping bombs almost in the same breath, stopping just short of a formal declaration of war. On the other hand, he had to concede that his teacher, Major General Xu Jingzhe, had predicted the expansion of the war within days with striking accuracy. Intelligence, Lin supposed, must have played a part.
The coverage focused on Lahore, the border city in the south. At Pakistan's urgent insistence, the UN delegation had postponed its trip to the Kashmir conflict zone and redirected to the bombarded city. The footage showed a UN-marked aircraft landing at the airport; the runway was still functional, but the navigation facilities had been destroyed.
The rolling news repeated the same reports every few minutes, occasionally adding something fresh. Lin consulted his reference files. The only militarily significant target in the city was the airport, where a few C-130Js of a PAF transport wing were based. But the helicopter footage showed that most of the bomb craters were roughly a kilometre off the runway, all of them in residential areas. The most conspicuous image was a mosque reduced to rubble. One surviving wall showed a clean hole punched through it, evidently by some kind of rocket-boosted munition. The camera panned to reveal a wide swathe of flattened housing around the mosque.
A local man was telling a CNN reporter in English that he had been jolted awake by the first explosion, then heard several more in quick succession. He was certain India had used inhumane cluster munitions to cause such widespread damage. The camera followed his pointing hand. The ground was indeed pocked with deep craters. A wrecked vehicle lay overturned in one of them, its roof nearly caved in. Lin shook his head. Ordinary cluster bombs could not have done this. He suspected anti-runway munitions, possibly the BetAB-500,1 though no parachute remnants were visible on screen and he did not want to guess without evidence.
Not guessing without evidence was a habit of Lin's. Major General Xu Jingzhe was mercurial; sometimes he would praise a subordinate's unsupported speculation, other times the same thing would earn a savage dressing-down. Lin, who knew he lacked the skill to read his superior's moods, generally kept half-formed opinions to himself.
He was thinking now that the intended target must have been the runway, and the Indian pilots, lacking the means for precision night strikes, had simply missed by that much.
"Last night, the power went out suddenly, and then I heard aircraft. At first we thought a plane was landing; you know, Lahore airport sometimes has late-night flights. But then the bombs fell. Thanks be to God, my family and I were unharmed." A local resident named Abdul Saif was recounting the night's events to a foreign journalist, standing before his house with one wall blown away.
"Are there military bases nearby?" an AFP reporter asked in halting Sindhi, with English subtitles running below.
"No. I swear to God, the only thing in town is a police station."
The broadcast cut to a foreign studio's commentary segment. A balding pundit who billed himself as a South Asian strategic affairs expert sat before a frozen image. The headline read: SOUTH ASIAN NUCLEAR WAR IMMINENT?
"The whole world is asking: why? Why did the Indian government suddenly lose patience and break its own rules of engagement? This is almost exactly what I predicted two weeks ago…" The pundit launched into an excited account of his own prescience.
Lin muted the television. He had no time for this. He needed to think through his own questions. The India-Pakistan war had escalated. What did that mean for Plan 4157B? The preconditions were falling into place one by one: exchange of fire, escalation, and a ground offensive now appeared imminent. India would certainly pull several frontline divisions from the east to join the western campaign. One question remained: how long could Pakistan hold out? If it lasted until October… Lin shook his head. That was nearly impossible. India had chosen its moment shrewdly, putting the final precondition in jeopardy. He believed Pakistan would accept a conditional ceasefire by July, perhaps even June, surrendering some territory, perhaps even handing over ISI officers to Indian courts. They could not hold out for long, and India's intent was plainly a quick, decisive war. Regardless, the old plan would be on tomorrow's agenda, and his preparation had to be thorough. He knew the Indian deployments in southern Tibet and the Assam hinterland by heart, but he had not visited the region in some time. There might be new developments he had missed. If he got something wrong in the briefing, there would be consequences.
A knock at the door. Lin shuffled over in his slippers. Major General Xu Jingzhe stood outside in full uniform, as always appearing precisely when a subordinate was under the most pressure, to add more.
"Sir, you're here."
Xu poked his head in, saw the television playing foreign news.
"Good. At least you haven't slept through the most important news of the day."
"Sleep in? I knew the situation was about to change, so… please, sit down."
"How did you know the situation was about to change? Tell me." The general walked in and sat at a desk.
"Let me get you some tea first, sir."
"You said India was itching for a fight. I wouldn't dare guess on my own."
"You never speculated about the direction of events yourself?"
"I only felt India wouldn't act rashly… An emergency cabinet, a political mobilisation exceeding anything in previous India-Pakistan wars; that was genuinely beyond what I expected."
"Oh? You sound rather like the mainstream view among those social-science academics. I just spoke to Senior Researcher Gao on the phone. He said he can't believe it's happened." The general said this with a smile. Whether it was praise or censure was impossible to tell.
"Sir, why were you so certain war was inevitable?"
"Simple. Intelligence."
"Intelligence?" Lin's tone was sceptical. The General Staff's intelligence-gathering capabilities were mostly concentrated on foreign military deployments, unit designations, weapons types. Anything deeper, such as the Indian leadership's strategic decision-making, was a different domain entirely, and even if such intelligence existed at the national level, it would not normally reach someone of Xu Jingzhe's rank. Studying satellite photographs to identify missile sites and eavesdropping on a head of state's private conversations were altogether different trades.
"Don't look at me like that. After all these years, you're still thinking like a scout, as though lying on your belly counting the enemy's guns is intelligence." Lin knew this was not the moment to argue.
"We have an intelligence-exchange mechanism with the Pakistani side, and we have sources at the Indian military-district level, and even within the Home Ministry and the Intelligence Bureau."
"Is that so?"
"A month ago, we learned that terrorists would infiltrate by fishing boat and attack an Indian coastal city."
"A month ago? Our government didn't notify India?" Lin asked.
"No need. The source was the Indian Home Ministry itself."
"You mean the Indian intelligence establishment knew about the attack in advance and didn't warn the Indian government?"2 Lin was stunned.
"Of all my students, you are very nearly the stupidest." The general shook his head. This was, for him, the most restrained possible expression of disappointment.
1. BetAB-500 (BetAB-500型炸弹): A Soviet/Russian anti-runway bomb (Бетонобойная Авиационная Бомба, "concrete-piercing aviation bomb"). The BetAB-500ShP variant uses a parachute to decelerate, then fires a rocket motor to drive a penetrator through concrete. The deep craters and overturned vehicle Lin observes are consistent with this type of munition landing on soft ground rather than on its intended target of reinforced runway. Lin's caution about the missing parachute debris illustrates his analytical discipline. ↩
2. The Mumbai attack foreknowledge: Xu's revelation that India's own Home Ministry knew about the terrorist attack and allowed it to proceed is the novel's most explosive intelligence detail. It recontextualises everything: the second Mumbai massacre was not a failure of intelligence but a deliberate provocation, orchestrated to provide the casus belli for the war that Kahan and Singh wanted. This retroactively explains the speed with which the emergency cabinet was formed (C16) and the readiness of Singh's detailed battle plans (C17). ↩