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  The two commandos watched the station wagon race away into the gradually gathering darkness, towards the waiting desert sands.

  They had been on the road, a narrow, bumpy dirt track, for about two miles when there was a sudden, explosive burst and the station wagon skidded to the right. Tanaz fought the wheel as she struggled to keep the heavy vehicle from ploughing through the muddy embankments on either side of the road.

  If it gets into the fields, we’ve had it. There’s no way I can get Iqbal away from here on foot. He’ll never make it in this condition.

  She fought to bring the vehicle to a shuddering halt just as the front wheels climbed the embankment on the right of the dirt track. Heaving a sigh of relief, she turned to Iqbal. The loud explosion of the tyre had jolted him awake. He was clutching the handrest tightly with both hands, anxiety writ large on his face.

  ‘Damn! What a time to run into a flat!’ Tanaz forced a smile. ‘Let me get the spare wheel out.’ She opened the door and got out.

  ‘I’ll help you…’ Iqbal struggled to pull himself upright.

  ‘No!’ Tanaz said sharply. ‘Don’t get heroic, Iqbal. The best way for you to help is to stay still and keep that wound from bleeding. I’ll manage the tyre change on my own. If you move around and it starts bleeding again, we’re in bigger trouble.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘No buts, Iqbal,’ she said firmly. ‘Just stay put.’

  Iqbal watched in silence as Tanaz got the jack and heavy spare wheel out from the rear of the station wagon. Despite her slight build, she was strong and handled the wheel with relative ease. She had just managed to wheel the spare up to the front of the station wagon and was about to insert the jack under the vehicle when the deep-throated roar of an engine burst in on the silence.

  Tanaz dropped the jack and moved swiftly to the driver’s side of the station wagon. She reached in and grabbed the Uzi. The weapon disappeared between the folds of her burqa with minimal movement. Simultaneously, she dropped the hijab and veiled her face again.

  Inside the vehicle, Iqbal struggled to sit up. He grabbed the second Uzi from under his seat and hid it inside the folds of the shawl Tiwathia had draped around him. He quickly checked to ensure the shawl concealed his blood-soaked clothes. The sudden movement sent fresh waves of pain through him and he struggled to force a deadpan expression on his face.

  A hundred feet ahead, a Pakistan Army jeep rounded the bend in the track and began to close in on them with tremendous speed.

  The army jeep sported the typical sand-green-andyellow camouflage commonly used by military vehicles. Its canopy cover was rolled forward as it thundered up to them. Four soldiers were perched on the rear seats and two in the front cabin. The four men at the back cradled the standard POF (Pakistan Ordinance Factory) manufactured PK-7 short assault rifles in their hands.

  The weapons were placed casually between their legs, their barrels pointing safely skywards, but neither Iqbal nor Tanaz had any doubt about the speed with which they could be brought into action by a trained soldier, or the lethality of the heavy 7.62 mm slugs that they could spew out with blazing rapidity. Each of the standard magazines fitted on the PK-7 rifle cradled twenty rounds and the eighty rounds in those four rifles could be unleashed within seconds.

  The jeep came to a noisy, creaking halt next to the stranded station wagon that blocked most of the narrow track. There was a sudden silence as the soldier behind the wheel turned off the engine and the billowing dust in its wake slowly settled around the jeep.

  ‘What’s all this?’ The thirty-something man who leaned out from the front passenger’s side had the bullying arrogance of a typical army NCO (Non Commissioned Officer). He was clearly irritated at being forced to stop.

  ‘Sorry, janab,’ Tanaz called out, her tone remarkably calm and even. ‘The tyre got punctured. I’ll just change it and clear the road in a moment.’

  ‘It would be much faster if you got that idiot sitting inside to help you.’ The NCO pointed at Iqbal. ‘You! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, warming your butt while you make the woman work?’

  ‘That’s my husband, janab,’ Tanaz replied before Iqbal could open his mouth. ‘He is ill. In fact, I was taking him to the hospital when the tyre got punctured.’

  She was still speaking when the NCO threw open the jeep door and jumped out, his metal-jacketed boots hitting the ground with a dull clang. Perhaps it was only force of habit or maybe he had noticed something that made him suspicious, but he was toting a carbine in his hand when he hit the road.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ the NCO asked as he approached the station wagon, heading towards Iqbal’s side of the vehicle.

  Tanaz exchanged a rapid glance with Iqbal as the NCO approached. She seemed to be asking him what to do. His expression made it clear to her that they could not take a chance. She nodded imperceptibly, her eyes swivelling to the four soldiers in the rear of the jeep, as though letting him know she would take them on, leaving him to sort out the other two. Behind the folds of her burqa, she soundlessly clicked the Uzi to automatic fire mode. The NCO was still a dozen feet away when the Uzi chattered to life. Despite the awkwardness of the loose, flowing fabric, Tanaz’s opening burst almost instantly cut down the two men at the back.

  Perched high in the open rear of the jeep, they were unmissable targets. Both men died before they even knew the firing had begun. The other two were marginally luckier. Despite the suddenness of the assault, they almost managed to jump clear of the jeep before the Uzi’s lethal cargo reached them. One man took the bullet straight in his head but the other managed to get a couple of rounds off before he fell. The bullets didn’t come anywhere near Tanaz because the impact had spun him around before he could bring up his rifle. The gun was arcing towards the right as he fell and both bullets exploded into the windscreen of the station wagon, starring the toughened glass.

  Meanwhile, inside the station wagon, Iqbal was bringing up his own Uzi to fire when the barrel snagged in his shawl. He clawed at it frantically, but by the time he cleared it and got the weapon up, the Pakistani NCO’s carbine had begun to spit lead.

  The NCO had been shocked into stillness when the Uzi in Tanaz’s hands thundered to life. By the time his training took over, the first two soldiers in the jeep were already dead. Tanaz was realigning her weapon onto the second set of soldiers in the rear of the jeep by the time the NCO released the safety and brought his carbine into play. The sharp three-round burst slammed into Tanaz a fraction of a second after she had cut down the last of the four men in the rear of the jeep. The harsh multiple impact literally lifted Tanaz in the air and threw her backwards over the embankment into the field. She hit the ground hard and then she was still. Blood began to seep out and stain the folds of her burqa.

  Before the NCO could fire again, hot lead from Iqbal’s weapon turned his head to pulp and he slumped to the ground.

  Iqbal managed to get off a second shot at the soldier behind the wheel of the jeep, who was sitting transfixed at the sudden turn of events, when the first PK-7 round fired by Tanaz’s final victim shattered the windscreen of the station wagon. The slug slashed through the windscreen and thumped harmlessly into the upholstery of the seat beside Iqbal.

  Damn! That was close…

  The thought was still forming in his mind when the second rifle bullet sliced through the already shattered windscreen and slammed into him.

  The heavy 7.62 mm slug travels with tremendous power; even at a range of 4400 metres it carries almost eighty joules of energy, more than adequate to deliver a crippling blow to the human body. The bullet that smashed into Iqbal had barely travelled thirty metres. It was moving with the lethality of an express train gone berserk. It made short work of his breastplate as it ploughed through his chest, throwing him backwards into oblivion.

  The sound of gunfire cleaved through the silence of the night for miles around. For a very long time its echoes seemed to reverberate in the darkness. The two Force 22 commandos racin
g through the night barely a mile and a half away from the RV, juddered to a halt. A little ahead of them was their guide Rehmat, whose job was to get them safely across the international border.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Tiwathia muttered. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

  ‘The first was definitely an Uzi and that’s what Tanaz was carrying,’ Sami replied. ‘The second lot sounded like the PK-7 and… I think there was some carbine fire too.’

  ‘Shit!’ Tiwathia paused for a moment. ‘Do you think we should go back?’

  ‘What good would that do?’ Sami said. ‘They must be at least three miles from here. By the time we get there, so will the Paki police and their border forces.’

  The two men exchanged worried glances.

  ‘Come on, come on! Let’s get going,’ Rehmat hissed at them urgently from the darkness. ‘We need to get out of here as fast as we can. The place will be crawling with patrols soon.’

  Reluctantly, the two officers turned and began to move towards the safety of the Indian border. They knew Rehmat was right.

  What the hell are we going to tell the colonel? Sami thought as he followed the guide.

  Despite the rapid clip at which they were moving, safety was still four stress-filled hours away. Standing between them and the IB was a cordon of mines, barbed wire, men, guns and electronic eyes and ears.

  FOUR

  ‘Tell me exactly what happened,’ Colonel Rajan Anbu said as soon as they had settled down in the Ops Room of the Force 22 base at Kasauli. As usual, Anbu was calm and gave no indication of stress. He had already done the basic, initial debriefing as soon as Sami and Tiwathia had crossed the IB and returned to the safety of the advance ops base, so he had some idea of the events that had transpired across the IB in the hunt for Salim. But there was only so much you could say on a radio network, even a secure one.

  ‘Okay, MS, I understand what you’re saying,’ Anbu had told Sami at the end of the debrief, masking his dismay. ‘You guys have done a fabulous job. Get some rest now and meet me at the Ops Room at 1700. We’ll go over the whole thing in detail then.’

  Located one level below the ground, the Force 22 Ops Room was a large rectangular room with a single door. The back wall was occupied by a gigantic electronic battleboard-cum-screen next to which was a large-screen plasma television. Along the right wall was a row of four tables angled so that they faced the screen. Each table held a gleaming desktop computer and a bank of phones. The left side of the room was taken up by a large wooden table on which were placed two brightly coloured and somewhat bulky phones. Marshalled in front of this table, in the middle of the room, were four neat rows of chairs, all facing the battleboard-cumscreen. Anbu leaned against the solitary table to the left, facing the battleboard. Sami and Tiwathia had swivelled around two of the chairs in the centre and were seated in front of him.

  ‘So, tell me what happened.’

  The stocky forty-three-year-old colonel was the first Commanding Officer of Force 22 and a fine example of that peculiar streak of controlled aggression that makes the Special Forces man stand apart from and ahead of the pack. Anbu was known to lead from the front and never expected from the extraordinary men and women that he commanded, anything that he was not willing to do himself. And that was no mean achievement, considering his unit comprised the crème de la crème of the country.

  Born from the bloody crucible of the long, low intensity conflict between the Indian and Pakistani military and intelligence establishments, Force 22 had been created to provide a rapid covert response to situations that could not – or should not – be dealt with by conventional forces in a more conventional manner.

  Every officer in Force 22 was handpicked from the Indian army, navy, air force or intelligence services. Each one was a commissioned officer not below the rank of captain and was in superb physical condition, a high achiever amongst his or her peers, trained to fight over land, sea and air, skilled in most known methods of killing and motivated to the highest possible levels.

  Anbu repeated his question to Sami and Tiwathia: ‘Please start from the beginning.’

  The two commandos in front of him looked unhappy and ill at ease. Sami, the senior of the two, automatically took up the baton. Keeping his emotions in check, he told Anbu everything – from the time they had crossed the IB and linked up with Tanaz, to the successful completion of their mission in the hill town of Murree, thirty kilometres from Islamabad, where Murad Salim and his assistant Azam Cheema had set up their operational base.

  ‘You are sure Salim is dead?’ Anbu asked.

  ‘There can be no doubt about it, sir,’ Tiwathia intervened. ‘Iqbal cleaved his head off with the scimitar.’

  ‘Scimitar?’ Anbu was momentarily nonplussed. ‘What scimitar?’

  ‘During the shootout, Tanaz’s weapon jammed,’ Sami replied. ‘She was right in front of Salim when it happened. He was about to shoot her when Iqbal snatched up this really fancy scimitar lying on the table before him and chopped Salim’s gun hand off. Then – I think he was carried away by the heat of the moment – he cut off Salim’s head with it.’

  ‘Damn!’ Anbu tried to visualize the scene. ‘That must have been one hell of a blow.’

  ‘It was, sir!’ Tiwathia replied, suddenly animated. ‘The damn thing went through Salim like a knife through hot butter.’

  ‘Really?’ Anbu nudged the story on. ‘What happened then, on the way back?’

  ‘Iqbal’s wound started bleeding like crazy…’

  ‘Iqbal’s wound? You didn’t tell me he was injured.’

  ‘Yes sir, he stopped a bullet meant for Tiwathia.’

  ‘Just raced forward and threw himself in the way, sir. If it hadn’t been for him, I may not even be here today.’ Tiwathia’s voice throbbed with emotion. ‘He was a good man.’

  ‘Was?’ Anbu interjected gently. ‘You don’t know for sure he didn’t make it out alive.’ He gave Tiwathia an encouraging smile. ‘Hope for the best, Vikram. Always!’

  Tiwathia smiled half-heartedly and looked away. There was an awkward pause before Sami took over again.

  ‘By the time we reached the RV it was clear that we’d have a problem getting Iqbal back with us. Then Tanaz said she’d take care of him and Iqbal wanted to stay on with her. In any case, he needed to get to a doctor and she said there was a secure one pretty close to the RV.’

  ‘They’re like twin souls, sir. It’s really strange how similar their stories are. Just like Iqbal lost his mother and sister to the terrorist bombs at Sarojini Nagar, Tanaz lost both her brothers to the jihadis. The Jaish-e-Mohammed had recruited the youngsters and sent them in to attack the police lines at Jammu. You remember the attack two years ago?’ Anbu thought for a moment and nodded. ‘Well, both of them were gunned down during that attack. That’s why Tanaz enlisted in the RAW. She realized it was the only way to help bring peace back to Pakistan – by putting an end to these bloody terrorists and their conniving masters.’ Vikram was finding it hard to keep the anger out of his voice. ‘Tanaz and Iqbal took to each other like fish to water. I was… am… really happy for them.’

  The sudden shrill ringing of the secure phone on Anbu’s table startled the three men. Sami made to rise, but Anbu gestured to him to stay put.

  ‘Don’t worry, MS. I’ll take that.’ Leaning forward, he picked up the receiver. ‘Yes? What? Okay! Let me call you back.’

  Returning the handset to its cradle, he picked up the remote control lying next to the phone and flicked on the television. The three men watched in mounting horror as the bloodbath on the screen cascaded into the room.

  ‘The first bomb went off at 7:30 p.m. at the entrance to the Hanuman Mandir in old Jaipur city. At that time the temple was packed with devotees who were leaving after the evening aarti. The explosion caused a stampede, resulting in many more casualties. In the next twelve minutes, seven more bombs went off in other, equally crowded areas of the old city. All the bombs appear to have been placed on cycles and had been c
arefully deployed on the various routes leading away from the temple. It’s obvious that the terror module responsible for these serial blasts had reconnoitered the area thoroughly and carefully worked out the direction in which people would flee after each successive bomb blast. Details of the casualties have yet to be established, though initial estimates indicate that at least sixty-five people have lost their lives in this horrific attack and more than three times that number have been injured.’

  The reporter’s voice was pitched high with excitement. The camera broke away from his face to show the destruction all around – the large black crater on the road, shattered vehicles and windows, blotches of blood staining the road. Shattered limbs lay desolately here and there. Shaken, battered people could be seen stumbling around in a daze, the braver amongst them ferrying the wounded to the cluster of ambulances that darted in sporadically and sped away with blaring horns and flashing strobe lights.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Tiwathia exclaimed. ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘An email was received by all major news channels and the Rajasthan police commissioner’s office just six minutes before the first bomb exploded,’ the anchor’s voice announced. ‘The two-page email was sent by a group that calls itself the Indian Mujahideen and it challenged the police to stop the blasts and threatened dire reprisals against the state and people of India.’

  Extracts from the email began to scroll across the television screen.

  Hindus! O disbelieving, faithless Indians! Haven’t you realized that the falsehood of your thirty-three crore dirty mud idols and the blasphemy of your deaf, dumb, mute and naked idols of Ram, Krishna and Hanuman are not going to save your necks, Inshallah, from being slaughtered by our hands? Never again will we let you sleep in peace. Never again will you step into a market without fear clutching at your heart. Never again will you leave your house without the fear of not knowing if you will return alive. We will ensure that the dust will never settle...’