Part V – Beautiful children of the valley
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 the story finale! We have reached the end. Thank you for reading this with me 🙂
Here’s part five, titled ‘Beautiful children of the valley ’.
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Let us switch on and tune in to some music of Beethoven while we watch these mortal men fight it out in the dark Himalayan valley. The tempo playing all inviting at first, and then once in its snare, it will take you high up and it will drop you. Up, up and down. The rhythm of life beautifully captured melodically in the music of Beethoven. Ah, alas, we ask what is life!? Hehe, let us not get carried away. Let us now look down, what is our beloved Captain upto? How about the Sniper? Are they still in the game? And what about the Missile? Is it still streaking or has it struck already?
But before that, we need to know about the months leading to this event. Both sides of the India-Pakistan had seen a heavy build up of forces. The world had tuned into the border dispute which could ignite a war any minute now. Amidst this commotion, Indian RA&W spies had picked up chatter about a hypersonic missile being deployed close to the border on PoK territory. At first what seemed untrue turned out to be true, as the drones verified and beamed back live video from the site across the border on many occasions. A surgical preemptive strike had become imminent. One thing leading to next, the same missile, which had astonishingly turned out to be a BrahMos, was now headed straight towards the bustling city of Chandigarh.
Also in the months leading up to the event, the Bosses in Delhi had prepared a well crafted plan to take back a huge chunk of the Pakistan occupied Kashmir which had been ceded to the Pakis after the many wars. Now all they needed was Pakistan to give them a reason to start a war. And the reason tonight, was cruising toward Chandigarh at 3 times the speed of sound. The missile needed around 15 minutes to strike the target. In that 15 minutes a lot of things happened.
A little while before the missile took off, along with the fighter jets, Indian Air Force also sent in the rest of the PARA (SF) in a Chinook across the border. They were supposed to help the injured squad back to safety. As the jets approached the site of the missile, they could see on their bleeping radar screens that there was a missile headed South. Regardless, they were ordered to stay on course and proceed as per the original mission plan. The Bosses just hoped that the Surface-to-Air missile interceptors would be able to bring down the missile in time.
The Wing Commander’s speaker turned on and the Sniper down below was communicating through a special radio channel. The Sniper’s voice seemed frantic, it crackled and said,
‘This is Zip. Bomb us, there’s too many, bomb us all.’
When the Wing Commander heard Zip’s voice and not his brother, the Captain’s, he felt a little unnerved. But, he had no intention of bombing them, he had another plan in mind. He commanded two Sukhois to stay on his tail, and the rest of the fighters were asked to proceed and bomb the bigger camps deeper in PoK. Once the rest of the fleet had broken off, the Wing Commander’s Rafale and the two Sukhois tilted up into the sky and rocketed into it, they went so high that the sound of the raging engines were completely lost to the people listening down on the ground. Once they reached sixty thousand feet, the Wing Commander spoke these lines,
‘You know what to do boys, give them Thunder’
Saying that, the three fighter jets pointed their nose downwards and started plummeting towards earth. They zoomed their engines and gravity did the rest. As they rocketed towards the camp, the speed of their craft was itching closer and hotter towards Mach 1. The Sniper down below looked up to see the approaching roar. The dying Captain looked up as well. Pretty soon everyone were looking up, even the terrorists. It was as though the fighter jets were hurtling right towards them.
At about the right altitude, the jets went into full afterburn and the three flying spurs broke the sound barrier at once. The sheer sound of the sonic boom blasted out of the sky and rippled into the bones of everyone down below. It was so loud, that it completely disoriented everyone fighting on the ground. If a skeptic observer had wondered why they were called The Thunder Gods, he would now be left with temporary hearing loss. The sonic boom struck the earth like Thunder. And the people on the ground rumbled with it.
At the same time, A Chinook helicopter roared into the valley and landed some distance away from the raging camp. With the Chinook, an advanced Light Combat Helicopter, a fine Indian made fox of a helicopter which housed two people whose aim was to blast the people down below out of the earth. The LCH proceeded and started blistering its heavy 20 mm cannon rounds into the hapless terrorists below. The disoriented terrorists fired desperately into the sky and it seemed to make no difference to the slaughter of the LCH. The special forces fighters who came in the Chinook proceeded to whisk away the injured.
Within minutes, the LCH set fire to the ground and hundreds and hundreds perished in its wake. It was almost as though the sleeping giant had lifted its heavy hand and slapped the nagging kid silent. Pretty soon, the fight was over. The only sounds now were the distant rumble of the bombings happening all around them. The Captain was still alive, but he had lost heavy amounts of blood. The Grenadier was in no better shape. The Sub Machine Gunner however, had succumbed to enemy fire. His body was lying in a ditch he was in, with a gun still clutched by his hand. The Sniper walked across the many-wheeled truck, and into the bushes on the other side where he had fired into. The Enemy Sniper was lying dead in one of them. And there was a clean red hole in his eye which had pierced the rifle scope through the lens. Which only meant, the sniper was aiming right at him when he was killed. Smiling, the Sniper jogged back to join the rest of the retreating soldiers.
While the fighters were bombing the north regions of the PoK, in the south, and all the way in the Punjab regions, Indian Tanks were gushing into Pakistan occupied territory from all sides. News came in that one of the Mirage bombers had been lost and the pilot had been killed in the dogfight which had just been ended by the decoy jets. In the Arabian Sea, India’s proud possession and child, the home made nuclear powered INS Arihant was snaking quietly towards the ports of Karachi.
But the missile was still streaking towards Chandigarh. It was now only 150 kilometers away. A Russian made missile needed a Russian made interceptor to kill it. To counter the BrahMos, the Indians locked and loaded the S400 missile hoping to intercept it. The legendary S400 interceptor that scares even the US, tore through the sky all the way from Rajasthan. It had one opportunity, one chance to strike the approaching threat and intercept it mid air. If it missed, thousands could die or even more. The opportunity came at 120 kilometers when the S400 collided head on with the BrahMos. The explosion was seen from miles away and was heard even further away. And just like that, the Missile’s journey had abruptly ended. Evil did not seem so evil anymore.
How would Pakistan react now? Would they retaliate and start an all out war? A deterrent was needed, and a strong one at that. The Indian Navy has arguably always been Pakistan’s greatest nemesis. Time and again Indian Navy ships and submarines have bombed Pakistani ports back to Stone Age and sent them scurrying for surrender. This time all it needed was INS Arihant to simply enter the arena in the sea, a variable which wasn’t even in the equation till now. INS Arihant was the Devil in the Sea and if it needed, it could reach out aboveground and wipe an entire country off the face of the earth. It simply needed to be there to drive a stale mate until the world could react and tell Pakistan to shut up. India now had most of PoK by morning. And there were faint rumors that, in fact however unlikely it seemed, war wouldn’t go on and that Pakistan would finally stop messing with Kashmir. As a friendly by-product, Balochistan was briskly on its way to freedom. By the next morning, and by the morning after that, US B-52 bombers and Nimitz class carriers had arrived to hold down the two warring countries. It was in everybody’s best interest if everybody quieted down and shut the fuck up. The world wanted to know how the LeT had acquired a BrahMos!
The sun had risen and the moon had been driven down. And in its light, the mountains of Kashmir gleamed with the same tint of gold that it once used to shine with. The piny pointed trees became sharper and crisper. The air became loving, and the ground became less red. Life was brimming back to force. There was a precarious peace at first, but pretty soon, Kashmiri people from PoK began moving freely around all of Kashmir. Kashmir had got its life again, and the people rejoiced with an all encompassing embrace.
The next night, the sun went down and the moon came up once again. This time, it stopped to look down with happiness for a long time, it saw the steaming Kashmiri Navratna Biryanis being passed around on the dinner tables, it saw kids with topis, running merrily around the bushes and the dirty roads. It saw the old men sit and drink and chat away to the valley of the night, it saw the beautiful Kashmiri women make love to the handsome Kashmiri men. It saw it all and it reminded the moon of a night not so long ago, when everything was serene and peaceful. The beautiful children of the valley had got some peace finally. It was a beautiful night, a cold night, a silent night filled with laughter and moonlight. It reminded the moon of a night it yearned for. A Kashmiri Night, a night where men, women and children slept peacefully under the blanket of a million stars and the rocky embrace of the snow capped mountains of Kashmir.
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