Part III – The Captain’s call
I started writing Kashmiri Night without an idea or a plot behind it. I started it specifically to challenge myself and see where the first random sentence took me. This is part of an ongoing series of connected stories I will put out as and when I write them. I do not know myself how the story will pan out or end, so let us find out!
Here’s part three, titled ‘The Captain’s Call’.
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The silence before the calm, the peace before the war, and the stillness before the Sniper took his shot. From the long muzzle of the Barrett M95 rifle the bullet came thundering out, swirling and slicing through the crisp mountain air like a hot knife through butter. The sound was as though the mountain had come alive, the forest coughing up something loud and sinister. Almost instantly, the bullet pierced the window of the Toyota Pajero and hit the Commander in Chief of the LeT, right in his fucking eye. The bullets of the Indian Sniper has hit many eyes and made clean Sniper Holes, and tonight it had hit another and made a neat circular Sniper Hole.
Rewind back ten minutes to 3:20 AM when the four soldiers had just taken their positions across from the camp. As the Captain surveyed the greenlit darkness, he could see that there was absolutely no activity at the camp. There was a white Toyota Pajero parked outside the barrack. The lights inside the lone barrack were turned off. The outposts were not manned, and out in the middle, there was a many-wheeled military truck, its hinds raised vertical, a long shaft stood 20 foot in the air. The missile was there, locked and loaded, like a snake.
The Captain felt a little amiss, there was something odd about this. Everything had gone like clockwork until now, and the Captain suspected or even felt that the clock was about to miss a rare beat. Then, to his utter disbelief, the ground near the barrack seemed to open up and light gushed out from somewhere below, a door swung open and a man came out from underground. Behind him, two others came up. Before he could make sense of it, his eyes fell on the face of the man in the middle. Even with just the night vision goggles looking from afar, the Captain could unmistakably make out the short stature, the crooked gait, the Devil’s mind of the head of the Lashkar-e-taiba. The Commander in Chief of the evil terrorist group LeT which infested these parts of the globe. The three of them got into the Pajero and the car hummed to life and the head lights illuminated some patches of ground beyond which sat the four silent wolves. The trio were leaving, that too in a hurry. The Captain had a second to think, much lesser if he thought about thinking about it. There was a clear available shot. The car was facing directly at them, and it had only to turn to the right just a teeny bit for the crosshair to pin point the left eye of the Chief who was sitting in the back.
The Captain spoke into his radio comm, and he addressed the Sniper, call named Zip.
‘Zip, Item in back, bring it in. I will finish the rest.’
And almost immediately the Sniper spoke his very first word of the night, and he replied,
‘Roger.’
Now, all the Captain could do and would do (and we can do and will do) was to stand ground and wait. Wait for the car to turn right or left and as the only path led, the car turned a little to the right. A shot rang out from behind the Captain, somewhere from inside the sloped jungle. The sound of the shot ringed and reverberated. If one could imagine the sound of a gushing fire in a shaft squirting out with great force, it would come close to this sound. The Captain could see from neat hole in the window of the car that the bullet had hit his target. Now, he discharged quick short bursts of 3 bullets each from his AK to permanently silence the other two. The echoes of the shots rang a bit longer than one would expect in a valley. But the silence came quick after that. The gargling sound of the Pajero engine seemed uninterested in the drama and continued to hum. A simple event from the stillness. A single shot to start a series of horrid events. How one bullet led to six. And how six bullets led to a war.
It was the Captain’s call. Sitting back from our pages, we can deem, this was right and that was not. But what about the man, the boxer in the ring, does he really have time to reflect, stop and consider? In war and in real life, where blows come out of the blue, uninvited, unapologetic, it is the fighter’s duty, no, the warrior’s, to hit back when the enemy seems to slip and present a rare chance, the only true chance available. It is a subliminal issue. The Captain’s call is always clouded in skepticism, but rest easy, it was made with the Captain’s instincts and surely that must amount to some good, some nice happy ending to this mess.
