Kasur
Lin Huaisheng remained at the base, working through the new picture. His teacher had not come back, so Lin still had no idea what the obscurely staged closed-door meeting two days earlier had actually decided. He had been quietly worrying about it. Whether India would commit ground forces on a major scale, whether they would replace the Chief of Army Staff: he was reasonably confident on both points, but world affairs always carried their share of variables, and he was beginning to regret having spoken so emphatically.1 Reports kept arriving, all about Indian ground movements. No surprise there: every Indo-Pakistani crisis produced large army deployments on both sides, but they did not always lead to combat. The signal-intercept stations in the Karakorams reported that Indian Army radio discipline was holding up reasonably well. The rail lines and roads were jammed with military vehicles and tanks; any tourist with a camera could photograph unit insignia easily enough. But there was no large-scale radio activity. Surreptitious behaviour of that kind usually preceded something serious.
"Several more corps are moving up to the border. They may be assembling around Halwara. Could be further north." A staff officer, hunched over the table, was studying satellite imagery.
"Oh?" Lin walked over with interest. He did not know this officer well, but knew his surname was Ding.
"Look. Houses flattened wherever they pass; columns hundreds of kilometres long. Indian road construction since independence has been quite poor. No roads wider than four lanes. Moving units is not easy. Look here. Several pontoon bridges. As of yesterday noon, the Yamuna had no pontoons. These tracked bridge-layers are also a first sighting. Possibly Russian-built."
"What's the unit designation?"
"The Internet says XXXI Corps. Indian users have posted plenty of mobile photos. A lot of complaint posts as well, since the wartime regime has the army monopolising rail and road, leaving civilians stranded.2"
"The Internet? Reliable?"
"Cross-checked against our satellites. The loading at Nagamandi station is all T-90s. The mobile photos clearly show a white tiger-head insignia on the hulls. Has to be the 31st Armoured Division, under XXI Corps."
"Anything more concrete?"
"The 31st's vanguard has set up a forward command post north of Halwara. The assembly area may be there, or it may be a feint. A new SAM-6 site has appeared near the command post."
"Why not assemble further south? Mountainous to the north, hardly suitable for armour." Lin asked. He had noticed by now that everyone he met assumed the war would happen, by the book, in the north.
"Historically, no Indo-Pakistani ground combat has occurred south of this region. Yesterday, another small infiltration operation. As it happens, also north of Halwara."
"Yesterday?" Plainly nobody had told Lin about this one.
"Yesterday morning, an infiltration unit composed of religious extremists destroyed a P*M-333 search radar site, seven kilometres west of Chandigarh. This morning a mobile French-made TRS-2215 was brought up to plug the gap." Captain Ding said.
"Indeed. Religious extremists with a deep interest in air-warning radars." Lin said with a smile. The military character of the operation was clear to him, but he was struck by the feebleness of the Indian defensive posture. The site had been very close to the border. Plainly careless. "Don't ask me. ISI matters run deep. No one can really say."
"How are the air engagements going these past two days?"
"Pakistan is taking only a slight loss. Six or seven fighters. Two airfields wholly destroyed. But by next week, most of their forward airfields will be hard to hold."
"You're that confident?"
"India has now committed three times as many aircraft as Pakistan. Next week it will be four. Beyond redeploying several wings from the east, they are very likely to bring in new equipment. Stand-off jammers. The Phalcon AWACS. Or tactical ballistic missiles."
"That would be a serious problem." Lin murmured. The face of the PAF group captain he had met just once came back to him.
"I attended your lecture two days ago. To be candid: if India presses on regardless of the international situation, Pakistan cannot hold out into September or October. Not even into July."
"Don't be too absolute. Decisive combat will not be in the air. It will be on the ground."
"If Pakistan loses the air, the ground fight is no contest. The Indian inventory holds enormous quantities of Russian air-to-surface weapons."
"Mm. Even so, their use of precision munitions to date has been limited." Lin said with hesitation.
"They will use them in volume. They cannot leave that stockpile mouldering in warehouses."
In the operations room of No. 29 "Scorpion" Squadron at Jodhpur,4 Captain Pandit had taken a seat in the back row, well in advance. He was the only person in the room. Threat brief was still some time away, and no one had asked him to attend. He simply could not stand to wait any longer for a face-to-face with his squadron leader. For days now no one had raised the matter of the bombed mosque, but no new tasking had come down for him either. He had felt the squadron leader's eyes on him these past days carrying something different, something close to resentment. He knew he had brought trouble down on his country. The Kasur Grand Mosque was over a century old. The matter was unquestionably grave. He also felt himself wronged. Tasking an obsolete MiG-27 with a night strike that required modern navigation to do safely was itself a problem; surely most of the responsibility lay above him.5
Squadron Leader Makunda walked in. He saw a captain sitting alone, looking poorly.
"Squadron Leader, I have to ask a question."
"What now?" Makunda shook his head.
"Will I be retired early?" Pandit was determined to have it out.
"Don't be a fool, son. If you're still thinking about that, here's what I can tell you. Yesterday, two of their F-16s bombed a civilian target inside our territory. Killed seventy-five civilians. In daylight. A deliberate act. That is war."
"War?"
"Your new tasking has come down. The squadron is moving to daytime operations. We continue to bomb the airfields, roads, bridges, railways and any other facilities of military value around Kasur. The victors are not put on trial. Pull yourself together."
"But… I have brought shame on the country."
"Shame? No. No. What you did has not let this country down. There is one thing I will say to you and to every other pilot. Whatever happens, do not get shot down anywhere near Kasur. The place is full of madrasas. Your work has thoroughly enraged those people. Every Indian pilot now should pray he does not fall into their hands." Makunda said, expressionless.
"Understood, Squadron Leader."
1. The closed-door meeting: Lin's seminar in Chapter 40 and Chapter 41, in which he laid out his thesis that India would replace its Army Chief of Staff and commit to a major ground campaign against Pakistan in Punjab. The "obscurely staged" framing here is partly a comment on Xu Jingzhe's habit of holding such meetings without telling Lin in advance who else would be in the room. ↩
2. "XXXI Corps": Captain Ding initially relays the unit identification as "XXXI Corps" from social-media chatter, then in the next exchange clarifies the satellite confirmation as "XXI Corps". The slip is preserved here as in the Chinese: an accurate small-scale picture of how open-source intelligence comes in noisy and gets corrected against signals-quality sources. The actual unit is XXI Corps with its 31st Armoured Division. ↩
3. P*M-33 and TRS-2215: The Chinese source has a redacted character (p*m33), preserved here. The most plausible referent is the PSM-33 search radar; the TRS-2215 is a real French-built (Thomson-CSF, later Thales) ground-based surveillance radar of the same family as the TRS-2230 Master used in IAF service. The novel's depiction of an unguarded radar site at seven kilometres from the border being knocked out by an ISI-organised infiltration is consistent with Singh's earlier observations, in Chapter 33, on Punjab-sector surveillance gaps. ↩
4. Jodhpur: The Chinese here renders Jodhpur as 焦耳布特 (Jiāo'ěrbùtè), with the second and third characters transposed from the standard Chinese rendering 焦特布尔 (Jiāotèbù'ěr). Treat as another instance of the author's character-transposition pattern; the city referred to is unambiguously Jodhpur in Rajasthan, where No. 29 "Scorpion" Squadron historically operated MiG-27s. The 32 Wing composition the author gives, with No. 29 Scorpions, No. 10 "Aerial Daggers" and No. 32 "Thunderbird" Squadrons, also matches real IAF unit naming for the period. ↩
5. Kasur, the mosque, and Pandit's earlier mission: A reference back to the night strike in Chapters 21 and 22. Pandit's MiG-27, navigating poorly under cloud, dropped its ordnance well off the briefed airfield target and into a residential area of Kasur. The Grand Mosque was among the buildings struck. The civilian deaths produced a large public reaction inside Pakistan, an awkward silence in the IAF chain of command, and the propaganda counter-campaign that drew Pandit and Rawal in front of state-television cameras in Chapter 23. ↩