The Sniper
Snow-covered mountains stretched endlessly, desolate, not a decent plant in sight. A few goats just beginning to shed their winter coats picked their way along the cliff faces, searching for shoots buried under the snow. Whenever loose stones tumbled nearby they would raise their heads and stand frozen in place. Over the decades, the goats here had learned to avoid paths and valley floors; flat ground invariably meant minefields.
Lin Huaisheng, bundled in a heavy coat, crouched behind a battery commander's telescope1 and studied a snow-white peak several hundred metres above the goats. An Indian Army forward post sat on the summit. Captain Saleem, his escort, sat beside him examining a map.
"The troops on that hilltop ahead belong to the 25th Division?"2
"That's right. About a platoon. 14th Maratha Light Infantry.3 The 25th's main body is further east."
"Is there a road behind the mountain?"
"There is, but it's terrible. Only passable in summer. This time of year, the forward troops depend on No. 153 Helicopter Unit4 out of Udhampur5 for resupply. Once or twice a month."
"Dhruvs?"6
"No, no, no. Mi-17s."
"How far is that hilltop from here?" Lin Huaisheng asked, making his own mental calculation as he spoke.
"One and a half kilometres in a straight line. Of course the vertical drop through the valley can't be measured precisely. Walking it would probably take a full day. Every usable route is seeded with mines; some theirs, some ours."
Through the telescope Lin could now see Indian soldiers in woollen caps poking their heads above a parapet, glassing his position with binoculars.
"Have they fired artillery in recent years?"
"Not in the last ten years. After 1999, both sides moved their main works behind the ridgeline. Can't reach each other. They've got a few Cheetah7 helicopters on the forward edge, which are a nuisance, but then we've got Stingers8 in every battalion."
As Lin Huaisheng left the observation post, he thought: a large-scale offensive across this terrain by either side would be utterly pointless. His superiors had sent him here to conduct exchanges with the Pakistan Army, and there were many ways such exchanges could be conducted, but Lin had insisted on visiting the forward line. The request had genuinely put his hosts in a difficult position, especially given the current situation. In the end the Northern Area Commander hit on a compromise: he picked from the map a pass that had been quiet for ten years and allowed the Chinese lieutenant colonel9 to have a look, with Captain Saleem of the 23rd Infantry Division escorting him throughout. As Lin descended from the hilltop observation post, he saw Pakistani soldiers bent over their weapons, apparently preparing for some kind of exercise.
"What's this, a field exercise today?" Lin asked the captain.
"Not an exercise. It so happens that yesterday an enemy aircraft went down to the east. Someone saw the pilot eject. Probably came down in the mountains. Higher command wants the garrison troops nearby to go and have a look."
"Looking for the pilot?"
"Not just the pilot. The wreckage too."
"Can I come along?" the Chinese lieutenant colonel asked directly.
"Lieutenant Colonel, have you ever seen terrain more frightening than this?" Captain Saleem said with a smile. The question amused Lin Huaisheng.
"Captain Saleem, I've seen steeper mountains. Five hundred kilometres that way." Lin pointed east.
"All right, we'll go together. The aircraft came down only a few kilometres away. With luck we'll get you back to headquarters in time."
"Will the Indian Army come?" Lin pressed.
"Ordinarily, no. Before June they're never very active. The real worry is the mines. We'll have to take the paths the goats use. One more thing: stay behind me." Captain Saleem stroked his moustache lightly as he said this.
The search party originally numbered eleven, led by a havildar.10 Adding Lin Huaisheng and Captain Saleem brought the total to thirteen. Saleem always carried a submachine gun, making him half a combatant; Lin had only binoculars.
Havildar Noorman11 seemed less than pleased with the captain's slapdash decision. In his view, an unarmed foreign stranger would inevitably slow his patrol, but rank prevented him from saying so. Lin read the havildar's displeasure and followed in silence. He would have to make sure he did not become a burden.
Noorman was in his thirties, reasonably familiar with the area, and walked point throughout. He carried a spare satellite phone and a handheld GPS, along with an old Steyr SSG 6912 sniper rifle that stood out conspicuously. It was a relic of another era; its dated lines and polymer stock called to mind the smallbore rifles of military pentathlon. The remaining soldiers mostly carried AK-47s.
Lin Huaisheng kept thinking that the terrain here closely resembled the Karakoram along the western border: ravines interlocking like teeth, peaks jutting up without pattern. Without GPS, finding a target a single kilometre away would have been difficult.
A day earlier, the Saab 2000 AWACS had accurately reported an aircraft crashing in this area, but coordinates alone were not enough. During an active conflict the Line of Control imposed effectively zero constraint, and sending in a helicopter would risk detection. Only infantry could confirm the situation on the ground.
The patrol wound through the mountains in circles, losing its bearings more than once. After a discussion, Havildar Noorman finally persuaded Captain Saleem to continue following his instinct. Lin did not wish to volunteer his own views on terrain reading; he was, after all, only a guest.
Around two or three in the afternoon they finally spotted a long scar of wreckage on a distant hillside. Aircraft components were strewn across the entire slope. The forward section had come to rest in a dry riverbed, the nose still pointing north; the direction of the target.13 The ejected pilot, however, was nowhere to be found.
"We can recover the computer's storage module, see if there's anything useful. And film it. That would have… would have… political value," the captain said, bracing himself against a boulder, out of breath.
"Will the Indian Army come to destroy it?" Lin asked from the rear of the column.
Captain Saleem looked troubled. He conferred briefly with Havildar Noorman, then recovered his confidence. They should not, he told Lin. Not worth it, for a piece of wreckage.
The party began searching for a way down into the valley. An hour later they reached the edge of the riverbed. It was a sheltered gorge, bare hilltops rising on either side. Lin thought that without occupying those high points they would be easy prey for an ambush, and said as much to Captain Saleem, as tactfully as he could manage. Saleem consulted the havildar again. In the end Noorman judged that the men were too tired; he would not have them scrambling up and down in thin air for the sake of an unrealistic concern.
The Jaguar had maintained the attitude in which it had been shot down. Its shattered turbine engine lay 150 metres behind the fuselage. When the wind blew, the compressor blades could still be seen turning. The soldiers in the lead swarmed forward, each hoping to prise a souvenir from the cockpit. The column dissolved into disorder. Lin walked over as well, took out his camera, and climbed onto the intact right wing. From there he could see that the pilot's seat was gone; clearly it had been ejected along with the aircrew. Beneath the broken left wing was a large hole, the metal skin curled inward. Probably where the missile had struck, or possibly impact damage from the rocks. Lin was no expert and could not tell; he pressed the shutter a few times at random.
"Havildar, get your men to find the computer storage module. Stop them pulling apart everything else." Saleem was speaking loudly. He could see one soldier studying the lights on the landing gear while another was collecting the drag chute that lay outside.
"But Captain, what does the storage module look like?"
"How would I know? You'll have to get in there and look."
As Havildar Noorman walked reluctantly toward the cockpit, Lin decided it was time to smooth things over, even though he had no clearer idea of what the module looked like.
"Havildar, I can go in and look. I used to repair helicopters, so it should be roughly the same?" Lin called down from his vantage point. Noorman looked up, saw Lin silhouetted against the last of the evening light, and smiled at him gratefully.
"That's very kind of you. What do you need?"
"Erm, a hammer. And an axe."
"I'm afraid we haven't got an axe."
"A large rock will do."
Lin vaulted into the cockpit. Without the ejection seat he could only squat. He had a general sense of aircraft construction; if there were any advanced electronics, they would be behind the instrument panel. The panel was already damaged, so without needing the axe or the rock he was able to remove a cathode-ray tube14 used for night targeting and laser designation on the left side. He reached in along the data cables and felt around: solid partitions on all four sides. More complicated than he had expected. He continued dismantling the fuel-control panel. This was a 1980s-vintage aircraft, and the entire cockpit was dense with switches and instruments. He could see no accessible ports.
Havildar Noorman's face appeared outside the cockpit, and he asked in a friendly tone whether Lin had found the thing yet. A dull rifle shot rolled across the valley. Noorman vanished from Lin Huaisheng's sight. Even inside the cockpit, Lin could hear the heavy sound of the havildar's body hitting the ground.
"What happened?" Captain Saleem's voice could be heard shouting from outside the aircraft.
"An Indian sniper. On the ridge." One of the soldiers.
Lin pressed his head down inside the cockpit and did not dare look out. He tried to reconstruct in his mind all the high points in the area and the direction of that single shot. Another report followed quickly, from the same bearing, and then the sound of another soldier going down. There was a practised marksman on one of the ridgetops, that much was clear. His first round had killed the havildar, who had been peering around near the aircraft; almost certainly not because of his rank, or the sniper would have taken Captain Saleem first. The most likely reason was the green sniper rifle on Noorman's back. The shooter had presumably calculated that eliminating his opposite number first would spare him the trouble of changing position after every shot.
1. Battery commander's telescope (炮队镜): A high-powered tripod-mounted observation telescope used by artillery units for observation and fire correction. Standard issue at observation posts along the LoC. ↩
2. 25th Division (25师): The Indian Army's 25th Infantry Division, headquartered at Rajouri in Jammu and Kashmir under XVI Corps (see C6N1). Responsible for the Rajouri–Poonch sector of the LoC. ↩
3. 14th Maratha Light Infantry (第14马拉地轻步兵营): The Maratha Light Infantry is one of the Indian Army's oldest regiments, with a lineage extending to 1768. The "14th" likely designates the 14th Battalion. Maratha LI battalions have historically been assigned to formations in the Rajouri–Poonch sector. ↩
4. No. 153 Helicopter Unit (第153直升机中队): An IAF unit equipped with Mi-17 transport helicopters, responsible for logistical resupply to troops in remote areas of Jammu and Kashmir, including the Siachen Glacier. ↩
5. Udhampur (乌塔普尔): The Chinese 乌塔普尔 (Wūtǎpǔ'ěr) corresponds to Udhampur, a cantonment town hosting Indian Army Northern Command headquarters and Udhampur Air Force Station. ↩
6. Dhruvs (北极星): The Chinese 北极星 means "Pole Star," a direct translation of "Dhruv" (Sanskrit for the Pole Star), after which the HAL Dhruv helicopter is named. Captain Saleem corrects Lin: the helicopters serving this sector are the larger Mi-17s, not Dhruvs. ↩
7. Cheetah (猎豹直升机): The HAL Cheetah, an Indian licence-built Aérospatiale SA 315B Lama. The Indian Army Aviation Corps operates Cheetahs along the LoC for observation, liaison, and casualty evacuation. The type holds the absolute altitude record for helicopters. ↩
8. Stingers (毒刺导弹): The FIM-92 Stinger, a man-portable infrared surface-to-air missile. Pakistan acquired Stingers during the Soviet-Afghan War and integrated them into infantry battalions along the LoC. ↩
9. Rank inconsistency (上校/中校): The Chinese text occasionally uses 上校 (Colonel) when referring to Lin from the Pakistani perspective, though he was introduced as a 中校 (Lieutenant Colonel) in Chapter 6. This appears to be an error in the original; the translation uses Lieutenant Colonel throughout. ↩
10. Havildar (中士): The Chinese 中士 corresponds to Sergeant. In the Pakistan Army, which retains British Indian Army terminology, the equivalent rank is Havildar. ↩
11. Noorman (努尔曼): The Chinese phonetic rendering 努尔曼 (Nǔ'ěrmàn). A plausible Pashto or Punjabi name. ↩
12. Steyr SSG 69 (斯太尔69式狙击步枪): An Austrian bolt-action sniper rifle adopted by the Pakistan Army. Chambered in 7.62×51mm NATO with a 5-round rotary magazine. Innovative when introduced in 1969, it had become conspicuously outmoded by the novel's period. ↩
13. Nose pointing north (机头仍旧朝着北): The Jaguar was heading into Pakistani-controlled Kashmir to strike a target when it was shot down (see C7N3). The orientation of the wreckage confirms its heading at the moment of impact. ↩
14. Cathode-ray tube (阴极射线管): Part of the Jaguar IS's DARIN (Display Attack and Ranging Inertial Navigation) avionics suite, used for navigation and weapons delivery including laser designation. ↩