Dragon Fire

National Command Centre, Karwana, Haryana, India

‘Missile launch from Pakistan!’ shouted Unni Khrishnan.

‘Target?’ snapped back Hari Dixit.

‘Uncertain, sir. We won’t know until re-entry.’

‘Warhead?’

‘Not known.’

‘Time to impact?’

‘Estimated three minutes. Do we launch?’

‘Launch site?’

‘Kagan. Northern Pakistan. 34 degrees 47 North. 73 degrees 36 East.’

Dixit was silent, his eyes darting between his watch and the television screen. This was the moment of horrific farce about which so much had been talked and nothing had been done. Nine years since the nuclear tests and all they had were two defunct hotlines which no one ever answered. No system of checks had been set up. No negotiations to stop a false nuclear launch. Nothing to stop mistakes. When it had all started, he was a health minister in a far-away state and knew nothing at all about war.

‘Get me Hamid Khan.’

‘They’re not picking up, sir,’ said an aide-de-camp.

‘Permission to counter-strike, sir,’ said a voice which Dixit didn’t even recognize.

‘Confirm the number of enemy missiles?’

‘Two, sir.’

‘Time to impact two minutes twenty-eight seconds.’

‘Waiting your instructions, sir.’

Except for the whirring of the air conditioning, there was complete quiet in the hot, claustrophobic bunker. The nuclear doctrine used in Asia, such as it existed, was one of revenge. There was no carefully balanced Mutually Assured Destruction, as in the Cold War, in which the United States and the Soviet Union would be deterred from attacking each other because nothing would be left of their countries once it was over. Nor were there checks on each other’s nuclear arsenals. India and Pakistan were as the Cold War was in the 1950s, not in the 1980s. Within two minutes, an Indian city could be destroyed by a nuclear weapon, in which case Hari Dixit would unleash enough fire-power to eradicate Pakistan as a nation.

‘Missiles on re-entry. Rajendra [phased-array radar] switched on. Akash [long-range surface-to-air missile] launched. One… Two… Three and Four.’ India had deployed one of its six Russian-built integrated theatre-defence systems in Srinagar, throwing a 500-square kilometre protective umbrella around the city. The other five expanded the umbrella to cover the whole of northern Indian, threatened by Pakistan. The radar could detect an incoming ballistic missile 65 kilometres away, and the defending missile could hit descending targets 24 kilometres high, with an in-built active control mechanism which would guide it precisely onto the incoming Pakistani Shaheen. The system was meant to be able to track sixty-four targets simultaneously.

‘Shaheen hit and destroyed.’

‘One or two?’

‘One, sir.’

‘Chandra Reddy on the line.’

Many key Indian defence officials had remained outside the bunker, running operations on a war footing, but not protected from nuclear strike. Chandra Reddy, the Head of External Intelligence, and the Foreign Minister Prabhu Purie were still working from South Block.

‘I’m not responding,’ said Dixit.

‘Good. He wants you to retaliate,’ said Reddy. ‘We should do nothing.’

‘Enemy missile ten seconds from impact, veering. It looks out of control.’

‘Stay on the line,’ said Dixit to Reddy.

‘Impact, sir.’

‘Where?’

‘Military HQ. Unconfirmed. Yes. Military HQ. My God. No. Four impacts. Multiple warheads.’

‘One has gone on the other side of the hill. Impact on Dal Lake market,’ said Reddy. ‘My God, thousands of people are there.’