Dragon Fire

Srinagar, the Kashmir Valley, India

He was fifty years old, too old and out of shape to have trekked through the mountains for three days and nights, through the LoC, into the Vale of Kashmir and hiding out, protected by men young enough to be his sons. He wasn’t a member of any of the groups. He had been for a short while part of Jamaat-e-Islam, but after Afghanistan he had lost his fire.

He had fought the Russians for five years and had been trained with the Stinger hand-held missiles sent in by the CIA. He was good with the Stinger, understanding how it homed in on heat emissions from the aircraft — helicopter or fixed-wing, it didn’t matter — and he was better than most at working a way around the decoy flares which easily seduced the missile away. The Stingers had given the Afghan war a new life, then suddenly it was over. The Soviet forces withdrew and the Stingers were packed up in their boxes. Saeed Khalid retired to a smallholding just across the border in Pakistan.

He heard that the Taleban government in Afghanistan had kept some of the Stingers and that Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate had others. The CIA didn’t get any back, that was for sure. The politicians said the Soviets had withdrawn because of Gorbachev and glasnost. But men like Saeed who had lived in the mountains and seen friends die in the war didn’t like that explanation. When they shot down the helicopters, the Mi-28 Havoc gunships with their 30mm cannon on the nose and AT-6 spiral missile pods on their pylons, and the Mi-24s which came in like death on the villages, Saeed knew the Stingers had made the difference. Without airpower, the Russians were nothing. Altogether mujahedin fighters like Saeed brought down 270 Soviet aircraft, a success rate of almost 80 per cent.

He opened the box and saw the launcher, all in pieces. He lifted it out carefully, feeling the same rush of excitement as when he had assembled his first weapon after training all those years ago.

When the phone rang in his house outside Quetta near the border, Saeed had recognized the voice, quiet, persuasive and commanding. He knew he would have no choice but to obey the Chief of Army Staff of Pakistan, General Hamid Khan, his friend and tutor, who had trained him with the weapon which defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan.

‘You are the only one I trust and the only one I know who can use them,’ said Hamid Khan.

They had strapped the metal cases to the sides of mules and walked them over the hills like they had done twenty-five years before. They travelled by night and hid out during the day and they reached the rendezvous near Srinagar with two hours of darkness left. He was protected by members of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the group he heard had tried to kill the Prime Minister. The rumour was that Hamid Khan had ordered the bomb attack on the car and chosen the place and time.

Saeed had kept track of the groups as they became more and more extreme, the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind, the Sunni group, Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam, who took on the minority Shias, then the more extreme Sipah-e-Sahaba who wanted to go to war against Iran, and the Harkat-ul-Ansar, the first group into Kashmir, and finally Hamid’s very own terrorist group, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the fighters who would win back Kashmir.

The door of the hut opened slightly, just wide enough for two scouts to slip in. They couldn’t have been more than eighteen and they didn’t carry weapons, because it was safer for them. Their training was in aircraft recognition and they told him exactly which aircraft had just landed in Srinagar and how he should shoot it down. Saeed knew the aircraft well. It was a Russian-made Mi-26, known as the Halo and the world’s most powerful helicopter. Saeed listened to the boys talking, about its position on helipad, the flight route they thought it would take out, the minefield around the perimeter fence and the gap in the Indian defences where they could fire, and run with a chance to save their own lives.

It would be safer than the barren land of Afghanistan, where even in the mountains there was barely a tree to give cover. Even though they had trekked through Kashmir at night, he had seen the deepest green ricefields and a landscape marked by tall poplar trees. They had walked along paths which took them through orchards of apple and plum trees, villages of tall, walled farmhouses made of wood and brick and showing off a wealth he had never seen in Afghanistan.

‘We just want to let them know that the Stingers are out of the boxes again,’ Hamid Khan had told him. ‘Let them know their airspace is no longer safe and that we are in the heart of the valley.’