Chimera (45 page)

No time now!

“Everybody get into cover!
Now!
” Saxena shouted as he picked up his INSAS rifle and ran from the tarmac towards the terminal building. Everybody else was doing the same around him. He was shouting orders as he ran through the terminal’s main doors:

“
Go! Go!
Don’t stop! Get out of the terminal building to the other side! Abandon the O-P on the roof
now
!
Move!
”

On the roof, the other two air-force NCOs had already grabbed their rifles and equipment and were rappelling down the ropes on the other side of the building…

In the skies above, the four J-10s armed with iron-bombs had broken formation as they began their approach over the airbase. The Igla missile team at the airport had already seen the black specks approaching. Now they were looking for a lock using the infrared seekers. But range and terrain was against them from the start…

A few moments later the Chinese aircraft flew over the airport and the Paras on the perimeter returned fire from their LMGs.

But it didn’t matter.

The first J-10 flew over the tarmac where the Mi-26 was parked and released his entire load of bombs as it streaked past. The series of thunderous blasts ripped through the tarmac area, shredding the Mi-26 into smithereens and consuming the stored ordinance in its developing fireball.

The shockwave smashed through the terminal and the control tower, gutting the side of the buildings facing the tarmac…

It seemed like an eternity had passed when Saxena opened his eyes. Smoke and dust filled his lungs. Broken glass and pieces of debris covered every inch of the ground, and large chunks of the building were collapsing around him. All of it was strangely quiet and it took him a second to realize that all he heard was painful ringing in his ears. He brought his hands up to his face to see the blood coming out of some minor wounds and a whole bunch of other scratches, but felt no pain. His brain was still catching up with the suddenness of the impact the body had taken. He got up to see his uniform covered in dust and small pieces of burning debris, which he shook off as he began to look around and see where he was.

Another member of his controller team ran up beside him and was literally dragging him away. Saxena’s mind had still not caught up to the events after the powerful blast had knocked him out.

Right now, all he could see was that his dust covered rifle was left behind where he had fallen. He could see his legs making their drag path through the dust covered floor while his colleague was pulling him away. 

“My
weapon!
Damn you! It’s over
there!
My weapon’s on the ground over there! Don’t leave it there!”

His colleague however, had other things in mind as he heard the enemy jet engine noises overhead:

“Leave it! We have to get out of this building now! It’s going to get hit any second!”

“We are at the front, soldier! I
need
that rifle! I…” Saxena’s thoughts finally began catching up to him as the two men reached the other end of the building:

“…are they
still
overhead? Wait: what about the others?
Wait!
”

Before his colleague could respond, another jet screamed overhead and a series of blasts destroyed the area the two men had been just a minute ago. This time they were far closer to the explosions. The powerful shockwave swept like a moving wall of bricks through the entrance of the terminal building on the other side and sent both men and two of the Paratroopers flying into the air amidst a cloud of debris and dust. They fell close to each other on the road outside, about ten meters away, rolling into the road filled with overturned and burning cars…

It took several seconds of coughing before Saxena rolled over his back and used the open door of a nearby abandoned army truck to stand up, leaning on the vehicle as he did. He had been shielded by his colleague, who now lay on the ground motionless, a pool of blood nearby. Gupta saw another dust covered soldier also staggering over to his colleague, and several other air-force ground-crewmen rushing over to help him and the others screaming from pain. When he finally turned to face the airport, he could only watch in horror.

There was a massive gaping hole where the main terminal building had been. A pillar of black smoke was gushing into the air from it. The control tower was a pillar of blazing fire now. When he turned his head upwards at the sound of jet engines, he could only hear unfriendly ones. Two or three black specks were still flying over Paru against the starlit night sky, seemingly picking targets on the airbase below.

A shriek of pain from someone nearby brought focus to his brain despite the shock. He began getting his motor skills back in action and staggered over to the open ground where he saw some soldiers staggering away clumsily, their uniforms covered with dust. Saxena grabbed one of them by the shoulder:

“Don’t stay in the open, damn it! Get on the other side of the road and into cover!
Go!
”

He then ran over to a bleeding army radioman who had managed to escape the nightmarish cauldron inside the building and grabbed him by his radio harness:

“Look at me! Is your CNR working?” Saxena shouted.

He struggled to comprehend the question. The man was more shell-shocked than it appeared at first to Saxena. Saxena waved over a warrant-officer.

“Help me get this CNR set off this soldier! I need to get in touch with warlord-central!”

While both men removed the harness, Saxena continued talking: “Have you seen the other forward controllers? I cannot see them!”

“No sir! We lost sight of everybody right before the attack, I...” the warrant officer’s sentence was broken mid-sentence as another thunderous explosion rocked the airport perimeter to the west. Both men looked up to see a J-10 streak by in a blur. Soon the radio was back in Saxena’s hands. He turned to the airman:

“Okay, get him behind cover and keep him there.
Go!
”

He then switched the radio on as the other two men staggered away from the road and into cover. But as he attempted to figure out why the set was not working, a sudden explosion in the sky above caused him to jerk his head up…

A small fireball had just turned into smoke above the airport and an aircraft began falling out of the sky. The burning wreckage of what had been a Chinese J-10 smashed into the peaks north of the airbase...

As the stunned Indian survivors at the airport looked up, wondering what had happened, a gray-painted canard-equipped fighter streaked overhead on full afterburner.

“
Yeah!
That was an MKI!” Saxena turned around to face the wounded soldiers nearby: “That was one of ours! Our boys are here!!”

ABOVE PARU AIRPORT

BHUTAN

DAY 6 + 1955 HRS

“Juliet-Tenner at your three!”

“Roger. I have him. He’s not going anywhere.”

The two Indian Su-30 crews to enter southern Bhutan had caught the Chinese pilots at a disadvantage. Instead of waiting for a clean beyond-visual-range annihilation of the J-10s as they climbed out of the valley, the Su-30 flight-leader had decided to mix it up with them at low altitude in order to break their attack runs. The airport below was already ablaze and flames were lighting up the valley in an orange glow. Within the thin walls of the valley, the J-10 had serious limitations in maneuverability. Not so for the Su-30MKIs which were far better suited for this job…

The flight leader had already dispatched one J-10 and its unfortunate pilot within seconds of entering the fray.

The Chinese pilot never knew what hit him. And as the flaming debris of that aircraft hit the ground, the two Su-30s had swept over the airport and were already mixing it with other three J-10s. Their attack on Paru had been halted. Their struggle to make it home alive had begun.

The Su-30 flight-leader flipped his aircraft to the starboard, pulled back on the stick and switching to guns, laced the sky ahead of him with cannon rounds. Most of these found their mark and another J-10’s engine smoked out and the aircraft flew into the valley north of Paru, a dead man’s control on the hands.

“
Smack-down!
” the flight-leader sent out over the comms as he saw his prey exploding into a fireball within the alpine trees below.

“Two down! Two-to-go! Do you have a visual?”

“Uh, roger that, leader,” his wingman replied. “I see two bandits bugging out to the north and gaining altitude!”

“
Huge
mistake! Wouldn’t you agree?” the flight-leader concluded.

There was a slight chuckle over the radio.

“Roger
that
boss! I have visual. I have acquisition,” the wingman depressed the launch button and felt the R-77s falling away, “and I have engaged!”

The two R-77s streaked away trailing a smoke exhaust, tail-chasing the two J-10s on afterburner at ten kilometers…

The results were predictable. Favorable kinetics was available to the Indian attacker. Two near-simultaneous fireballs announced the destruction of the two fleeing Chinese aircraft. The flight-leader was not impressed with the PLAAF pilots and their poor visual-combat skills.

Amateurs!

“Okay. White-Knight-Leader declares the skies over southern Bhutan as all clear. Now let’s go find ourselves that lone Sierra-Uniform bird to the north!”

The two aircraft punched afterburners and accelerating north just as four No. 7 Squadron Mirage-2000s established DCA patrol over Paru. The gap in Indian air-defenses over Bhutan had now been closed. But with heavy losses in aircraft, personnel and facilities, the damage was done.

PARU AIRPORT

BHUTAN

DAY 6 + 2115 HRS

He had been lucky.

Saxena realized that this was the gist of it. It had taken quite some time before the pain in his ears had subsided. Blood had poured out of one ear due to shrapnel wounds. Scratches and burns were everywhere on his body. He had even vomited after the pressure waves from numerous explosions had ripped through the body. He was still somewhat nauseous from it.

And yet, he was luckier than most around him…

Saxena sat on an abandoned ammunition crate near the main terminal entrance of the airport. What was left of the terminal, that is. An army corpsman was tending to his shrapnel wound near the ear.

Other soldiers had arrived from Haa-Dzong and were laying the dead bodies on the side of the road, waiting for the trucks to take them south. As he sat there, he watched the seventeenth body being brought out and laid in a line. Some more were even worse off: their bodies not being recoverable from the debris just yet.

He sighed and looked back up at the smoking wreckage that was Paru airport at the moment. The fires had died away because of the cold and the lack of combustibles left untouched. But the debris was still spewing smoke all around.

“That should do it for now,” the corpsman said.

Saxena nodded to him in silence and the army medic walked away towards the stretchers laid out nearby where another wounded paratrooper had been laid down, one of his legs blown away and the blanket laid over him red with blood near the knees. He was dosed with painkillers and couldn’t feel anything. Saxena looked at him, squinted and then looked back again at the smoldering remains of the terminal building.

Time to get back to work…

He stood up, walking past the road now crowded with army soldiers. There were no soldiers inside the airport though. They had been ordered to stay away until the ordinance disposal teams had swept it. They had been working on for an hour now and were almost done.

“Heck of a mess, old boy!” a voice said from behind.

Saxena turned to back to see an army Lieutenant-Colonel accompanied by two fully armed soldiers walking up to him, leaving their AXE utility vehicle by the road. The officer was wearing his standard army disruptive-pattern camouflage uniform. His name tag said: ‘Fernandez’. Saxena snapped off a salute, jerking loose some of the dust off his uniform with the sudden motion.

“Sir!”

“
Easy
there, son!” Fernandez said. He glanced at the collapsed terminal and the smoking wreck that was the control tower. He whistled softly.

“
Hell
of a bombardment you guys went through. Casualties?”

Saxena looked around at the screams and the mumbled pain of the soldiers all around.

“Considerable, sir. We…uh, lost a lot of the air-force personnel trying to evacuate as much of the supplies and logistical equipment on the tarmac as we could before the attack. My F-A-C team has suffered near total fatalities,” Saxena choked as he completed that last bit.

Fernandez patted the young officer on his back.

“Nasty business, son! But
this
is our job! Your team members did their job as they were trained to do. You did the same,” he said and continued: