LASHKAR (12 page)

In retrospect, that single shot fired by the second police commando proved a serious error in an otherwise perfect operation. Had that shot not been fired they would have taken the seventh man alive. If they had taken him alive the Indian Government would have been able to unravel the conspiracy much faster and they’d have been able to produce walking-talking proof of the terror strike to the world.

Not that anyone could find much fault with the shot. The commando had been working on a highlykeyed-up adrenaline response. He’d fired only when he saw there was no other way to prevent the terrorist from using his weapon on his buddy.

*

The man named Furkan was unconscious when the police ambulance carrying him raced into Modi Hospital in nearby Saket. The ambulance entered the hospital gate at almost the same time as the Bikaner Mail cleared the city limits on its way to Bikaner.

‘We need this bastard alive,’ the cop told the doctor on duty. ‘He is one of the men involved in today’s bomb blasts.’ The hospital activated its best medical team to stabilize the injured terrorist who had lost a lot of blood. The head injury was far more critical than it looked. The police was so keen to revive the man and question him that they had a Deputy Commissioner of Police from the Crisis Management Team sitting right outside the door of the ICU. However, it was to be a long and agonizing wait.

It was almost two hours after midnight when Furkan regained consciousness and spoke his first word since he had been hit. ‘Water.’ The croaked whisper was barely audible but everyone was so keyed up that the sound electrified the atmosphere. The news that he had spoken swept through the hospital and within seconds a cabal of khaki descended on the room he was in.

‘You will definitely kill him if you start questioning him right now,’ Manish, the doctor who had taken charge of the wounded man said. ‘Give us some time to stabilize him first.’ He had to literally fight off the police but was not able to do it for long; too much rode on the man talking. Around 0230 hours Dr Manish finally came out of the room with a resigned expression on his face. He nodded to the cops waiting impatiently outside. ‘Question him now. He won’t last much longer.’

By 0300 hours the man known to the world as Furkan Sheikh had told the police the whole story, chapter and verse. The only thing he did not disclose was the role of the Maulavi from the Savita Nagar mosque. Whether he did not wish to involve a man of God or did not consider it important to do so, no one will ever know, because he succumbed to his wounds just as he was coming to the end of his story. Whirring video and audio recorders captured every last thing he said, right to his rasping last breaths.

Within minutes, copies of the tape were rushed to the Crisis Management Committee. The tapes had complete details of the Lashkar team members who had carried out the strike, their escape routes, details of the training camp in Muzaffarabad where the strike had been planned and the Lashkar had trained and information about Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Brigadier Murad Salim who had masterminded, coordinated and executed the strike.

‘Send a copy to the PMO,’ the Task Force Commander told his assistant.

‘At this time of the night?’ The man looked up incredulously.

‘The Headman had said he wanted to be in the loop at all times.’

The Task Force Commander was right; twenty minutes later the Indian Prime Minister was listening to the recording. Despite the late hour he was wide awake.

Soon a lot of other people would be too.

The Indian Government was well aware of the location of the terrorist training camp that Furkan had referred to, as it was one of seventeen other similar camps that dotted the landscape of Pakistan and the POK. So were the Chinese, the Russians, the Americans, the Israelis, the British, the French, the Germans, the Somalis, the Guatemalans and anyone else who cared to know. It was an open international secret.

Almost every nation was aware that the Pakistani General’s claim that he had curbed all terrorist activity in his country was a blatant lie. The whole world knew about it yet refused to acknowledge it. The Americans even went about applauding the General and praising him for his help in hunting down the Al-Qaida. But the time for beating about the bush was over. Every successive terrorist strike was shortening the global fuse.

IQBAL

1950 hours, 30 October 2005, Terrorist Camp in Jungle above Hari, Kashmir.

Even through the thick fog of sleep shrouding him Iqbal heard the scream and felt a hand grip his shoulder. A panic-stricken scream erupted uncontrollably from his own mouth as the horror of the night gone by returned. Once again, the ricochet of gunfire shattered his mind. He saw the illuminating rounds flare up in the dark sky with harsh metallic clicks. Psychedelic flashes of guns firing tracer rounds, bullets arcing through the night like fireflies, and the images of writhing men falling lifelessly to the ground suffused his mind. Literally gibbering with fear he pushed away the hand clutching his shoulder and forced his eyes to open. There was no one there. That is when another moan of pain broke through the fog of his nightmare and Iqbal realized that it was only Wahid, the instructor, crying out in pain.

Reality returned like a cold shock.

Except for a few smouldering embers, the fire in the angeethi in the centre of the hut was dead. However it was obvious that someone had fed the fire at some point in the night or it would have gone cold by now. Iqbal could hear the wind hissing in the trees around. He guessed night had fallen many hours ago because his body told him that he had been asleep for a long time; it felt painfully stiff and ached from countless sores and bruises. But the hunger pangs gnawing at his stomach reassured him.
If you’re hungry you’re okay.
The voice of the instructor conducting the first-aid class at the training camp came back to him. He suddenly realized the same man now lay a few feet from him; and he was far from okay.

Iqbal forced himself to go across to him. When he knelt down beside him a sickly sweet smell assaulted his senses. He felt more than saw the pool of blood the instructor lay in. Wahid Ali was slipping in and out of consciousness and was obviously in tremendous pain. Lying restlessly on the cold, hard floor, he still clutched his side as though desperate to keep life from flowing out of him. Blood seeped from between his fingers.

‘He is going to die.’

Iqbal gave a half scream as he turned with a start and saw the sentry who had met them at the outskirts of the camp. ‘There is nothing we can do for him here. Maybe if you all had returned to Chakoti last night he might have made it. Maybe…’ The sentry spoke in a dryly matter-of-fact manner. Almost as though he was discussing the weather.

‘There must be something we can do.’

The sentry had been hardened to the realities of life by almost three years as a jihadi. He had seen his contemporaries fall to the bullets of the Indian security forces. Some, he had even seen felled by other jihadi groups. He knew it all. The reality of life on the run. Living in hellish camps such as this one. Then dying the death of an animal without even the courtesy of a proper burial.

He looked bemused by Iqbal’s innocence, as though unable to fathom how Iqbal was missing the obvious. ‘Look around you. There is nothing here. Nothing except a few bandages and some basic medication for headaches, fever, loose motions and shit like that. This bugger,’ he pointed at the gut-shot instructor, ‘needs to be taken to hospital. That’s not going to happen, you know.’ He sighed wearily and shook his head in disgust. ‘Inshahallah, he will go soon and not be tormented by the pain much longer.’

How can he be so damn cold-blooded? How can he not care for his own comrades?

The sentry saw the shocked look on Iqbal’s face. It seemed to arouse something inside him and for one brief moment he wanted to reach out and speak to him:
Don’t judge me, my young friend. You don’t know what it is like to live in perennial fear of betrayal by villagers who are sick of the constant turmoil and killing that plagues their lives, of colleagues who are disillusioned by the futility of the fight, of our own treacherous masters sitting in Pakistan who have their own agenda that has nothing to do with Islam, the liberation of Kashmir or the jihad.

Instead he said harshly: ‘Don’t you know this is how it ends for most of us? Barely a handful of people who enter the mujahideen mill that flourishes in the Kashmir Valley live to see the end of the first year. As for those who live out the second year, you can count them on your bloody fingers.’

At twenty-six years of age the sentry was already a bitter old man. ‘Come,’ he said to Iqbal a shade more gently, ‘look after this one instead.’ He pointed to Omar who lay as still as a corpse on the other side of the hut. ’I’ll go out and get some wood.’

Iqbal tried to turn his attention to Omar and tend to him but the instructor’s screams of pain began again a few minutes later. Every successive scream was like a spear jabbed into his head. Then, abruptly, the screaming stopped. It took him a while to register that something had changed. Sudden, illogical and childish hope lit up in him.
Maybe the bleeding has stopped!

Hope died abruptly when he saw the darkness of death settled on the instructor’s face. It was drained white; the pool of blood around him had spread all over the floor. A fearful sob escaped unbidden from him as he stared at the dead man. Iqbal stumbled out of the hut and collided with the sentry who was now returning with a pile of wood chips in his arms.

‘Where do you think you are going?’ The tone was not unkind, but the steel of command was unmistakable.

Conditioned to six months of unflinchingly obeying orders it brought Iqbal to a dead halt. ‘I’m…he is…so much blood…’ Iqbal fumbled, barely coherent.

‘Here…’ said the sentry as he dumped the woodchips in Iqbal’s arms and nudged him back inside. ‘Throw some into the fire. Let’s have a little more light.’

Back inside, the sentry took in the dead man lying in a pool of blood. He did not bother to check his breath or pulse. The sentry had seen too many dead men not to be able to recognize death when he saw it. ‘Come on. We need to bury him. Come and help me.’

‘Bury him? Isn’t he from the Pakistan Army? Do you think it is okay to bury him here?’ Even as he spoke Iqbal realized it was not a very smart remark and his voice trailed off.

The sentry gave a short mirthless laugh. More like a bark. ‘What do you think we should do? Take him back to Chakoti, hain? You think those buggers care?’ He waved a vague hand in the direction of POK. ‘They refused to collect their dead even when the Indian Army was handing their bodies over at Kargil. Because that would have meant acknowledging that they were Pakistanis.’ The anger he felt came through loud and clear.

‘Why do you say that? Why are you so cynical about them? You know they are helping us. They train us, give us money, weapons and…’

The sentry’s bitter laugh shocked Iqbal. ‘You think they are doing it for us? You silly fuck!’ He hawked loudly and spat in the corner of the hut. ‘They just don’t have the balls for a fair fight. They have lost every damn war with India, that is why they have inflicted this endless, aimless jihad on India. They are trying to bleed India by forcing it to fight this constant low-intensity war.’

Standing there in the cold mountain air the sentry jabbed a finger at him, his anger evident even in the darkness. ‘For the college guy that you seem to be, you are quite a fucking moron. Can’t you do some simple maths? They didn’t hire you for money, but they know you need it to live so they give you…what? A few thousand bucks, right? What do they give you if you die? Bugger all, right?’ He made another vehement gesture. ‘But what happens when one of their own regular army soldiers dies? They have to pay hundreds of thousands as insurance, gratuity and pension to his family, right?’

He gave Iqbal a long angry glare: ‘Twenty dead jihadis like us cost them less than one dead Pakistani soldier. Plus they have the comfort of denying that they are the ones who train us and task us to fight their war. They get to fight a cheap war at almost no cost to them. Even the few bucks they throw at us we earn for them by bringing out their drugs.’

‘Drugs?’ There was an incredulous look on Iqbal’s face.

‘How do you think the drugs from Afghanistan reach America and Europe? Do you have any idea how many millions of dollars those shit-eaters earn from drugs? Most of it fills the coffers of those fancy ISI Generals, CIA agents and our great fearless leaders…a few paltry pieces are also thrown at us to buy arms and ammunitions.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ Iqbal answered with angry vehemence.

‘Really? You want to go and take a look at the backpack of that guy? Go on!’ He gestured angrily toward the dead man lying between them. ‘You want to come with me to the main camp in the next valley and have a look? Damn you!’ he shouted. ‘I know what you are feeling. Exactly how I felt when I came to know how I had been used and abused…’

The sentry stopped suddenly. He threw up his hands in a weary gesture as though the futility of it all had gotten to him.

‘They are ruthless bastards. We are just pawns in their great game. Irrelevant. Expendable. They don’t fucking care who lives or who dies…’ He looked away. The pain and confusion starkly etched on his face reached out to Iqbal, overwhelming his mind with confusion. Suddenly the sentry shook himself and returned to reality. ‘Come, let us bury the poor bugger before he begins to stink.’

‘Then why do you still accept their support if you know all this?’ Iqbal finally mustered the gall to ask as they carried the body towards the forest. ‘Why do you continue fighting if you think all this is futile?’

The sentry didn’t answer for a long time. When he finally did, he spoke softly, almost as though he was talking more to himself than answering Iqbal’s question:

‘What choice do I have now?’ His voice was almost lost in the wind and Iqbal had to strain to hear what he was saying. ‘Back in those days…when the blood ran hot and the cause burned bright I killed many Indian soldiers. Seventeen…you know…I have taken part in seventeen operations. My rifle has accounted for many of them. They know about me…’ for a fleeting moment his face shone with a deeply buried, long-forgotten pride before it grew dark again – ‘Do you know what they will do if they catch me?’