A Special Bombing
"Is there a tasking for me?" Pandit asked, cautious.
"No. Nothing yet. But you stay on call at the base." Makunda shook his head.
"To put it plainly, I'm under internal investigation. Every aircraft in 32 Wing (No. 29 Scorpions, No. 10 Aerial Daggers and No. 32 Thunderbirds) is flying. I'm the only one with nothing to do."
"Captain. Your record has been forwarded upward, that much is true. But I assure you, it is not what you think. They are working out an important tasking. The Air Staff has selected you as the best man for the job."
"An important tasking?" Pandit could not believe it.
"Yes. A special tasking, issued by the Defence Ministry directly. They consider you the most suitable. Because you have experience with the KAB-500Kr television-guided bomb."1
Pandit said nothing. He could not imagine what special tasking would come down to him. As the pilot of an old bomber without modern precision-guidance integration, the most he could expect was patchwork strike work.
"Pakistan's 2nd Armoured Brigade is moving from Malir northward. Headquarters wants an experienced pilot to bomb the Mangla Dam.2 An urgent request from the Army Staff. Their analysts believe Pakistani ground forces from other regions must be drawn into the Punjab axis. The army has already fired a number of BrahMos cruise missiles at the dam. None hit it."
"My God." Pandit said. He did not know the precise definition of war crime in international law, but bombing a dam was unmistakably one of them.3 He was also taken aback at the BrahMos's apparent CEP. How could the error be so large that it failed to hit a dam?
"As I said. The victors are not put on trial. Don't doubt that point."
"In other words, this is the army's request."
"It's not as simple as you think. The Tarbela and Mangla dams have been our designated practice targets for years; the Defence Ministry's standing template. You have rehearsed strikes against them many times. None of that is the army's doing. The truth is, the Defence Ministry has long wanted a real attack to assess the effects of bombs against a concrete gravity dam."
"But a MiG-27 carrying a 600-kilogram bomb cannot do real damage to a dam of that scale. The thing won't even shed paint."
"Effect is secondary. Hit the target. That is all." The squadron leader said, with a thin smile, and a remark of unusual depth. Pandit had to admit he had not understood it at all.
"But…"
"Enough. Don't speculate. Go and rest. Your tasking will come through at any time."
Several thousand kilometres away, at a base in central China, Lin Huaisheng was in the intelligence room studying the war's likely near-term direction.
He had been waiting for word from his teacher, but Xu Jingzhe had vanished. The task left for Lin was simple enough: produce a short-term forecast on the situation. He still had no idea what the meeting two days earlier had concluded, but the work in front of him had to continue. There were not many officers here whose careers were soaked in the Indo-Pakistan question. Around him, intelligence analysts came and went, passing reduced satellite prints and other written material. The war had become, in its way, fascinating. The whole world pretended to stand outside it; the major powers' satellites kept gathering first-hand intelligence over the Indian Ocean without pause. The hard fact was that this contest between two nuclear states had created a serious crisis for the world. Within hours of the start, both sides had begun, casually or otherwise, to strike civilian targets. Rumours that the Indian Navy would blockade Pakistani ports were already running everywhere.
"Pakistan has moved the 2nd Armoured Brigade and 2nd Mechanised Brigade north. That makes V Corps at Karachi a hollow shell." Captain Ding came over and offered the news. He had taken to consulting Lin first, out of respect.
"Movement on the southern PAF side?"
"32 Wing at Masroor has scrambled several J-7Ps in support of the north. That is all for now."
"They are like you. They don't believe India will execute a wide envelopment from the south." Lin said, in a tone suggesting he knew every line of the Indian Army's plan.
"My friend, this is not the Second World War. I have my reservations about your reading. Modern conflict serves political ends, not geopolitical ones, so this Indo-Pakistan crisis must be controllable. Likely confined to air engagements. Ground deployments behind the borders are symbolic. Tanks will not decide this one."
Lin only shook his head in disagreement. He could not persuade his colleague except by showing him the evidence.
"By the way, one new item. Today the Indian Army made a public fool of itself. Fired more than ten BrahMos cruise missiles. The guidance failed. Most of them landed in Mangla Lake on the Indian side. Lunch-time CNN."
"That is hardly possible." Lin nearly shouted. He knew the thing was as good as impossible. Even with a guidance issue, the missiles could not all have erred on that scale and ended up on their own territory.
"Where were they fired from?"
"Not yet clear. I just looked at the television footage. The wreckage looks like the army variant. Possibly fired from central India. Targets perhaps the I Corps air-defence positions: dense flak in that sector, so they did not commit tactical aircraft."
"This is not so simple." Lin cut him off and walked to the map on the long table.
"Look at the map. If India launched the missiles from central India, then plainly the missiles, somewhere near the border, perhaps over Gujrat twenty-five kilometres from Mangla Lake, executed a ninety-degree turn. Otherwise they would not have come down on the Indian-side salient of Mangla Lake."4
"You want to know why the missiles turned?"
"That is the heart of it. I Corps was not the target. The terrain-matching guidance failed, then the missiles lost their way after the turn and went into the lake. Look. Plainly all of them flew the same routing. South to north. Which is why their failures clustered in one place." Lin took up a ruler and worked across a 1:50,000 sheet.
"I begin to follow you. Why turn rather than fly direct." Captain Ding said. In truth he was still unclear.
"Which means: their target is unusual. It can only be attacked from a single direction. So it is not an airfield, not a radar, not a command post."
"You mean Mangla Dam?" Captain Ding said, startled.
"Yes. The Jhelum runs north-south on the Pakistani side. The dam therefore faces south. I overflew it some days ago. That is exactly its layout. Whether tactical aircraft or cruise missile, only an approach from the south can strike it."
"Now I follow. The missiles entered Pakistani airspace at altitude and turned in order to attack the dam head-on. But GPS or terrain-matching error caused them to misjudge when to descend. They overshot the dam, sailed over the top, and came down on the Line-of-Control side in Indian territory. This… this is simply…"
"You said this war would be controllable. Save for the use of nuclear weapons, this war has no moral limit at all."
1. KAB-500Kr: A Russian-built 500-kilogram television-guided bomb, designed for use from Soviet/Russian tactical aircraft including the MiG-27. The seeker locks onto a contrast image on the cockpit display before release; the bomb then guides itself onto the locked image. The KAB-500Kr's operational record in Indian service is comparatively modest, which fits Pandit's status here as one of a small number of qualified operators in the squadron. ↩
2. Mangla Dam: The novel renders the target as 杰赫勒姆水坝 (literally "Jhelum dam"), evidently meaning Mangla Dam, the large concrete-and-earthfill dam on the Jhelum River that impounds Mangla Reservoir. The dam straddles the Pakistani Punjab–Azad Kashmir boundary; Lin's analysis shortly afterward, anchored on Mangla Lake, confirms the referent. The other dam mentioned in passing, Tarbela, is on the Indus and is the larger of Pakistan's two principal hydraulic structures. Together they have functioned as the standard high-value targets in IAF strike planning since the 1970s. ↩
3. Bombing a dam as a war crime: Pandit's reflex reaction matches the position taken in Article 56 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (1977), which proscribes attacks on dams, dykes and nuclear electrical generating stations where such an attack would cause the release of dangerous forces and severe civilian losses. India is not a state party to AP I, but the rule is widely treated as customary international humanitarian law. Makunda's "the victors are not put on trial" is the second instance of that phrase in this chapter pairing, the first being his counsel to Pandit on the Kasur mosque strike. ↩
4. The salient and the geometry: A small section of Mangla Reservoir's eastern arm extends close to the Line of Control, with the boundary running through the river valley above the dam. Lin's reconstruction is that the Indian Army fired the BrahMos salvo from a launcher in central India, programmed the missiles to fly north into Pakistani airspace and turn over Gujrat, twenty-five kilometres south of the dam, in order to attack the southern face of the dam head-on. Errors in the descent-cue calculation caused them instead to overfly the dam at altitude and continue eastward until they struck the water surface inside the salient on the Indian-administered side. ↩