Dragon Fire

General Headquarters, Rawalpindi, Pakistan

The photographs of the dead were mostly of young men, but many of the bodies were charred beyond recognition. The villages named on the photograph captions were Kohala, Garhi, Mahandri and Jarad, just inside Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Houses were in flames. Patches of scorched grass smouldered and lines of refugees were stumbling away along the tracks, which led to safer areas.

The list of the victims was too long for Hamid Khan to do anything but glance down it. He noticed a twelve-year-old girl from Garhi and an eighty-two-year-old man from Jarad. The Indian airstrikes killed 140 Pakistanis, most of them civilians. Pakistan sovereignty had been violated. People were fleeing right along the LoC, an estimated sixty thousand, no longer believing that their army would protect them. The frontier, which had kept the two sides apart for sixty years, was no longer recognized as a valid border.

‘What are the Indians saying?’ Khan asked Masood, who had brought the photographs into his military bunker office.

‘Unni Krishnan,the Chief of Army Staff, said after damage assessment that there may be more strikes. The attack aircraft have returned not to Lohegaon, but to Ambala, which is only a few minutes’ flying time from the front. Our radar has detected ten more SU-30MKs also flying up to Ambala, and Mirage 2000 fighters are expected for any future sorties.’

‘Artillery exchanges along the LoC?’

‘No substantive increase, sir. But continuing.’

Hamid Khan stood up and opened the door to his office to look out on the war room. It was dominated by maps of Kashmir, a scene familiar to Khan throughout his military career. Over the years, the war room had transformed: once little more than a meeting room with dog-eared charts pinned on the wall and the changing order of battle written on a blackboard, now it was alive with colourful computer imagery. One whole wall was taken up with Kashmir itself. Smaller areas were magnified to show details of the shelling on Indian towns like Kargil and Drass; reinforcements in the Pakistan city of Muzafarabad, the capital of the nominally independent Azad Kashmir; and the strategic forward sectors of Tatta Pani, Darra Sher Khan, Bhattal Ghambeer, Khoi Ratta and Pir Badher. A special screen illuminated the tightly guarded sector of Kahuta, the site of Pakistan’s uranium-reprocessing plant, a key element of its nuclear weapons programme, which in an air war would be vulnerable to Indian attack. In 1994, both countries had agreed not to target each other’s nuclear facilities. But if the conflict worsened, Hamid Khan would have to assume that the agreement was null and void.

Khan knew each of the sectors well. He had fought in them, controlled them, watched men die in them, and he understood enough about the Kashmir terrain to know that the war was unwinnable without a political settlement or the complete defeat of either India or Pakistan. As he stepped out, the colonel in charge of the shift walked straight over. ‘The Indian army has ordered the evacuation of two hundred villages along the Punjab border with Pakistan, sir.’

Khan took the sheet of paper the colonel was holding.

‘These are from Chinese satellite surveillance,’ explained the colonel. ‘The town of Khemkaran, population sixteen thousand, thirty kilometres south of the main Lahore— Amritsar road.’ The colonel ran his finger down the blurred image of the main street. ‘We estimate only five hundred people are left there. The people are moving everything away — household possessions, vehicles, if they have them, even livestock.’ He handed Khan another photograph. ‘This is what is coming in.’

Khan could see clearly the columns of tanks and artillery shuffling west past the refugees to take up their positions on the Pakistan border.