Dragon Fire

Indian military HQ, Karwana, Haryana, India

The Karwana underground complex had been built in the late nineties after the Pokhran nuclear tests and the escalation of the conflict in Kashmir. The only noticeable landmark was a sprawling run-down farmhouse with outbuildings, three kilometres outside the village on a 120 hectare estate which had been taken over by the government. A high wall had been put up around one hectare of the property, within which the bunker had been built. It was neither spacious nor cavernous, unlike the one in China. The Prime Minister had his own quarters, but other members of the National Security Council shared rooms and the military personnel involved slept in dormitories. There was one canteen, common shower rooms and the operations room was just under 100 square metres. This was not designed for a prolonged war but precisely for the crisis which was occurring now. Either it would be over within forty-eight hours, or they would all be dead.

Signals were sent and received through antennas concealed in the roofs of the farmhouse building. Air-conditioning units were installed inside the outer buildings. A sewage system ran into an underground river. The bunker operated from a generator fitted into the complex. If that broke down, there were two emergency generators in the farmhouse.

Military staff, dressed up as farmers, had continued working the property throughout construction and the interim period during which it wasn’t used. Any satellite pictures or human agents passing the place would have seen a rich landowner’s property and nothing suspicious. No transmission, not even a test, had been sent from the site. The encrypted code had never been used before. Once signals began, the Karwana nuclear bunker would have up to two days before being located and an indefinite time before the code was cracked.

Most of the National Security Council flew out to Karwana by helicopter as soon as Pakistan carried out its tactical nuclear attack. The Prime Minister carried with him the nuclear codes and would have ordered a retaliatory strike if any missile launch had been detected from Pakistan while he was in the air. It had not. The Indian air force and 333rd Artillery Group had already drawn up plans for a wave of strikes intended to cripple the military government of Pakistan.

India had almost a thousand combat aircraft. But while the SU30 was a state-of-the-art weapon which could take on anything used against it and the Light Combat Aircraft could hold its own, many other aircraft such as the old MiG-21s were close to obsolete and failed to perform well. For the first wave of attacks against Pakistan, the older aircraft were used, except for the offensive against Kahuta, which needed high-precision bombing.

Reports back from the pilots suggested that Pakistan’s air power had either collapsed or that aircraft had been flown to Afghanistan and Iran in order to stop them being destroyed. Dozens of Pakistani aircraft had been used in attacks against Indian airbases in the minutes before the tactical nuclear strike. They had limited success and early estimates were that Pakistan lost more than forty aircraft in that wave of sorties.

It was impossible to know the success of the Indian strikes on the Pakistani missile bunkers. Unni Khrishnan, India’s Chief of Army Staff, wanted to maintain strikes against them, but shift the emphasis to destroying the Pakistani airbases known to have nuclear-capable aircraft. At the same time, he was keeping back far more aircraft than he would prefer, in order to counter the threat from the east by China.

Meanwhile fighting in Kashmir, outside Lahore and around Sialkot had virtually stopped, indicating that Pakistan’s central command and control system was close to being paralysed. As soon as Khrishnan heard that the first wave of strikes were finished, he ordered the second attacks to begin.

One of Pakistan’s newest and most threatening nuclear-capable aircraft was the Fantan A-5M, recognized by the bubble canopy on its fuselage and pointed nose. It was a single-seater, twin-engine supersonic fighter developed by the Nanchang Aircraft Company of China. Its particular skill was at low-level flying and was designed as a support aircraft for ground troops and ships moving forward in an attack. The cannon on each wing were mounted close to the fuselage, leaving room for racks of spare fuel tanks, missiles or bombs — including a laser-guided nuclear bomb of up to 20 kilotons.

Very few of the American-made F-16 Fighting Falcons remained in service. This was the aircraft used in the tactical strike and three had been lost then to pursuing Indian aircraft. Pakistan had hoped to build up a substantive force of F-16s, but its difficult relationship with the United States had left them without a full supply of spares and unpredictable maintenance schedules. Of the forty originally acquired by Pakistan, only twenty-five remained, in three squadrons. In 1990, the air force had ordered another 71 F-16s, but they were never delivered because of Pakistan’s attempts to develop nuclear weapons. When it became clear that Pakistan was not going to stop its programme, Washington ended its military supply relationship. The money so far paid for the F-16s was returned. The aircraft was not the weapon of choice for delivering a nuclear bomb, but, by improvising the electrical system, it could be used for a nuclear strike on visually acquired targets.

The third nuclear-capable aircraft was the French-made Mirage, a single-seater, ground-attack and fighter reconnaissance aircraft, which could carry two 20-kiloton nuclear bombs. Although Khrishnan had details on the whereabouts of the Fantans and F-16s, a squadron of Mirages had vanished in the overnight cloud cover and so far remained undetected. India’s counterforce attack planning was complicated by the thirty different airbases in Pakistan which were able to host the nuclear-capable aircraft. The ten Major Operational Bases (MOB) were the peacetime bases for the aircraft. Of those, only Sargodha and Samungli had been neutralized in the strikes on the missile bunkers. Chaklala, which was the main airbase of Rawalpindi, would be dealt with in a separate operation.

The other seven MOBs, Faisal and Masroor near Karachi, Mianwali north of Sargodha, Minhas/Kamra north of Islamabad, Peshawar in the north-west, Rafiqui/Shorkot north-east of Multan and Risalpur in the far north, would be targeted in the second major operation to start as soon as the missile-bunker sorties had ended.

Thirty minutes later, Khrishnan would launch a second wave of attacks against the Forward Operational Bases (FOBs), which only became fully operational during wartime. Lahore had been taken care of by Indian artillery on the outskirts of the city. Multan had been attacked as a missile base. The new targets were to be the southern bases of Mirpur Khas and Nawabshah, west of Karachi, Murid, south-west of Islamabad, Pasni on the southern coast, Risalewala and Vihari, south-west of Lahore, Shahbaz in the centre of the country and Sukkur to the south of Shahbaz.

The other nuclear-capable airfields were known as satellite bases for emergency landing and recovery during both peacetime and wartime. Khrishnan hoped that once Pakistan realized the wrath it had unleashed, bombing these would be unnecessary.