THIRTY KILOMETERS EAST OF RAHIM YAR KHAN
PAKISTAN
DAY 1 + 0925 HRS
“Copper-two-five, do you…do you see that cloud of dust, half kilometer east of that wavy set of sand dunes? Over.” The confused voice on the radio asked.
There was a silence of several seconds before another voice chimed in: “Uh…‘
wavy’ set of dunes, Copper-actual? What
wavy set of dunes? Nothing
but wavy sets of dunes down there. Over.”
“Come around on my six, enemy convoy on my three, relative. Do you see it?
“Hang on. Coming around…” the second voice said and the increased noise of jet engines lit up the comms for several seconds. “…okay, I see the cloud on your three, Copper-actual. But they are friendly convoys returning from the front?”
“
What? Aren’t we on the right grid?”
“It’s the right grid, sir. Just that the targets have moved. I cannot tell whether I am seeing friendly IR strobes, enemy decoy strobes or just the damned hot sand flying all over!”
“And,” the first voice added, “I have radar warning spiking up from the west. This is not a friendly place to be. Goddamn it, two-five. Standby,” the original voice answered with a rasp punctuated with gasps of air taken through an oxygen mask. “Copper-actual to Copper-central. We can’t distinguish between friend and foe over here. Thermal markers are ineffective in the heat and we cannot, repeat: cannot, eyeball targets visually. Friendly armor has moved since we arrived on station and comms are noisy. Suggest we scrap this one off the board and RTB. Over.”
“Negative, Copper-actual! You are to deploy weapons on target! Over!”
“You want me to bomb our own guys, Copper-central? I am not deploying weapons without positive ID on targets. You want to circumvent that directive, I suggest you come here and do it yourselves! Addendum: find that incompetent flying-officer directing this from the ground who fu@ked this one up and strap him to the next round of cruise missiles you launch into the enemy! Copper-actual is aborting this strike on local authority. Over and out.” A few seconds later: “Let’s get out of here, two-five.”
“Roger. Egressing.”
Kulkarni had had his helmet headset pressed to his left ear and his eyes closed through the entire conversation between the air-force pilots circling above and their airborne commanders further east. Past experience against the Chinese in Ladakh had taught Kulkarni the hard way that whenever friendly aircraft were overhead with precision munitions and looking for targets, hearing in on their chatter was sometimes the difference between a successful strike and a catastrophic friendly-fire incident.
And he wasn’t relying of hear-say either. He had seen for himself how the 10TH Mechanized Battalion had lost two BMP-II armored vehicles and an entire platoon worth of nearby soldiers to a mistaken strike from a lone air-force Jaguar strike aircraft in the final days of the brutal Ladakh campaign. The pilot of that aircraft had mistaken the retreating pair of vehicles as advancing enemy armored personnel carriers and had taken them both out with dumb bombs. After-action analysis had absolved the pilot of error and attributed the incident to chaotic combat and unclear frontlines…as well as lack of cooperation between the land and air services.
Now he was seeing the pendulum swing the other way. Air-force pilots were following close-air-support protocol to the letter. Which unfortunately meant that strike packages would return without delivering their ordinance rather than risk striking friendly forces. Personally, Kulkarni wished he could have joined the conversation that had just taken place and ordered the pilots to take the risk and drop their payloads. Every enemy tank that was destroyed before it engaged Rhino was a tank that would not exact casualties from Indian tankers.
My tankers! Kulkarni fumed as he opened his eyes and his mind adjusted back to the insides of his Arjun tank. Despite the rumble and chatter going on within his tanks, he could swear he heard the bitter noise of the two Jaguar strike aircraft receding away to the west, weapons and payload intact…
Kulkarni’s commander comms frequency flared up: “What the hell just happened? Where’s our strike?” Kulkarni recognized Rhino-three commander’s voice instantly.
“No go, -three. The pilots cannot distinguish foes and friendlies. Strike has been aborted.”
He heard what amounted to a very passionate muttering of Hindi expletives on the comms before Rhino-three chimed back: “Typical.”
“Looks like we will have to do this the hard way!” Kulkarni stated blandly.
“Negative, leader. It’s our way, not the hard way! Rhino-three out!”
Kulkarni allowed himself a brief smile at the corner of his mouth on that one. But a glance at the ABAMS screen took that smile away. They were now close enough to the Pakistani armor force from their 1ST Armored Division that he was forced to zoom in further to separate his forces from the enemy. Blue markers showed his force advancing roughly north. The opposing green markers were shown as moving south-east, towards the Islamgarh breach point on the border. Kulkarni was under no illusion that the Pakistani armor commanders intended to overrun Rhino and make a break to the border to reclaim the enlarging chunk of land that had now fallen under the treads of Indian tanks out here.
And the ABAMS screen showed Kulkarni that should they succeed in overrunning Rhino, there was not much to prevent the enemy from achieving that goal. The Trishul mechanized convoys would not survive a frontal attack by heavy tanks. Not for long, anyway.
Kulkarni swiveled the ABAMS screen out of his way and peered into his commander sights. He brought up his comms mouthpiece:
“Rhino-actual to all elements, -one and –three. Imminent enemy contact! Fix bayonets and prepare for a knife fight! Out.” He chimed out.
“Targets?” He asked his gunner as the tank rumbled over yet another large dune. Kulkarni could see Arjun tanks on either side of him doing the same. The way Rhino-one and Rhino-three were staggered, there were echelon groups of Arjun tanks rolling over the uneven terrain here. Rhino-three was to his south and was his “right hook”, which would swing down from the east on the enemy’s left flank if such an opportunity presented itself. Of course, if Rhino-one took excessive casualties, Rhino-three was also positioned to provide the second layer of tanks to reinforce the first group. It was all about the commander’s options. Kulkarni wanted to have as many of them as he could as the fluid battle shaped itself…
“Just a mass of dust clouds rising into the sky from the north,” the gunner replied without looking away from his optics. “Our friends are still rolling south.”
“Keep our welcome presents hot and ready!” Kulkarni noted to his loader, who was now sweating profusely and showing visible signs of nervousness. Kulkarni worried about his driver and loader more than his gunner. Partly because his gunner seemed to thrive on the chaos of combat and had ice water in his veins and partly because he had seen armor combat alongside Kulkarni in Ladakh. His other crew members were more raw and had no prior combat experience. This would be their first taste of armor combat.
Their baptism by fire.
“
Contact! I have contact! Three kilometers at twelve-o-clock!” the gunner shouted, causing the loader to jerk in shock. Kulkarni peered back through his optics.
“Wait for a clear shot!” Kulkarni shouted and then switched comms: “Rhino-actual to all elements! Contact! Contact! Maneuver offset by forty degrees! Take your shots!”
On that command, the twenty-three Rhino-one tanks swiveled by forty degrees to east, but kept their turrets aimed north on independent stabilization on targets. This presented the enemy with a sideways moving force which was harder to adjust for in the fire-control-systems than a head-on charging force. To further complicate matters, Kulkarni had tasked his force to follow a zig-zag maneuver where the enemy gunners could not apply a constant lead on the sideways motion on the Indian tanks. For its part, the advanced fire-control computers on the Arjun compensated for the motion and stabilized the turret and evaluated the motion leads without too much hassle for the gunner. It wasn’t as easy as point-n-shoot, but it was close…
Kulkarni felt his tank shudder and the turret fill up with slight smoke as the main gun recoiled and dumped an empty shell casing.
“Shot away!” The gunner shouted. Kulkarni watched the round rip up the sandy terrain as it flew horizontal and low and went into the front glacis armor of the incoming Pakistani Al-khalid tank. The shot splattered into a fireball of sparks and smoke and then dissipated as the enemy tank shuddered to a halt. Moments later the engine compartment of that tank started spewing smoke.
“On target! Move-on!” Kulkarni confirmed for his gunner. The turret was already swiveling to the left. His optics flared white as the next shot shook the tank and went on its way. It missed its intended foe and flew over the latter’s turret.
“Too high! Compensating!”
Kulkarni turned his attention to other matters. He swiveled his optics left and right and saw that a massive tank battle was now underway. Both sides were trading shots and the cohesiveness of Rhino-one was dissipating away. That was to be expected, of course. Which is exactly why Rhino-three was sitting further south: its tanks were rolled into a cohesive fist of steel…
“Hold on,” the driver interrupted. “We are going over a dune!”
Kulkarni and three Arjun tanks to his north went over the dunes almost in formation. As they came over the dunes and went down the other side, the gunners got back into action again. The Arjun tank furthest to the north exploded in a fireball. Its debris flew radially in all directions.
“
Oh god! Rhino-one-ten is gone! I say again, one-ten is burning up!”
The comms were instantly alive with the shocked voices of novice tankers. The hardened veterans just kept their heads down.
Kulkarni turned his optics north just as his tank shuddered again. The smoke and smell inside his turret was becoming unbearable already. But what he saw outside was even worse. There were now seventeen pillars of black smoke rising into the blue skies above. Dust was everywhere and the ground was a churned mush of tank treads. Visibility was fast diminishing and his initial initiative was giving way to a chaotic melee. Kulkarni swiped the sweat dripping into his eyes now and made observations.
As he watched, a Pakistani Al-Khalid tank rumbled around the burning chassis of another Pakistani tank and made its way out of the bellowing smoke…straight in front of Kulkarni’s tank and another to his right. Kulkarni’s gunner was aimed the other way to engage some other tank behind this one…
Kulkarni shouted the warning: “Oh shit! Gunner! Enemy armor contact point blank! Twelve-o-clo…!” The sentence was killed midsentence by the fire of the main gun on the Pakistani tank. A split second later the forward chassis of the Arjun tank on Kulkarni’s right exploded into a million pieces and showered the entire area nearby with falling debris. The burning Arjun tank shuddered to a halt with the main gun bent at an awkward angle and the front chassis burning furiously.
Kulkarni turned in horror to see the Pakistani gunner swivel his main gun by thirty degrees to point at Kulkarni’s tank just around the same time as Kulkarni’s gunner did the same. He expected death to come instantly. Kulkarni’s tank shuddered and the Al-khalid tank literally fell backwards against the momentum of the point-blank sabot round fired by Kulkarni’s gunner. A second later it exploded from the bottom up and the turret fell to the side amidst a tower of flame…
“Target destroyed!”
Kulkarni allowed himself to breathe again and could see his heart pounding against his ribcage.
That was too fu@king close!
He turned his optics right and saw that they were now leaving Rhino-one-five behind now. The two enemy tanks three hundred meters to his north were burning into blackened hulls already. But the smoke from these tanks and all the others were obscuring all visibility around the surviving tanks. A haze of brown and black had now replaced the blue skies and sunlight. The scenery reminded Kulkarni of the Kuwaiti battlefields from the first Gulf war. The only light that seemed to enter this haze was from the flashes of main gun rounds as they left their barrels.
That was where ABAMS came into its own. As the blue-force-tracker that it was, Kulkarni could see all of his tanks against a terrain overlay. Those that were alive, anyway. The Pakistanis had no such capability. This allowed Kulkarni to maneuver his force regardless of outside visibility, detrimental as it was to the gunners. He could, if he wished, extricate his force from chaos and regroup further away.
Had that moment arrived?
That was the key question. And the answer was that Kulkarni couldn’t say. He had lost six tanks so far based on their absence from the ABAMS screen. Four others were mobility killed and were fighting as standing-pillboxes. Three others were reporting minor damage.
The enemy was doing much worse. One of the features in ABAMS was the ability for each crew to mark targets for the others. That way, all tanks connected to the ABAMS net could coordinate strikes and maneuvers. But right now the ABAMS screen was only showing a handful of enemy targets marked. Could it be that in the heat of battle, his tank commanders were not updating the net?
Kulkarni opened Rhino-one comms: “Rhino-actual to all Rhino-one tanks on this net: mark targets and status! Out.”
He turned back to the screen and saw that the status was reiterated as before, but of the five remaining enemy tanks, only three got marked. They had destroyed this enemy armor force.
Or had they? Kulkarni zoomed the view out and saw that they had indeed run into about a battalion of enemy armor here. There was another battalion of the 1ST Pakistani Armored Division to his east. And they had no clue what had knifed through their sister battalion on their left flank. Could he now dig into this second battalion from their rear by cutting north from here? Maybe. But first, he needed to extricate Rhino-one from this mess.
“Driver, traverse north. Get us out of here!” Kulkarni ordered.
He felt his tank shudder to a halt and then swivel northerly, raking sand up all around as the two treads moved opposite to each other. Then the sudden burst of acceleration and increased rumble from his diesel engines. He switched comms:
“Rhino-actual to all Rhino-one tanks: follow my lead. Those that are mobility-killed will hold positions. All others, form up! Rhino-three: bring yourself up. Rhino-actual is taking over –one and –three. Over.”
“Rhino-three copies all, leader. All yours.”
“Good. We have driven the bayonet into the enemy’s gut, gentlemen. Now’s the time to twist it and watch him die! Rhino-actual out.”