Dragon Fire

Chandigarh, India

The call from his controller interrupted his light sleep. Chandigarh was never quiet, with the blaring of a horn or the crunching of gears on the busy road outside his room. It was only a week since he had been rotated, the beginning of his second tour of duty in Chandigarh, the city chosen many years ago from which to launch an attack on Dharamsala. His operational name was Tashi and he was a graduate from the People’s Liberation Army Foreign Affairs College in Nanjing. Unlike most educational institutions specializing in international issues, the Foreign Affairs College avoided employing foreign teachers, to try to ensure that its graduates were not recognized when they were sent overseas.

Tashi was a Tibetan, who had spent a year at Johns Hopkins University in the States. He was a member of the Chinese Communist Party and an employee of the Second Department of the General Staff Department, responsible for training agents in intelligence-gathering abroad. Largely unknown, however, was its added role in carrying out covert military operations on foreign soil.

Tashi was a sleeper agent. His controller used just two Hindi words to alert him to the mission. Tashi exercised for fifteen minutes, showered in cold water, which spluttered and dribbled. He lathered his scalp, then stepped out of the shower to shave it in front of the mirror, watching the contours of his skull as clumps of hair fell into the basin.

The orange and maroon saffron robe was folded in his bag, and he shook it out, watching the dust fly out around the room. He wrapped it round him, checking the pockets he had sewn on inside. A driver was waiting when he walked outside his building, and he followed him to a red Maruti jeep. If they talked Tashi had been told to address the driver as Sattar, but they travelled in silence.

At Una, the road forked into little more than two country tracks, and Sattar had to ask the way. Tashi wound down his window to let in the fresh morning air. As they climbed the mountain, the countryside became emblazoned with orange and blue spring flowers, sometimes beautiful, sometimes wrecked by the poverty of the villages. After the first bridge across the Dehra River, when the pine trees began, Tashi slipped the grenades into the pockets of his robe, two on each side.

After Lower Dharamsala, which was still a predominantly Indian town, Sattar took the longer but better route to Upper Dharamsala or MacLeod Ganj, driving round by the Gorkha Army Cantonment at Forsyth Ganj. As they climbed and wound round the mountain the view became more and more spectacular, stretching right down the Kangra Valley on one side and up to the mountains, heavily covered in snow, on the other. The Gorkha battalion was fighting in Kashmir and only a skeleton staff looked after the building. But Tashi wanted to see it for himself, to check how quickly professional troops would arrive after the operation. The sentry boxes were mostly deserted and rusted padlocks hung on many of the gates. The windows of the officers’ mess were even boarded up.

Kashmir was sucking in the Indian troops. There were almost three-quarters of a million men there now and still the war went on, funded and fuelled by Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and a dozen other Islamic countries wanting to cause trouble. Tashi wondered why India had allowed the Tibetans to open up a second front in China. It just seemed crazy to him. He checked his watch. The journey had taken just over five hours. In half an hour his job would be over. They left the cantonment area and passed the church of St John’s in the Wilderness, where Lord Elgin, the Earl of Kincardine, was buried. The road was busy, half-blocked with three-wheelers and monks walking slowly in clusters.

Sattar drew up just before the bus stop. European backpackers, in loose, grubby clothing, some with Tibetan beads hanging off them, unloaded their luggage. The stench of the streets was dreadful, with open drains and rubbish piled up everywhere. No one seemed to be cleaning it up. Filthy water ran through rivulets in the road and gathered in potholes. A sign said Welcome to the Little Lhasa in India. If this is what Lhasa would be like under Tibetan rule, thank heavens the Chinese have it, thought Tashi.

It was just after 0915. Question Time in the Parliament-in-exile started at 0930. They called it Question Time to satisfy the Western democracies, but it was nothing more than a recitation about waging war against China. Tashi would wait five minutes and then go in. Sattar manoeuvred through the squalid little town and headed down Nawrojee Road towards Lower Dharamsala.

He stopped just outside the compound which housed the small Parliament building. Tashi got out of the car. The pockets held the weight of the grenades well and he felt for the pistol with his right hand. He pulled the robe around him against the morning mountain wind, waiting while Sattar turned the car, then he walked briskly, his head lowered to avoid eye contact with other monks.

He walked under the arch of the compound, looking right towards the offices of the Tibetan security, which he didn’t consider a threat — the .38 would see them off if they suspected him. He kept his pace as he took the two steps leading to the Parliament building, ignoring the office marked Dept of Religious Affairs on the right. Directly in front of him were wooden pigeonholes, each stuffed full of memos and newsletters.

He went to the left, taking his bearings from the faded sepia pictures of Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalai Lama.

His left hand moved to a grenade and his right opened the double doors inwards. A wooden screen blocked his view and he stopped. There were no voices behind him. No one chasing or suspecting him. There was no hurry. Hardly a face turned to look at him. A naked light bulb hung from the ceiling over a centre desk where clerks took notes. The room couldn’t have been more than 550 square metres, and there were two rows of seats on each side, each with shared microphones which could deflect the grenade throw. A deputy on the right was speaking, leaning across the microphone, and the room was a mixture of saffron robes, business suits and women in striped Tibetan aprons. The red light of a cheap Panasonic camera showed that it was recording the proceedings.

Tashi moved to the left, so that he had a clear line to the Speaker. He drew the pistol, taking the safety catch off and used his left hand to clear the robe. He fired at the Speaker’s head, hitting him twice, and as the first scream of panic reverberated around the chamber he threw a grenade towards the last bench by the window. A second grenade he rolled on the floor straight down to the Speaker’s chair and the third he tossed to his right, the pins coming out smoothly just like they had when he practised, and he kept the fourth as he backed out of the door.

The grenade in one hand, the pistol in the other, he ran until he was out of the building, then slowed to a fast walk. Three explosions tore through the small room, and Tashi turned, like an onlooker, watching as the victims stumbled out.

Sattar was waiting, the car door open, engine running, and drove off as soon as his passenger got in. Tashi pulled off the robe and struggled into a shirt and trousers. They edged painfully down through Lower Dharamsala, passing an ambulance and a police car before they got to the bottom. An army helicopter hovered over the Dalai Lama’s compound. Sattar kept going. Neither man spoke and eventually they were clear. An hour later, just before Palampur, Sattar pulled up past an Ambassador car parked on the left side of the road. This was where they parted company. Tashi left his weapons and robe with Sattar. The Ambassador driver gave Tashi an envelope with his new identity.

The second driver was called Sadek. Like Sattar, he had been trained for Kashmir and was part of the Lashkar-e-Jhangar, the people who had tried to assassinate the Prime Minister of India.