NORTH OF LAHORE
DAY 3 + 0020 HRS
The line of seven Al-Khalid tanks moved obliquely, their main guns firing as they moved. Two kilometers to the west, the green-white flashes of their guns saturated the night-vision optics on his binoculars, so Haider lowered them and let his eyes adjust. Now the black of night punctuated by the flashes of yellow filled the horizon. As he watched, a distant crackle of fireballs indicated the falling of artillery on some poor souls on the frontlines…
Haider turned to see Akram standing behind him, watching silently. His low-light goggles were push up above his forehead on to his hair. Neither men said anything, but the silence was punctuated by the chatter of several radiomen and half a dozen staff officers busy running the army units out here. Haider finally walked up near Akram and rubbed his eyes.
“This front is stabilizing,” he said, his voice filled with exhaustion. “Looks like the 6TH Armored will hold its ground. For now, anyway.”
“Yes, sir.” Akram said quietly. A stabilized front was hardly the desired outcome for officers of his generation, brought up on the humiliation of defeat from previous wars. Haider patted the man on his shoulder. He knew how it felt. He turned to face the young major: “This is not how this was supposed to unfold.”
He looked his young aide in the eyes. He knew they all had seen and heard the state of the war as it stood tonight. The Indians had reacted to the strike on Mumbai with shocking force. And the results of all that had landed them here weeks after the event. But living in the past was something Haider could ill afford to do. Not at the moment, at least.
“I need to get some sleep if I am to function properly,” he said finally. “Wake me up if something happens during the night.”
Akram nodded and muttered a “yes, sir” under his breath. Haider walked past him and the radiomen towards the houses that had been requisitioned from their owners to serve as his command center. Until the Indians found this one too. But he was not going to sleep out here in the mud and cold. He needed a bed. A Pakistani general sleeping in the mud with his troops? Unthinkable. Even under the circumstances.
He walked past the dozens of soldiers and civilians resting on the streets outside the house. Some were eating food and others were sleeping. These men belonged to the units he had gotten out of Lahore prior to the nuclear detonation. Most of these infantry units were exhausted, expended and disorganized now. The battle for Lahore had proven very costly to the Pak army. One part of him wanted to wake these men up and send them off to the frontlines east of here. After all, that was what their comrades in the 6TH Armored Division were doing. But he was too exhausted from the efforts of the day trying to keep the 6TH Armored from disintegrating after the sudden destruction of its command centers by a series of Indian air strikes. And that was just before the unit had moved into combat! What would have happened to it if he hadn’t stepped in?
Perhaps his inner voice was trying to find justifications for his exhaustion. Maybe all his body wanted was some sleep. A few hours. That’s all. After that he would determine what had to be done next. He walked into the living room of the large house and found the stench of soldiers, officers, equipment, blood and food to be nauseous. He winced and walked past the soldiers to the second floor where a room had been kept aside for him. He walked in and went for the helmet chin strap, before realizing that it had been broken since his time in Lahore this morning.
God! Was it really just this morning? He asked himself as he sat down on the bed.
It felt like it was months ago!
He fell back on his back on to the mattress and instantly fell asleep.
“Sir!” There was a knock on the door.
Haider muttered some choice Urdu expletives and then composed himself: “Go away! I told you to leave me alone!”
But the knock on the door persisted. “Sir! Please open the door!”
Haider picked up his sidearm from the bed and then walked up to the door. He opened it to find one of his radiomen standing there, holding a phone speaker. “Sir, incoming call from army headquarters! For you!”
Haider scowled and then took the phone from the man, extending its coiled cable as he walked into the room.
“General Haider, here.”
“General, please hold for the army commander!” A bland voice replied.
Haider raised an eyebrow at that. He wondered what Hussein wanted now…
“You still alive?” Haider recognized Hussein’s gruff voice. Not to mention his tone. His facial expression contorted, but he kept his voice calm.
“Alive and fighting,” he managed to say without anger seeping in. “No thanks to you though.”
“Where are you now?”
Haider let out a deep breath. “Commanding field units north of Lahore. The 6TH Armored in particular. The Indians decapitated its leadership just as it moved into the line. I was in the area and took over.”
“Good!” Hussein replied. Haider noted the change in tone. The man sounded genuine on that one. “Had you not stepped in, it would have been chaos and the Indians could have penetrated deep into our defenses. I was told that the 6TH Armored was fighting hard. I should have guessed you had something to do with adding steel to the spine of the men out there.”
“I appreciate that,” Haider sat down on the mattress. “How bad is it?”
He heard what could only be a long sigh on the other end. Haider knew that well enough: Hussein wasn’t sure what to do. That sigh had always been his placeholder whenever he wanted advice but didn’t want to ask for it. Haider looked to the floor: “that bad, eh?”
“Did you hear about the debacle near Rahim Yar Khan this evening?”
“I heard some rumors on the command net,” Haider lied. He knew a great deal more about that failed counterattack from his ISI commanders, but he wanted Hussein to say it the way he saw it. Because that was more important than what anyone else thought…
“The Indians routed us from there, plain and simple.” Hussein said, surprising Haider with his uncharacteristic bout of honesty. Pakistani generals never admit defeat as a matter of principle. They couldn’t. Doing so meant public humiliation and ridicule and the termination of any further prospects in Pakistan. They hadn’t admitted a defeat even when ninety-thousand soldiers had surrendered to India in what had once been East Pakistan in 1971. They even celebrated the loss of land in 1965 to India as victory day in the country. And the humiliation of Kargil and Siachen were ignored or passed on to civilian government scapegoats. Under such a culture of repression, it was surprising to say the least when the top general in the country admitted a defeat in candor such as this.
Hussein continued, taking Haider’s silence to indicate that he was listening: “They have taken the entire stretch of land from the border all the way to the Indus river near the town. The 1ST Armored Division has been destroyed. So have several Infantry divisions. They have chopped our control of the country into several pieces. The northern forces are now fighting independently of the southern forces. And units west of the river are being funneled into thanks to the river and the complete traffic chaos on only highways west of the river that we control!”
“But we can still move forces across the river?” Haider asked. His mind was working in overdrive now. “And the concentration of our forces in the north means that we do not have to worry about the Rahim Yar Khan capture as being overly strategic in…”
“Isn’t it though?” Hussein interrupted. “Do you know that the Balochis are using this as the important time to launch their own drive for independence? How are we to move forces into the area when the Indians are making strategic movement impossible?!”
“Right,” Haider said after a couple seconds.
“Our control on the country is hanging by a thread, Haider.” Hussein said flatly. And once again, he sounded genuine. That scared Haider a lot more than anything the Indians could do. Haider was a master of conversations, but he felt even a lieutenant out of training could see where this conversation as going. Once the country’s fate had been invoked, there were no limits on what methods they could use to defend themselves…
“And the Indians haven’t stopped even after the Lahore detonation,” Hussein continued. “If that wasn’t a clear enough sign for them about the seriousness with which we see this invasion, then nothing else will stop them. Perhaps the Mumbai atta…”
“Let me stop you right there,” Haider interrupted his commander. There was only so much he would be caught speaking over a comms line. He wasn’t about to hand the Indians any evidence. Not now. After a second, Haider continued: “the country’s fate is hanging in the balance, sir. We need to pull ourselves together and do what has to be done!” He let that emphasis sink in, before continuing: “and you need to get out Rawalpindi.”
After a very long minute of silence, he got his response:
“Yes.”
It was the most chilling one word reply Haider had ever heard. In it carried the acceptance of fate. His own fate and that of his country. Acceptance of his past actions. And a certain determination to see it through. All summed up in one word over the military comms.
Both men knew what had to happen now.
The link cut off. Haider looked at his phone as though it had offended him in a deep way. But really it was his reflexes kicking in while the mind processed what his immediate next steps needed to be.
“Sir?” The radioman said as Haider handed him the phone. But Haider was already in his self-preservation mode. He grabbed his helmet, sidearm holster and pushed the scared radioman aside as he walked out the door.
After all there are too many manchurian components involved with jinn technology