Dragon Fire

National Security Council, Washington, DC

‘These have come in in the past hour, sir.’

Tom Bloodworth, the National Security Advisor, was working alone under a single desk light when his office door was pushed open with a light knock by his second-shift secretary, who was on duty from 1800 until midnight. His office was in a building in the White House grounds, connected by a passageway to the West Wing, where most of the presidential business was conducted.

He opened the folder of photographs which Judy Lewis put on his desk. ‘Give me half an hour undisturbed, will you, Judy,’ he said, meaning no calls from Asia, which was beginning to buzz at this time. The prints had been processed by the Directorate of the National Photographic Interpretation Center and delivered to his office through a high-capacity fibre-optic cable link. Bloodworth spread out the photographs on his desk just like he had in his early days as one of the twelve hundred specialists at the Office of Imagery Analysis. Now it had become part of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, jointly run by the Pentagon and the CIA and operated from the Washington Navy Yard.

He had sworn by IMINT (imagery satellite intelligence) for most of his career as an intelligence officer, until May 1998 when India surprised the world by conducting five underground nuclear tests. Four satellites had been deployed full time on India, with cameras powerful enough to read the time on a soldier’s wristwatch. Analysts had previously picked out bursts of activity at the Pokharan testing range in 1982, 1995 and 1997, which had led to American questions about the nuclear weapons programme. But they failed to detect India’s entry onto the nuclear stage. The CIA was guilty of one of the biggest failures in its history.

Admittedly, the Indians had carried out most of their work at night and under cloud cover when satellite vision was poor. They also knew the time the satellites would be overhead and avoided activity during that time. They used intricate communication codes. Scientists dressed in camouflage uniforms to make them look like soldiers in training. But none of that was an excuse. At the nearby village of Khetolai, a stone and sand Rajasthani settlement with a population of twelve hundred just three miles from Pokharan, even farmers knew. An Indian army major drove there shortly before the tests, warning the villagers that there would be some heightened activity. One villager, who remembered the shuddering of the ground during the 1974 nuclear tests, replied: ‘Don’t worry. We know you’re going to do another test.’

Bloodworth, who then headed the CIA’s South Asia desk, called for a list of consumer products used in Khetolai. He found it was among the poorest and most basic communities in India. The villagers used the Parachute brand of coconut oil, made by Marico Industries, and detergents such as Surf, a product of Hindustan Lever; the only luxury of any kind was the Hero bicycle, made in Jalandhar City in Punjab. If these goods were in Khetolai, they would be all over India. Bloodworth set about creating a network of low-level agents, known as HUMINT or human intelligence. Truck drivers and sales representatives would be debriefed on a regular basis to get first-hand intelligence.

Bloodworth used the cover of multinationals such as Motorola, Coca-Cola and Hewlett Packard, together with the more grass-roots retailers such as Hindustan Lever, to ensure that America would know as soon as India conducted unusual military operations anywhere again.

Now, many years later, he was the National Security Advisor, a friend of the President, with an eye automatically glancing towards the sub-continent. The media, and therefore the American public, might ignore it, but Bloodworth knew it was the most explosive place on earth. The photographs in front of him confirmed reports he had been getting from the ground. India was moving a formidable force of armoured vehicles and artillery towards the border with Pakistan. The operation was being run from the Southern Command Headquarters at Pune near Bombay, or Mumbai, as India’s financial capital was now called.

The analysts had identified Soviet-made 130mm and 152mm guns mounted on Vijayanta chassis, British-made 140mm guns, together with the British 105mm self-propelled Abbot gun and the Indian Pinaka multi-barrel rocket-launchers. The network of Soviet surface-to-air missile systems was being increased with extra batteries installed in camouflaged positions throughout Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and the Punjab — the 2S6 Tungushka air-defence systems working with the Indian Akash missiles. Twenty SA-316B Chetak observation and liaison helicopters had been identified off-base, together with five Mi-25 and six Mi-35 Hind attack helicopters. Two extra mountain infantry battalions had been moved from the Northern Headquarters at Udhampur and were taking up position close to the LoC at Kargil. Columns of regular troops, travelling mostly at night, were pouring into Kashmir. But what worried Bloodworth more than anything was the activity much further south in Rajasthan, with tanks moving out from bases in Jaisalmer and Bikaner, mainly the older Soviet-made T-55s and T-72s. But north of there around the city of Amritsar several of the new T-90s had been spotted, together with the updated version of the indigenous Arjun main battle tank.

Bloodworth’s analysts had not found any unusual movements of the nuclear-warhead-carrying Prithvi or Agni missiles, something which would worry him even more. As with all intelligence, the pictures on his desk might only be what the Indians wanted him to see. He assumed that both nuclear and conventional versions of the Prithvi were deployed securely with XI Corps at Jalandhar and further south in the Jaisalmer and Barmer areas. If that was only a quarter of the preparations actually going on, it would mean that India could push across the border from Amritsar at any time and be on the outskirts of Lahore in Pakistan in a matter of hours. She had done it before in 1965, except then neither country was a nuclear power.

Bloodworth pressed his intercom to speak to Judy Lewis. ‘Could you get Chandra Reddy in Delhi for me,’ he said. ‘He’s the head of India’s Research and Analysis Wing, but tell them the call’s both urgent and personal.’