In Full Force
"Unusual enemy movement toward Peshawar. Range is long; they're turning, perhaps forming up," the AWACS reported. Goyal looked down and saw, on his display, enemy aircraft active in that direction. They seemed to be drawing away from him. That valiant Thunder, he thought, should not be among them, for an aircraft that cannot refuel in the air would be flying from rather far off. Then his thoughts turned again: could they be those copied Su-27s Pakistan had lately got from China?
"Fortress, report enemy movement as it develops. Over."
"Fortress understood. Perhaps a redeployment; lately they've kept moving aircraft to the Afghan border."
Across four hundred kilometres, the AWACS could not yet make out the types in the enemy group; only that these aircraft's radar cross-section had grown somewhat larger after the turn, and that they were not driving straight at the Indian group. Perhaps it was only a few Mirage Vs redeploying.
"Eagle leader, lately they've been furtive," Rawal said. He was suspicious by nature, forever afraid a trap was waiting for him.
"Heh, quite right. But soon they'll have no field left to take off from."
"..." Over the radio no one spoke; they all waited for Goyal to go on.
"I know something. The top is planning to use cruise missiles against the deep airfields now, and the civil fields they use to launch and recover fighters will be destroyed too," Goyal went on.1 This startled several of the squadron commanders on the ground at once, for they had not known there would be such an operation either; all they knew was that the stock of BrahMos missiles seemed to be running low. Still, seeing that Goyal was a Vir Chakra holder with access to the highest commanders, who knew whether what he let fall was true or false.
"Eagle leader, we've analysed the enemy track. They're flying toward the western Sulaiman range. Perhaps a manoeuvre; they have some large military airfields over there still in fairly good repair," the AWACS reported.
"All right, we'll keep an eye on that direction at all times," Goyal answered. He knew, of course, that "at all times" was hard to manage, for the Sulaiman Mountains of central Pakistan run very long, and as his own position shifted, those aircraft would draw further and further onto his flank and rear, and soon slip into his radar's dead angle. But if the enemy imagined he could loop behind him so simply as that, it was rather wishful, for there was always an AWACS watching the skies over Sahil.2
"Target has vanished, perhaps landed," the guidance officer aboard the AWACS said. On his electronic map, south of where the Pakistani group vanished, there was indeed a military airfield at Miriwan; and further west, the military airfield at Lugorgod, seat of the Pakistani Southern Air Command, could also launch and recover combat aircraft.3 In the Afghan war of the 1980s these fields had been bridgeheads against the invading Red air force, and were fairly complete in their facilities; only in recent years had they gradually fallen quiet, with a few training units stationed there now. "Perhaps, with the forward fields struck again and again, the Pakistani command has thought once more of these few surviving large military airfields, and means to hide its remaining aircraft there?" the guidance officer thought. It was no more than a preconceived idea, but the idea left him a little off his guard.
At that same moment, on the northwestern flank of the Sulaiman range, a group of eight J-11s had not landed as the Indian guidance officer supposed; on the contrary, they were waiting in the air to join with six F-16Cs lifting from this area. By the plan, once they had formed up they were to cross the geographic barrier at once over the crest of the Sulaiman range, so as to appear at the enemy's rear from the shortest possible distance and catch them off guard. This would be the largest counterstroke the Pakistani side had mounted since the war began; the first wave would be flown by eight J-11s and six F-16Cs, in a beyond-visual-range attack. The timing was chosen for around the moment the enemy released their bombs, which would be the enemy's more disordered moment; going by the Indian air force's previous attacks, once the strike was done the low-flying Indian attack aircraft, short of fuel, would race home from every direction to their several bases, while the high Su-30 fighter group could not cover every direction at once.
Of course, the air is not the ground, and the timing of an attack is hard to seize; perhaps the first wave could throw the enemy only into a degree of confusion, so this attack had a second string. The second wave would be flown by eight Thunders lifting from a few forward fields near Islamabad; that would be a bayonet-close fight, and in principle the Thunders would strike only at the aircraft the Su-30s abandoned in their haste, those slow attack aircraft that could not keep up.
The plan for the second wave was Group Captain Sami's proposal at the operations conference.4 He held that to use the Thunders alone, taking off from the eastern fields to block the way, or to use only the few missile-capable aircraft crossing the Sulaiman range for a long-range attack, would each fall within the Indian air force's expectations; and that they had eight to twelve Su-30s in the air at any time, perhaps a few MiG-29s as well. So the two attack schemes had to be run together, both at once. The Air Staff worried that the air command could not conduct guidance in two directions at the same time, which might cause great confusion. But Sami thought little of it; his view was strikingly simple: if the confusion could be shared out to the enemy as well, the plan was workable. Given Sami's unshakeable standing in the Pakistan Air Force, the plan was settled so in the end: Air Commodore Islam would sit aboard the AWACS as overall commander of the air attack and of liaison with the ground air-defence units, while Sami would work on his own, directing the eight Thunders in the air as the moment required.
Multan's search radar watched the movement of the Indian aircraft at every moment; and, sure enough, once the huge, jumbled Indian group reached southeast of Gujranwala it began to turn, every element adjusting heading due north, advancing along the Jhelum. Given the dam's peculiar layout, facing south with its back to the north, this manoeuvre was obligatory; so however dazzling the earlier movements, this last stretch of the route would not change in the slightest. For the staff officers on both sides, each side's dispositions of attack and defence would show themselves in this final leg.
Flying at the very front, as usual, was the Scorpions' MiG-27 group, who would make a precision attack, using television-guided bombs to strike the cracks in the dam's face exactly. Flight Lieutenant Pandit was at that moment holding his wing angle steady while easing off the throttle to slow the aircraft. Down low, his aircraft had a great advantage over the more advanced ones. Of course, he knew this advantage came at a price. Because every attack was made in the same single-file column, low and slow, any air-defence officer with a little sense would find it the finest chance for his flak to take aim, and the tree belts on either bank were superb positions in which to set such sites. The flight lieutenant knew an Indian saying too: no one picks up gold twice in the same place; good luck will not fall on your head every day.
"Set your minds at rest, it's confirmed there's no more air-defence fire on top of the dam; but we do have to keep our eyes on the tree belts either side at all times," Flight Lieutenant Pandit said. Yet this was easier said than done.
The flight lieutenant's left hand rested on the throttle, the glove already soaked through with sweat. If anything stirred, he would have to use this one hand to complete three actions in a very short time, if he was to turn danger aside. First, to shove the throttle hard forward and press down the afterburner detent switch; second, to reach back and haul the variable-sweep lever to full sweep, then jam it firmly into a notch that fixed the wing angle. At the same time, his right hand had to pull back into a climb; and if a violent bank to evade were needed, he would also have to tread the rudder into a turn in some direction all at once. He had never tried so complex a set of actions low and slow in training, and it was a manoeuvre the regulations strictly forbade, for so extreme a handling could easily bring on a crash and the loss of the aircraft and pilot; but on the ground the flight lieutenant had rehearsed this sequence in the cockpit many times, and was sure he could carry it through in a single breath, for he knew clearly that, at some critical instant, it was a means that could save his life. The MiG-27 had a powerful engine and a variable-sweep planform that could change at will; but its poor handling capped its potential, and to draw out its full strength one needed a few special methods outside the operating manual.
1. Cruise strikes on the deep airfields: The plan Goyal lets slip is to hit Pakistan's rear airfields, and the civil fields being used as fighter dispersals, with cruise missiles. The squadron commanders' surprise, coupled with their sense that the BrahMos stock is running low, marks how far the Indian effort is stretching itself; the BrahMos supply problem has recurred since the failed Mangla salvo (C51N2). ↩
2. "Over Sahil" (萨希尔): Here 萨希尔 is used as a place, the sector the IAF's AWACS orbits over. The same characters elsewhere name the IAF pilot Sahili (C63N1); the two are unrelated, and this spatial use reads as an authorial reuse of the name. The referent as a location is uncertain, so it is transliterated and left as it stands. ↩
3. Miriwan and Lugorgod (米里瓦安 / 卢戈尔果德): Two large military airfields in western Pakistan from which the ambush force stages, described as bridgeheads of the 1980s Afghan war now reduced to training use, the second being the seat of the PAF's Southern Air Command in the novel. Neither name resolves cleanly to a real base; both are transliterated and their referents flagged as uncertain. In reality the PAF's southern command sits at Karachi, not in the Sulaiman ranges. ↩
4. Sami's two-wave plan: Group Captain Sami, CO of No. 26 Black Spider Squadron and pilot of Thunder 101, argues that either half of the counterstroke alone would be anticipated, so both must run together: the J-11/F-16C wave over the Sulaiman crest, and his own eight Thunders from the Islamabad-area fields for the close fight. His answer to the Air Staff's fear of two-axis confusion is that confusion shared with the enemy is confusion won. ↩