Chapter One
ON THE HIGH SEAS
FIFTY KILOMETERS OFF THE COAST OF MUMBAI
14TH MARCH + 0130 HRS
The small fishing boat heaved with the waves, struggling to maintain its course. The frothing sea water was splashing against the wooden hull as the vessel cut through the waves. Afridi looked flinched as a spray of water once again headed towards his eyes. He tasted the salty water and spat it out, turning away from the railing he had been holding on to.
“Accursed weather!” He shouted as he straggled towards what constituted as the bridge on the small ship. He grabbed the ladder leading up to the small room and looked around. The entire boat was awash and all surfaces were slippery. Waves were breaking above the bows of the ship now, engulfing the tarpaulin covers over the containers laying there. Afridi glanced at the ropes keeping the containers tied down and satisfied himself that they were going to hold. Then he started to climb up the ladder.
“Can’t you make this thing go any faster?” He blared as he lifted himself off the ladder and on to the floor of the small room. The two men there shook their head.
“If we go any faster, we will break the boat’s back!” the owner of the boat, and the former captain, said after several seconds just as the boat heaved again and fell over the crest of a massive wave. Water splashed high enough to hit the glass of the bridge. Afridi looked at the eyes of the captain and saw the fear…not of the waves or the weather. The old man had been through countless storms over his long life. No. The fear stemmed not from the natural but from the manmade.
Afridi smiled cruelly and removed the AK-47 hanging off his shoulders. He put the weapon on the small map table and looked at the former ship owner.
“Are you afraid of this?” He pointed to the rifle laying on the table. Both men in the room beside him remained silent. He nodded appreciatively. Good. Fear is always useful.
“Today you will accomplish what Allah has wished from you as devout Muslims. You will accomplish what he desires and will find a place by his side when the time comes,” Afridi said grandly. He was prone to hyperbole…especially when he held the power to make the people around him listen. His rifle ensured that power. And his mission ensured the afterlife…
He looked around and saw the overcast clouds and the drizzle hitting the windows now. Flashes of thunder followed intermittently, lighting up the bridge in a flood of bluish-white light. The glass vibrated a few seconds later as the thunder crackled through the skies.
Filthy weather…He thought as the ship heaved again, following the motion of yet another of the never-ending waves. Afridi struggled to hold on and maintain his balance. He was not a sailor. Never had been his entire life and never had thought about it. Apparently Allah had other plans for him, as it had turned out. Given the nature of the job he had been given, the discomfort of being trapped on the high seas was irrelevant.
This “ship” was barely deserving of the term. But it was an decades old veteran of the waters of the Arabian sea. It had survived countless storms and had always made it back to port with its crew safe and sound. And that kind of security was what Afridi and his men needed on their journey from the beaches west of Karachi.
Security and anonymity…Afridi reminded himself. Indeed, for all its glorious years on the seas off the Pakistani and Indian coasts, this ship and its crew were well known to all authorities. Both in India as well as in Pakistan. And that was important. The last thing he needed now was to be caught off the coast, away from his objective, by Indian Naval and Coastal security forces.
Which is where the weather came in…Afridi reminded himself as he put his hand out of the windows to feel the drizzling rain.
This kind of bad weather made his job easier and the job of his enemies harder. There would be little chance of detection from low flying patrol aircraft with these clouds and rolling waves. There would be no moonlight to assist in visual acquisition and the undulating surface of the water coupled with the extremely small thermal signature of this low-tech vessel would ensure that sensory detection threat was low.
At least that’s what they told us…Afridi thought as he shrugged off the rain water and again shouldered his rifle behind his back. The eyes of the two crewmen didn’t leave his actions. “Look at the sea where we are going!” he shouted with a rash wave of his arm. “If we get lost out here, I will personally slit your throats and throw your heads off this boat for the sharks to feast on! I want to be at our objective within the next two hours before this storm dies away! Understand?!”
The two men nodded in quick successions but said nothing. Afridi moved to the captain and grabbed him by the throat, choking him.
“You have been very quiet ever since I came up here. You are not having second thoughts about the task god has given you, do you?” He pressed his fingers tighter around the old man’s neck, causing him to gasp for breath. “Speak up, you old ba$tard!”
A few seconds later Afridi relaxed his grip around the man’s throat. The captain instantly fell on his knees gasping for air.
“Bah. You miserable villagers are not worthy to be leading this task!” Afridi turned to a hatch nearby that led into the belly of the ship. That was where the rest of his men were. There was a small orange-yellow glow of light coming from down there. Afridi bent over the hatch and was met down the ladder by one of his men, sitting with his rifle next to the base of the ladder.
“Rashid!” Afridi shouted. Rashid looked up and smiled.
“Wake everybody up. We are getting close to the destination. I want the cargo checked and primed. Understand?” Rashid nodded and threw his cigarette away, getting up with the help of the ladder. Afridi looked back at the bridge once Rashid was on his way. He could hear the voices of other men down the hatch now. The captain’s assistant had helped the captain get up and take a seat near the steering column. The latter’s face was red and he was still struggling for breath.
“You!” Afridi pointed at the assistant. “Get back to the control! Leave him or I will shoot you right here and now!”
As the petrified man promptly got up to get to the controls, Afridi looked out the glass and saw the drizzle dying down. He could even see some break in the cloud cover…
“How far away from the coast are we?” He asked the assistant.
“Probably two dozen kilometers.”
Not a good time to lose weather cover…Afridi thought. They were entering one of the busiest commercial shipping areas. He could even make out the lights of at least half a dozen large container ships on the horizon.
Afridi turned as he heard noise behind him and saw Rashid climbing up the stairs to the bridge, his rifle slinging over his shoulders. He kicked the captain blocking his way on the floor and walked past the writhing man to come up next to his team-leader. By this time, Afridi had taken the binoculars from the bridge and was actively scanning the horizon.
“Problems?” Rashid asked.
“Not yet,” Afridi replied without taking his eyes off the optics. “But the weather is starting to clear and we still have some distance to go before we are in range of the dinghies.”
“Inshallah, we will deliver as promised!” Rashid proclaimed confidently. Afridi grunted and smiled.
“Indeed, my friend! I…” Afridi’s voice died off as both men overheard the droning noise of aircraft engines. A warning from the assistant made them look just as an Indian Dorner-228 aircraft broke cloud cover about a kilometer away from their location. The aircraft was on a path away from the boat and was moving away…
“Maybe they didn’t see us!” Rashid offered. Afridi continued to watch the departing aircraft through his binoculars as it drifted in and out of the low hanging clouds and early morning mist. The aircraft noise was dying down now and Afridi was almost agreed with Rashid when the Dornier aircraft banked to port and began to turn, several kilometers away…
“The ba$tards have spotted us!” Afridi said as he lowered his binoculars and let out some choice, heart-felt expletives. He then turned to Rashid as the aircraft noise started to increase again: “Get everybody up now! Tell Ahmed to open up the containers we have for just this kind of emergency! Go!”
As Rashid leaped to the ladder and began climbing down, Afridi kept his eyes on the twin engine propeller aircraft as it swung by the ship, this time within a few hundred meters of the bow. Afridi saw the logo of the Indian Coast Guard on its fuselage against the flicker of a lightening flash some kilometers away. He thought he also saw a small dome-shaped optical pod lens flash against the same light.
There’s no hiding it now...he thought to himself and looked to see as Rashid and two other men of his team brought out a pair of wooden containers up the hatch. Rashid slid one of the containers over the floor of the bridge and cracked open the lid. He removed the thin cover of hay on the top to reveal a long green tube with optics on one end. It had painted on it “ANZA MK-II”. Rashid put his rifle down and hefted the loaded surface-to-air missile launcher in his hands, cleaning off the stray hay off it. He removed the lid off its optics and slid the batteries into the optics, clicking then on. He then looked to Afridi:
“Ready when you are!”
Afridi frowned. This was to have been their last resort. But given the nature of the mission at hand, they were armed for any eventuality. He held under no false assumptions that the Indians would be unaware of the threat posed by this weapon or even the weapon’s characteristics. After all, they had faced versions of the same weapon many years ago during the Kargil war. No. The issue here was not the weapon itself but its use. Deniability doesn’t work very well if one advertises the source of one’s weaponry…
“Not yet. Let’s make sure they are on to us first,” Afridi pointed out. “For all they know, we are just another fishing vessel lost at sea in the storm.” He got a wicked smile from Rashid on that one just as the aircraft made another low pass over the vessel, drowning it in its propeller noise.
“They are hailing us on the radio!” the captain’s assistant shouted.
“Tell them what they want to hear. And stick to what we told you to say. One word besides it and your sentence dies with you! Understand?” The assistant nodded in fear and began to respond to the radio hails. All the while the ship continued towards the coast. All they need do is buy time…
“The aircraft is armed!” Rashid said as the aircraft banked around the bow of the ship again, scrutinizing it with its infra-red optics. Afridi saw what Rashid was pointing to: there were a pair of rocket pods underneath each wing of the small patrol aircraft. Each pod carried four fin-stabilized unguided rockets…enough to sink this vessel without too much trouble.
“Easy!” Afridi ordered. “Let them keep talking. And keep that launcher stowed away. The more they talk, they closer we get!”
The assistant turned from the radio to face the men behind him: “The Indians are ordering us to shut off our engines and stay where we are. They are ordering us to not come any closer to the Indian coastline!”
“How far put are we now?” Rashid asked.
“About eighteen kilometers away,” Afridi replied, looking at the GPS tracker in his hands and the paper map laid out on the chart table. He shook his head. “Still too far away.”
“No choice then!” Rashid said as he flicked open the optics of his launcher. Afridi realized that his colleague was correct. There was no other option. He turned to the captain’s assistant: “You. Do what the Indians are asking.”
“Get them complacent! I like it!” Rashid let out a derisive laugh.
A few minutes later the ship was dead in the water, rolling and pitching with the waves around it. The crew of the Dornier-228 aircraft overflew the docile and obedient target, observing them via night-vision-goggles. Behind them, the systems operators continued their task of observing the Pakistani ship through the infra-red and near infrared optical pods. One of them spotted a man on the railing outside the bridge elevating a long tube at them and realized what that was. He shouted the warning to the pilots up front and zoomed his optics on the tube just as the optics flashed white and then smoke drifted away from where the pipe had been. The operator zoomed the optical scope back out and saw the rising thermal plume coming up towards them. The pilot banked his aircraft hard and prepared to punch out flares, but he and his crew had been caught completely off guard against such an anti-air threat. A second later it was already too late…
Afridi saw from inside the bridge as the Anza missile climbed into the Indian aircraft and slammed into its engines the very instant the pilot had released flares, lighting up the sky. The explosion tore apart the small aircraft’s starboard wing amidst a flurry of flames. The aircraft splashed into the waves a couple seconds later.
“There is no hiding it now!” Rashid said as he threw the discarded launcher off the ship and walked inside, wiping the smut of the missile exhaust off his face. Afridi turned to the captain’s assistant:
“Full speed ahead! Head straight towards Mumbai! Get us as close as you can!”
As the ship’s engines rumbled back to life and the vibrations made it back to the bridge, Rashid looked at the rest of the men and then to Afridi: “What’s the plan now? They will be waiting for us! There is little hope of carrying out the original mission.”
Afridi grunted in amusement.
“The original mission? The original mission
still stands, my friend. But our execution is now much more direct! Prepare the payload!”
Rashid raised his eyebrow in surprise and then nodded. He then motioned to two of his men to follow him down the hatch, leaving Afridi on the bridge with everybody else.
Fifteen minutes later there was no doubt that the Indians were aware that something was going down off the coast. Afridi was the first to spot an Indian Coast Guard ship on the horizon, steaming at full speed towards his boat against the hazy backdrop of the Mumbai skyline much further south.
Here they come…
He ran over to the hatch: “Rashid! Are you ready?”
“Almost! Give me five more minutes!” was the reply.
“Five minutes! That’s all we have anyway! Let me know when its set!”
Afridi then walked back to the assistant and saw that the Indian ship was now much closer, given the high closure rate between them. He could see the Indian sailors moving up the bow of the ship to man the mounted machineguns and other weapons. He also saw what looked like preparations for a boarding party. He had been trained to recognize all these signs. For just such an eventuality…
A floodlight from the Indian ship switched on and began moving up and down the heaving and pitching boat. Afridi nudged the assistant to keep his direct course towards Mumbai, forcing the Indian vessel to move to the side. This time, of course, the Indians were not spending time talking. A burst of heavy machinegun fire riddled the stern of the boat and sent Afridi and the others diving to the floor of the bridge as splinters flew off the ship and tracers flashed by, lighting up the night. The thunderous rattle of the gunfire drowned out all other noises.
When it stopped, Afridi raised his head and saw smoke piling into the bridge from the rear of their boat. The engine had died and they were now adrift in front of the marauding Indian boat. The flashlights from the Indian vessel were shining straight at the bridge, making Afridi wince and bring his arm to shield his eyes.
“What’s going on up there?” Rashid shouted from the hatch as he climbed up the stairs.
“Stay where you are!” Afridi shouted back and waved him to go back down. Once Rashid had done that, Afridi continued: “They are preparing to board us or kill us. Either way, time’s up! We are as close as we are going to get. Are you all set?”
Rashid nodded in the affirmative.
Afridi looked at the light from the sky scrapers of Mumbai on the horizon and then smiled. “Good! Do it!
Allahu-akbar!” Afridi closed his eyes…
…Several seconds later, a flash of white erupted from the Pakistani vessel and engulfed the Indian vessel with impunity, expanding outwards for a kilometer in radius before rising off the sea underneath a rapidly rising stem of flames. Mumbai was back-lit against this rapidly rising ball of nuclear fission, sending rapid man-made tsunamis towards the Mumbai coast along with a massive cloud of radioactive fallout…
With thoughts on the accuracy of technical stuff in there, realism (if any! 
) of the scenario with regard to present geo-politics, flow of the book from the standpoint of general readability etc. 
BRF scenario "Fenix":