Dragon Fire

India — Pakistan border, Rajasthan, India

Lieutenant General Gurjit Singh, commander of the Indian XXI Strike Armoured Corps, closed his eyes to acclimatize quickly to the bright desert sunlight, opened the tank turret and lifted himself out of the cramped and dingy interior. If they were sent in, he anticipated at least seventy-two hours of continual combat before the Pakistani surrender. His ears were already ringing with the constant radio traffic through his headphones. He took them off and jumped down onto the crusty surface of the Thar Desert to allow himself five minutes of clear thinking.

His armoured deployment was as good as he could make it. But even for the new and most tested tanks the Rajasthan sector was one of the most difficult for armoured warfare. The desert was not like in North Africa, where the sand was relatively hard. The surface of the Thar desert was loose and shifting. No wheeled vehicle could handle it, and even tracked vehicles could suddenly get bogged down. There were very few paved roads, and once across the border all Pakistani territory was assumed mined.

Under his command were a thousand main battlefield tanks, an assortment of tracked armoured vehicles and a hundred thousand men. The advance armour would be led by the three-man T-72M1 Ajay main battlefield tank (MBT), whose resistance to nuclear, biological and chemical attack had been proven in exercises. Its sensors could detect chemicals, viruses, bacteria and gamma rays released into the air by an explosion. The filters ensured that contaminated air didn’t enter the crew chamber and there would be enough oxygen to continue advancing in hostile conditions for several hours.

Singh’s own tank was a T-90, the next model on from the T-72. The electronics were not as stable as the T-72, which was why Singh had deployed them in front. But the T-90 was one of the best-protected battle tanks in the world. It was fitted with an infrared jamming system to disrupt any guided rocket attack. The missile had a range of four kilometres and took less than twelve seconds to reach that distance. The anti-tank missiles were intended to engage tanks fitted with Explosive Reactive Armour (ERA) as well as low-flying air targets such as helicopters, at a range of up to more than five kilometres. The missile was fitted with a semi-automatic laser beam riding guidance system and a hollow-charge warhead with an 80 per cent chance of penetrating a target with 700mm armour. In most situations the T-90 could attack a tank or a helicopter while it was safely out of range itself.

The back-up for the T-90s and T-72s was the Indian-built Arjun, a tank which had failed many of its user trials and was not liked by the army. It had too many technical defects to be trusted to operate alone and the first orders for the Arjun totalled less than 125. The second series was meant to have improved features, but they only led to further defects.

The first advance would bypass small pockets of the enemy resistance. The second wave of T-90s and Arjun tanks would mop up.

Unlike the enemy, Singh knew the positions of every sand dune, bunker and Pakistani tank formation across the desert. He had ordered pictures from IRS-1C satellite when it was at pan 91–53B, taken from a height of 960 kilometres. Some were confined to the smallest tactical area and if needed he could have brought in images right down to the markings on individual tanks.

India and Pakistan had agreed that no military exercises should take place within a hundred kilometres each side of the border. But as soon as darkness had fallen, Singh received the order from Southern Command Headquarters in Poona to advance to within a kilometre of the border. He had now been waiting there for half a day.