Dragon Fire

General Headquarters, Rawalpindi, Pakistan

‘The Prime Minister called,’ said Captain Masood softly, unwilling to disturb his boss’s train of thought.

‘Did he now?’ said General Hamid Khan. He remembered an afternoon less than a month before when protesters had marched on the Parliament building. The Prime Minister had demanded that Khan give the order to open fire with live ammunition. ‘We must teach them a lesson they will not forget,’ the Prime Minister had said.

‘Let us wait and see what happens, sir,’ Khan had patiently replied. The demonstrators delivered their petition and left peacefully.

‘What moral excuse would I have for obeying that instruction?’ Khan confided in Masood afterwards. ‘Pakistani soldiers are not going to protect the ruling classes by killing Pakistani people.’

Now, the Prime Minister seemed intent on interfering in military affairs again by demanding that Pakistan withdraw from the Kashmir conflict. If Khan agreed to that, the streets would run red with the blood of the forces of Islam on the rampage. Kashmir was the outlet for their aggression, yet the Prime Minister could not see it.

Khan picked up another phone and dialled the number himself for the Chief of Naval Staff, who was in Karachi. ‘I think the present government—’ he began.

The naval commander interrupted: ‘You need explain no more.’

He then spoke on the encrypted military line to the three-star generals in command of IV Corps in Lahore, X Corps in Rawalpindi and II Corps at the central military headquarters near Multan, known as the strike corps. He offered a face-to-face meeting with the Chief of Air Staff in Rawalpindi, but was asked to wait on the line. Then, without introduction, the voice of the air chief said: ‘No.’ The line went dead.

Khan found the Deputy Chief of Air Staff at the huge Sarghoda airbase in the centre of the country, mixing with the F-16A pilots of No. 9 Squadron. ‘The Prime Minister has called an emergency session of Parliament,’ said Khan. ‘We expect him to order our withdrawal from the Kashmir front.’

‘To save his own bloody cronies and US dollar accounts,’ replied Air Marshal Yasin Kalapur, a former fighter pilot. ‘I bet his bloody wife’s nagging him about not being allowed to the London sales any more. Good luck, General.’

Khan got Masood to call up a map of Pakistan on the computer screen in his office. He watched as Masood used green to colour in sections of the armed services upon which he could count. In Pakistan, the army controlled almost all military power. Technically, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was his senior, but that role was adviser to the Prime Minister. Hamid had a line of command. The Chairman did not.

Hamid had spoken to three of the army’s nine corps commanders. The air force would hesitate, but the Deputy Chief of Air Staff would bring it into line. The navy, less important in the first hours, was on board. He anticipated confrontation in Rawalpindi because it was the headquarters of many different sections of the military. He did not rule out exchanges of fire and casualties. But the cantonments around Chaklala were Khan’s home turf and within twenty-four hours he expected that the trouble would be over. He shaded in neutral grey the corps commanders he had not contacted at Mangla, Gujranwala and Bahawalpur, and he marked two areas in hostile red, Quetta and Peshawar, both near the Afghan border and both corps commanded by men who supported the civilian administration.

Khan turned to Masood. ‘What time will all cabinet members actually be in the Parliament building?’ he asked.

‘At sixteen hundred, sir.’

Khan closed the country map and brought a city plan up onto the screen. He examined the images from the surveillance cameras around the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, the Supreme Court Building and Parliament House, gleaming modern buildings with landscaped lawns, sprinklers and balustrade driveways. Unlike the monuments to modern government in New Delhi, the architectural symbols of Islamabad had not been built by the departing colonial power. They were the creation of corrupt leader after corrupt leader. While citizens scraped for food and soldiers fought in the mountains of Kashmir, the country’s leaders lavished money on buildings no Pakistani needed. Khan loathed the ruling oligarchies with their foreign education, property and bank accounts. But he also loathed what seemed to be the only alternative: Islamic revolution and the repressive fanaticism which he had seen in Afghanistan and Iran.