Operation ‘Fox-Hunt’ (22 page)

“Sparrow here, repeat, what is the situation.”

Sanjay’s voice came through the speakers. “We have a parameter breach; a vehicle has got through outer parameter. We have casualties. Will keep you posted.”

The NSA looked at the DG-Security, “Have your men on the border closed in on the militants yet? Quickly… we may have little time before they are warned.”

“Sparrow calling Tiger one, Come in Tiger one… make contact with Bogeyman ASAP … repeat… we have a situation… make contact with Bogeyman ASAP….”

“Tiger one here Sparrow one… we got that… roger… over and out.” Tenzig’s voice came through. The DIG BSF in the control room called in the circling Dhruvs.

Mumbai, Outer parameter, Operation area: 0245 hours

It was a traffic policeman who noticed it first. Constable Lakshman Pawar was manning the road block to assist traffic movement. The checkpoint had two men from that fancy new commando unit. They were positioned behind a sandbag fortification. A pair of headlights was slowly bearing down on the post. Pawar squinted until he could make out the outline of a Maruti van. It was being driven at a moderate speed. He gestured at the the two Force One (F1) commandos; they nodded that they could see the vehicle. They were expecting no trouble. As far as the two men knew, the chances were more of someone coming out than going in. This was their second taxi in twenty minutes, “Bloody airport drops,” muttered Raju Mali, the constable with the F1, as he pressed the transmit button and spoke into the microphone and informed the control room, “Checkpoint six… Romeo one… taxi approaching checkpoint six. We are flagging it down.”

His partner took position and he checked the safety catch on his M4 carbine while the traffic cop hailed down the taxi.
They had sent the mollified passenger in the first taxi away by threatening to arrest him.

Adil had tried calling the number he had been given; there was no range. He cursed the mobile company. He then realised that as they were near the national park, cell phone towers were likely to be limited. He asked the driver to pull up on the side and took out his pistol with a silencer and shot him in the back of his head.

He pushed the driver to the passenger seat and climbed in. Adil had realised that the best way to warn them would be to create a noise and a diversion. This would allow his comrades a chance to retaliate. He put an earphone from the mobile to his ears and tried calling again. But there was no signal. He shifted the idling car into gear and started rolling. As he drove down the road, he saw a checkpoint. He put the pistol with silencer between his legs and the AKSU on the lap of the dead driver beside him. In one hand he grabbed a grenade. Trying his luck, he pressed the dial button on the phone and could hear the phone ringing at the other end. “Come on, you mother fuckers… pick the damn phone up…” he pressed his feet down on the pedal and headed in the direction of the checkpoint.

“Hello, who is this?” Shezad’s alert voice boomed in his ears.

“Who do you think, you dozy fuckers, Santa Claus? There are cops all around you, I am lucky I didn’t get caught… I am creating a diversion…. Break out!”

Shezad had seen the phone and immediately realised who it was. The number had been given to him in Cherat. He had it memorised. But the words coming out of the speaker shocked him into action.

The van slowed down at the checkpoint and stopped. The traffic cop went over to driver’s side. “You can’t go there, back up!” he spoke haughtily to the driver in the dark.

A voice hissed back, “Listen bhenchod, don’t say anything, I have a gun… come closer.”

The policeman could now see the metallic glint of the gun; he went closer.

“How many men at the check post, Thulla?” Adil asked using the derogatory term for a cop in India.

Pawar was petrified. “Two … two, what do you want?

“Listen…” his words were cut short as the pistol coughed.

Mali heard the thud as the cop fell to the ground. Before he could collect his wits, the van accelerated towards the post. Mali got off a shot before a grenade fell into the make shift checkpoint. Mali pressed down his transmit button as his comrade loosed off a volley of automatic fire at the van. The grenade exploded in three seconds. The last words heard from Mali’s position in the control room were, “Grenade…Sudhakar…grenade…,” as Mali tried to warn his partner who was shooting at the runaway car.

Sanjay spoke urgently into the microphone as Javed rushed out to take charge of the situation. “Prepare for action… Prepare for action.” At his cue, Sukhjeet asked his men to prepare for the attack. The thump of the grenade and automatic fire had been heard clearly.

“So much for well-laid plans; Javed’s men will handle the party crashers, you prepare for attack,” Sanjay directed Sukhjeet. “Thapa, get your men to tighten the parameter.”

He turned around to Thapa, “Have your men taken positions on the target floor yet?” the look on Thapa’s face said it all.

“Shit! Shit! All this preparation and for what!” Sanjay cursed, under his breath. Another twenty minutes and the teams would have been deployed.

Adil’s action had taken twenty minutes out of Sanjay’s plan, moments in which the SAG commandos would have been in the lobby and would have broken down the door of the apartment in a classic door entry operation.

The attack was now in shambles, the SAG men were still tooling up after dismounting in an assembly area and the SRG was still completing its deployment. Sanjay couldn’t help but grab a M4 Carbine from the Force 1 equipment and wear webbing with spare ammo and grenades over his jeans and shirt. He decided to be cautious and also put on a F1 bullet proof vest.
No sense getting blasted by our own side
, he thought. He asked a young IPS officer in command of the control station.

Sukhjeet sent up a five man team up the stairs to make contact with the enemy. The SAG storm troopers rushed up the stairs to contain what was fast becoming a disaster.

In the flat, Shezad handed out the weapons from the secret cabinet to everyone. He looked at the team. “We came ready to fight and win…let’s do it…Izaz and Jameel…take positions in the living room, give us cover fire…Musheef and Tariq, come with me, we will move into the next apartment and take hostages. Once we are in the next apartment, move ahead and create a killing field for anyone entering this floor.”

It took the boys two minutes to arm themselves and close the primary plan. And then Izaz moved into position.

At the same time as Izaz opened the door, the squad of SAG on their way up for deployment opened the staircase exit of the floor. Both sides fired on instinct, the door and their bullet proof jackets provided protection to the SAG but Izaz had no such luck and a bullet pierced into his arm and sent him sprawling across, still firing. Shezad quickly took his spot and continued firing while his men crashed down the door in the opposite apartment and moved in. The apartment was empty. The Pakistanis were surprised but did not panic. Shezad knew they had few minutes until the Indian security forces recovered from their surprise and mounted a full scale raid. He pulled pins out of two grenades and dropped them below on the ground. He followed that up with a burst of fire wanting to create panic among civilians.

The grenades exploded harmlessly as no one was present below. Along with the bullets from the SAGs MP5s and the M4s, the grenades created chaos throughout the three towers. Lights had been disconnected by the Rangers as soon as the shooting started. As the residents opened their doors to walk out they were met by policemen and F1 men and were asked to go in and take cover.

Below, Sanjay and Sukhjeet were putting together an attack while Thapa and his men scaled up the opposite roof tops and placed snipers and sealed off all the entrances from the complex. The team in the stairway was asked to stay put to avoid any of the raiders from shifting floors.

Shezad had other plans. He saw that one way off the floor, via the staircase, which was blocked by the commandos, and the other was the lift which had been turned off and locked. And the third was the windows and the pipes to the floor above or below, covered from across the buildings by the snipers. Every now and then, a bullet would thud into the outer concrete to mark their presence.

But there was a vulnerable spot, the lift shaft. On his first day in the apartment, Shezad had made a recce of every exit point. He had eventually noted that whenever the power was switched off, for maintenance or otherwise, the lift car went to the basement floor and stopped there. He had studied the lifts in the apartment and knew that the door could be opened in an emergency from outside. The lift shaft would be their escape pod.

But first he needed to buy time to make that escape. He asked Musheeq to cover the staircase door while he and Tariq brought up Izaz and placed him on ground. Next, they dragged out a sofa and a wooden cabinet and set up it horizontal position to cover Izaz and Musheeq, turning it into a fortification. Jameel
meanwhile continued to fire randomly from different apartment windows at the opposite roof and apartments. Once the ‘fortified’ position was made in the lobby, the men dragged out the two gas cylinders, one from each apartment and placed them where they could easily be shot from the lobby.

Then Tariq used an iron rod from the bedroom mosquito net to fashion a crowbar with which he and Jameel opened the lift door. Shezad shoved in two grenades, loaded his AK on his back and put extra magazines in a small knapsack and a flashlight around his neck. As an afterthought, he picked up the keys to the Jeep below Amin had left for them. He gave a quick hug to both Tariq and Musheeq and tousled Izaz’s hair. Once he was sure that the position could be defended for some time, he lowered himself into the lift shaft. Jameel followed him. And the door slammed shut behind them. With power off, no one would notice the doors opening and closing.

Sukhjeet was ready for the assault. He had a team in the apartment under the floor where the terrorists were bunched up. A team had also moved on a floor above. The team above signalled that it was ready to drop down through a window and balcony into the floor below. Sukhjeet decided that he would soften the opposition up by opening three fronts and forcing them into a corner. The movement and firing pattern suggested that they had decided to make their stand in the lift lobby of the apartment floor, which was at the centre of two apartments and now they had access to two apartments. Sukhjeet would drop his men into the balconies of two apartments on either side of the lobby while the force in the stairs would rush in as the fire fight began. The study of the apartment dummy earlier had confirmed that there was no direct line of fire to the bedrooms his men intended to burst into.

Simultaneously, four commandos slithered from the window
on the floor above and swung through the glass window into the bedrooms below. At the same time, sniper fire provided them protection from terrorists if they moved into either apartment to ambush the commandos.

As the commandos landed on the balconies of the apartments, Musheeq and Tariq fired into the open front doors of both apartments so as to try and keep the commandos from rushing them. Izaz, meanwhile, kept taking pot shots at the exit door to prevent the team in the stairway from rushing in and charging their position.

A commando lowered himself upside down from the roof and lobbed in a stun grenade into the lobby through a window and grappled up. The flash and sound disoriented the trio for a few seconds in which the team from staircase exit charged the ‘fortification’. Firing blindly, Musheeq was able to force the commandos to pull back, but a parting shot in the chest bought him down. He died before he hit the ground. Izaz, who was in pain and half blinded wildly shot into the apartment near him to push back the commandos who had moved into the living room. A lucky shot hit the LPG cylinder setting off a massive explosion. The two commandos were caught in the explosion and had to be rescued by their colleagues. One of the commandos doubled back and through the flame fired of a burst from his MP5 at Izaz which hit him in the chest and he hit the deck. The commando party in the opposite apartment had more luck as they had noticed and removed the LPG cylinder in the confusion that followed the stun grenades. But post the explosion of the gas cylinder in the other apartment, they had stepped back.

The firing and the LPG explosion lit up the sky. Sukhjeet, Thapa and Sanjay looked up. Thapa’s men had now sealed up the area to avoid the gun battle between the F1 and unknown
number of terrorists outside from spilling in. Sukhjeet asked his men to pull back, hold positions and remove the wounded commandos from the apartment. Fire engines were bought forward to douse the apartment which was on fire.

Sanjay took stock of the situation and realised that they needed to clear the floor quickly. The firing and the repeated explosions would bring the entire press to their doorsteps in a few minutes.

Shezad and Jameel could hear the explosions and the gunshots as they slowly lowered themselves down the elevator shaft. Shezad had decided that Jameel would get off at second floor and open another front, but then decided against it. They would go down the basement and then sneak back into open and cause maximum damage. Out in the open, they would have an opportunity to even escape. They reached the roof of the lift car and decided to take a breather. He switched on his sat phone and called a pre-stored number.

“The operation is blown. Izaz, Musheef and Tariq are most likely dead. Jameel and I are holding out. I don’t know until when though.” Colonel Khan, sitting in the control room with the duty staff heard the tense voice and felt a knot in his stomach.

“Khuda Hafiz, Ghazni. We all salute you. Disconnect the line and carry on the fight.” He knew that the satellite phone could be traced. The Indians had caught on. He must warn the other group. Before that, he had to call his boss. Brigadier Hasan put the phone down. His wife could see that he was upset.

“What happened? Something serious?” she asked.

“Nothing to concern you dear, but I need to go immediately.” He walked to the other room and called the DG-ISI. He knew that the DG-ISI didn’t like to talk about covert operations over the phone. He was a careful man. Hasan told him he was coming over to brief him in person. General Abbas was in Rawalpindi
and had already got a call from Colonel Khan; he was heading to the Army house to brief the COAS. He had told Khan to warn the other group. It was 0330hours.