The Beast Of The Dragon

Deepak Shergill

First published in India in 2012 by CinnamonTeal Publishing Copyright 2012 Deepak Shergill ISBN: 9789381542231 This book is a work of fiction. Incidents, names, characters, and places are products of the authors imagination and used fictitiously. Resemblances to actual locales or events or persons living or dead is coincidental. All organizations, equipment (military or civilian), name, places, location and the way organizations operate or behave are a figment of the authors imagination. Deepak Shergill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work. All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Typesetting & Cover Design: CinnamonTeal Publishing CinnamonTeal Publishing, Plot No 16, Housing Board Colony Gogol, Margao Goa 403601 India www.cinnamonteal.in

This book is dedicated to all men and women who work on Offshore Supply vessels of all shapes and sizes in the hostile environment of offshore Oil fields. Without their efforts, the extraction of hydrocarbon to sustain the world would not be possible. But, their contribution, dedication and sacrifices are rarely, if ever, acknowledged or recognized.

The Bend

he bend in the road was at 6925 feet in the area across the river Jhelum, close to the Line of Control (LOC), across Ledi Gali and Pir Kanthi on the Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) side in the Pir Panjal mountain range of the Himalayas. The way was packed with river bed stones and gravel pressed into the mud to give it a semblance of a road, but it was still motorable. The security block of brick and roughly hewn stones with a tin roof had a central tower from where a lone sentry had an unrestricted view of the road for a kilometer on both sides. The back of the security block was attached to the edge of the layback from the road and overlooked a shallow ravine. Lush grass adorned the area and was dotted in places with boulders. This Indian Army Security Block was called Menon Post, named after the brave Lieutenant Colonel Menon, Commanding Officer of 1 Madras Regiment. The brave warrior had lost his life in an ambush by Pakistani tribal raiders in April 1948. During monsoon the ravine had water washing down incessantly from the mountain slopes. The mountains, covered with thick pine and spruce trees, extended towards the northwest for ten kilometers and then further northwards, forming parallel folds with the Pir Panjal range. Captain Jaideep Khurana of 1 Punjab regiment sat in the sentry tower on a folding field chair; upon a folding map-readers table before him were a sheaf of forms that were filled at his post covering a list of all movements across his post. A record of all vehicular traffic, personnel, stores, provisions, ordinance, equipment and domestic animals that passed his post was maintained thus. Jaideep did not look at the forms as mere records but as important information. He picked up the personnel movement forms that recorded the movement of personnel in the last
1

Deepak Shergill

one week and noted that it recorded thirty one movements from the Uri end towards Saigara northwest wards where the road ended. Most movements were of labourers in the Border Road Organization camp at Jumma post, ten kilometers northwest of Urusa, but set back from the LOC. Jumma Post was named after Jumma Mohammed, a local villager who had bravely saved the life of Lieutenant Colonel Man Mohan KhannaCommanding officer 4 Kumaon Regiment in June 1948when he was accosted by Pakistani raiders near Pandu. He and his small detachment of men were on their way north of Pandu to deliver the much needed medium machine gun (mmg) to 2 Dogra Regiment. Jumma Mohammed had shielded the detachment and was awarded a Vir Chakra by the Government of India. Jumma post was manned with half a companys strength of jawans from 1 Punjab Regiment. The other half was at Menon Post. The small medical detachment at Jumma Post, manned by a Major from the Indian Army Medical Corps, spent more time dispensing medicines and medical advice to the sparse local population in the neighborhood of the post and the labourers attached with the Border Roads Organization. Jumma Post had a large fenced compound. Most of it was taken up by road construction machinery and material. The army had temporary barracks constructed at one end. A part of the compound adjacent to the post, separated by a barbed wire fence, was populated by the civilian labourers who maintained the roads. A small party of labourers looked after the Army khhachars, the sturdy Asian mules that carried logistics to the three forward pickets on the steep mountain peaks near the LOC. Personnel movement always interested Jaideep. He had been in command of the post for the last twenty days and by now he knew almost every person who moved in his area of command. His Post clerk, a regular infantry soldier and a wizard of sorts on the computer, updated the sturdy army laptop daily. Jaideep opened the programme coded Sentry and took a peek at personnel movement data. He tapped the Frequent Name box and two names showed up: Masood Sarar and Rashid Dor. Masood, the labour contractor for the Border Roads Organization had made three trips to Barmulla in the last week and his assistant Rashid had made two. With each name Jaideep selected Group and the name was placed with three to four names that were identified as labourers moving with Masood and Rashid to Uri and back. Jaideep typed link
2

The Beast of the Dragon

with transport with each group and the familiar TATA 44DT, JK 9C A 5024, showed up. The small, yet powerful truck belonged to Masood, who used it to transport labor and material. The truck displayed a yellow painted board on the wind screen near the passenger seat, with black letters that read ON ARMY DUTY. For obvious reasons the board was only displayed when approaching a check post or in a convoy. Masood was a man of cheerful disposition. Kashmiri by birth, he had spent his formative years in Jalandhar, Punjab, and spoke Punjabi well. At nearly fifty years of age he was full of energy and whenever he was asked for any minor help by the personnel at the post, his cheerful response was Jee Hukam Karo. He obliged the personnel by fetching for them the small requirements from Baramulla on payment. Jaideep studied the various lists for some time and found no unfamiliar pattern. He stood up, stretched himself and informed the tower sentry that he was going down to the Ops Room. The alert sentry sat behind a SS 56 mmg with an effective range of 3500 meters. The SS 56 mmg was the innovation of a group of IIT Roorkee students nine years ago. They conceptualized it and Ordinance Research Organization of the Indian Government at Rourkela fine-tuned it for the Indian Armys field requirements. From conceptualization to acceptance, the Indian Army took rigorous field trials before accepting it as a standard infantry field weapon. The names of the IIT students were long forgotten, but the SS 56 prevailed, for the students had named their project Sling Shot 56. Jaideep gently touched the heavy Colt .45 revolver in the western cowboy holster strapped on his right thigh. The revolver belonged to his great grandfather, a farmer in pre-partition Punjab in Pakistan. His grandfather had been in the British Indian army and had witnessed WWII in Africa and the post partition crisis in Kashmir in 1948. His father had followed his grandfather to the army and Jaideep was happy to make the choice himself. The regiment Ordinance personnel specially customized .45 bullets for Jaideep. The customized .45 bullets delivered a weaker kick than the original ones. The .45 Colt in Jaideeps hand looked like a toy. At 185 centimeters he made an imposing military figure. He descended the ladder and went to the Ops Room at the back of the post. The name was a misnomer. It was just a simple 10 feet by 12 feet room with a small window and a small kerosene room heater in the corner. One of the walls had an ordnance map of 100 sq kms area around
3

Deepak Shergill

the Menon Post. The map had colored pins stuck to it in various places. What each red, green, yellow and blue pin indicated had no reference code. Even the position of the post was not indicated on the map. One wall had a 14 inch LCD screen monitor that displayed feeds from all-weather surveillance cameras placed around the post, the reception area and the waiting room. Jaideep was more interested in a box with an LCD screen. The box resembled a small TV at best, with a thick base, a dozen LED indicators, an on/off switch and a few dials. In front of it was an alpha numeric keypad to command information on the LCD screen through a processing box at the base of the monitor. The box had a logo of Bharat Electronics Corporation and was named EBNET (Electronic Beam Net). The Indian Army called it Chowkidar. The processing unit was attached to a small dish-antenna that was located outside at roof level. The antenna resembled a microwave dish-antenna and a keen observer would have noted that it pointed northwest, placed parallel to the ground, unlike a TV set box-antenna that points skywards. EBNET got its data input from four screen beam boxes placed in a watershed area some 15 kilometers from the post in an area that ran between two forward post but formed a wedge into the LOC towards Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, screened from the two posts by large boulders. This was a well-known point of entry for militants. During the months of monsoon, the water shed was safe due to the flood waters running down from the mountain slopes. But during dry season, the watershed was a trickle stream that was frequented by the local Gujjars with their cattle and sheep. The area was frequently patrolled and had trip wires laid at 3 feet above the ground, and sometimes stray cattle, sheep and game tripped it, raising false alarms. The area was not mined since buried mines in a watershed would get washed away in the torrents of water. Infiltrators were also cautious and looked out for such trip wires. The trip wires had remained a distraction for the infiltrators and the EBNET beam net of four beams was installed across the watershed at a point where the area was narrowed by a huge boulder. EBNET was capable of monitoring twelve beams but four were considered sufficient for the area. Each beam box operated with an allweather battery that could withstand temperature variation from minus 30 degrees to plus 52 degrees Celsius. The device was programmed to sense human weight, height, form and rate of movement. The beam sensors were radio linked to EBNET at Menon Post.
4

The Beast of the Dragon

Two days ago EBNET had recorded six movements in the early hours of the morning. A foot patrol had been deployed immediately to check the area. The patrol went on a trot, was at the location in a little over an hour and searched all probable exits but found no trace of any intrusion. Jumma Post and Head Quarters at Uri were alerted and a discreet search of the surrounding area was mounted on the basis of two time factors, advance of a group on foot and a group using a vehicle, the circle expanding eastwards and covering some populated areas. All roads, tracks and villages along the expanding semicircle were put on search by ground units and Snake Eye helicopters of the Indian Army Aviation. Local Army Intelligence command activated their informers, but the trail was cold so far. What bothered Jaideep was the time span between the beep alarm that indicated individual bodies passing. The first was at 06:02:32, the second at 06:09:11 with the next three at 06:09:19, 06:09:26, and 06:09:42 respectively. At 06:33:36 there was another one and after that there was no further alarm. The last alarm bothered Jaideep. The others were in a pattern of five, moving in a column across the surveillance line at an interval of about seven minutes between the first and the last beep. The first individual crossing could be a scout who might have gone to see if the route was clear and then called the others in. Could the last one be a false alarm? False alarms were not uncommon. Although a system test was run each day on EBNET, a false alarm could be due to any reason. The EBNET system was prone to false alarms in thunder showers and when it snowed heavily. But, it was a nice and cool September day. Though EBNET was programmed to detect human body movement, sometimes an animal movement could trigger it off too, as had happened in the past when a Gujjar had crossed across it, chasing his errant cow. Jaideep had thought about all this earlier and had sent a detachment the next day to check if the system was functioning as it should be. Two of his Jawans had walked across the electronic mesh and the system had immediately indicated the same. Although the area was under an extensive search operation, Jaideep had a gut feeling that at least six intruders were picnic (coded slang for at large) in his area or even the Jumma Post area. He waited for some time in the Ops Room and looked at the map. With a divider, he measured on a scale pasted separately on the desk and ran a semicircle
5

Deepak Shergill

from the point of intrusion. Even a slow-moving person on foot would be in Uri by now, he reasoned. Too much thought never did lead to clearing of the cobwebs. He put the matter out of his mind for the time being, ordered a cup of tea, climbed back to the sentry tower and opened an Urdu newspaper a few days old, to not only read but also to polish his Urdua language he had learned from his grandfather for the sheer pleasure of enjoying the Urdu poetry that his grandfather enjoyed. His grandfather had never learned Hindi and like most Sikhs who lived in pre-independence Punjab, could read and write Urdu and Gurmukhi well; and having had his schooling in a good English boarding school at Mussoorie, he also obviously wrote and spoke English like a pucca English sahib. As he skimmed the headlines, Jaideep wondered if most soldiers spent more than half their careers in bored routine jobs with intervals of high energy drills and exercises and short spurts of actual combat. Some went through the army without ever seeing the face of an enemy. In his tour of duty Jaideep had seen his share of combat against cross border terrorists. What he did not know at that point of time was that he would be the first in the series of seemingly unrelated events which would have an immense impact on the nation. Some of these events made history, some mere hot news. The single common thread in all these events was terrorism with a capital T, emerging in a new avatar, spanning oceans and bounding across geopolitical boundaries disdainfully.

The Intruders

he late afternoons of September in Kashmir were a delight. The day had the kind of warmth that drove the mind to thoughts of picnics and the nights had just the right chill of romance. The surroundings of Menon Post were always quiet and often the voices of men talking were carried far by the wind. The tower sentry was the first to react to the sound of an approaching vehicle, not yet in sight. The sound came from the road towards Jumma Post and distinctly indicated that the vehicle was lumbering up an incline. The sentry reacted with his right foot and sent a low intensity alarm to the reception party below. His hands worked mechanically to activate his SS 56 mmg, as he swung it to point north. With his thumb he activated a target acquisition screen, much like what one sees on a digital camera, but this one was screened with an eye piece. He zoomed in to 1000 meters target data acquisition distance to the point where the vehicle would appear around the bend. His thumb activated a second button and the mmg sent out an electronic beep, which when hitting the target, would Doppler range it like a speed gun and give the speed at which the target approached. At night it had an added facility of thermal imaging a living being at 2000 meters, even if he was sheltered behind a bush. The colder the night the better was its performance. It could also detect if anyone was cowering behind a rock and was blowing his condensed warm breath into the air. If a person stayed more than ten minutes behind a boulder on a still, cold night, the gun system detected the heat source as the air around the living being showed a relative heat difference. Machinery and vehicles having a larger thermal signature were by far the easiest to detect. The sentry threw a glance at Jaideep and continued his vigil. Jaideep was already looking in the same direction, glad that the days monotony
7

Deepak Shergill

was broken by some activity. The post came alive and set in motion a wellplanned drill. Hidden cameras were activated all around the post. The warning electronic eyes at 500 meters along the road on either side were not activated since visibility was good. In times of fog these electronic eyes issued a warning if anyone approached the post along the road or even from behind, from the ravine. The road barrier was dropped and the tire shredder was activated to raise the spike out of the ground across the barrier. Jaideep remembered that when taking over the post from the erstwhile officer who was handing over, the latter had informed him that this pneumatically activated device often malfunctioned and had once refused to draw down into its housing bar, thereby holding up a convoy of supply trucks for over three hours. The device auto-activated instantly if anything crossed the path of its electronic eyeeven a human on foot. An unnecessary precaution, thought Jaideep. The sandbag post on the rope end of the barricade bar was quickly manned by a Jawan carrying a Shool 56 assault rifle (SAR)one of the best infantry weapons in the world, a wonder of Indian ordnance research and development. Two other Jawans with SARs manned a sandbag post at the north end of the post building. One of them carried a red flag that was used to wave down the vehicle to a stop. *** Jaideep observed the drill keenly. But his subconscious still wandered to the infiltrators. There had been little infiltration in the Kashmir valley in the last one and a half months. At first the security forces had congratulated themselves on the aggressive security and patrolling systems and their effectiveness. The pre-snow months saw the maximum infiltration from across the border from Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. This drop in infiltration was assessed to be for the reason that the terrorist organizations sympathetic to Al Qaeda had joined forces, under the Taliban flag to wage a war against Pakistan and America and other allied forces on the Afghanistan side. Afghanistan and Pakistan had been in turmoil post the death of Osama bin Laden. Then a month ago, in a terrorist strike within a minute of each other, Taliban trained terrorist had viciously attacked the United States Embassy and the British High Commission at Islamabad in a most novel
8

The Beast of the Dragon

and unusual manner. The Americans paid for killing Osama bin Laden and the British paid the price of assisting them. The eventual pressure mounted on the United States. They had to pay a heavy sum of money to Pakistan to go full force and give support to American efforts against the Taliban. The American public clamoured for the state to take some action. *** The truck had rounded the bend and slowly approached the post. It was the familiar TATA 44DT of Masood. The vehicle pulled up in a shallow area of about 50 square meters cut in the side of the mountain, some 60 meters from the post barrier. As were the instructions, the driver and the passenger disembarked from the truck and moved towards the post reception area. The sentries did not move till the two men had entered the reception area. The two sentries then moved towards the vehicle with a mirror on a metal dog leg bend, to inspect the underside of the truck. From the back of the truck four passengers were then asked to disembark with their belongings and stand on the opposite side of the road, in clear sight of the barrier sentry and the tower mmg. The vehicle was then thoroughly searched. The post Havaldar Major moved out of the post reception area and went towards the passengers lined up for inspection. Accompanying the Havaldar Major was one of the men who had gone to the reception area. He was Rashid, Masoods assistant. With Rashids help, the papers of the passengers were inspected and identified. All passengers were then ordered to go to the waiting room in the reception area. Jaideep had watched all this with alert eyes. Serving in the Kashmir valley on security duties could make a man hyper-alert to trouble. Trouble often came from the most unexpected sides. Just then the power telephone on the tower rang. The sentry reached out for telephone, raised it to his ear and after listening briefly said hain sahib. As he replaced the instrument he said to Jaideep, without turning his eyes away from the target, Sahib, Havaldar Major sahib is calling you down at the office. Jaideep descended the ladder and went to his office-cum-living quarters at the back of the post. Once he was seated behind his desk he rang a bell to the reception room.
9

Deepak Shergill

After some time, the Havaldar Major came in and said, Sahib, Rashid and his driver have valid passes, there are four passengers who are new and they have a letter from the border road sahib countersigned by Major sahib from Jumma post. Jaideep took the letter from the Havaldar Major and looked at it. The letter introduced four labourers from a nearby village and requested that passes be issued to them to work in the contractor gang. The letter was as normal as all the passes that were issued for the contractor and his gang by the Border Road Headquarters at Uri. Jaideep asked for the border village passes of the four persons and had a look at them. They were worn out with near fading pictures but seemed to be in perfect order. Whats the problem sahib? Jaideep asked. I dont know, sir. You take a look at the four of them. They dont look like locals. The area around Jumma post was mostly inhabited by Gujjars. Some of the men from the villages in the area took up employment with the Border Roads Organization. They were poor and the traditional work of raising cattle and sheep was no longer lucrative, as more organized cattle and sheep farms were coming up in the lower part of the valley and around Jammu. Jaideep stood up and went to the reception room with the Havaldar Major. He called the post Naib Subadar to take a look as well. The Naib Subadar was a seasoned soldier and always gave wise and sound advice. The four people were summoned to the reception room. The first thing that struck Jaideep as the four persons filed in was that they looked tired but well fed; the locals, who had a frugal diet, always wore that lean undernourished look. Two men seemed to be in their early fifties, which was rather old for the hard labour of the contractor gang. Two were younger and looked tough and fit. All of them were dressed in the local attirelong shirts with loose salvars; they all wore padded jackets and dirty, frayed, folded-up balaclavas on their head. Their beards were untrimmed and formed a healthy growth on their faces. Most of all, their eyes showed no sign of having ever worn black kohl. All the men wore well-worn sports shoes with woolen socks and had threadbare traditional Gujjar woven woolen blankets thrown over their shoulders. They surely arent locals, Jaideep thought. A locals hands would be callused with dirty broken nails and he would have a permanent smear
10

The Beast of the Dragon

of black home-made kohl in his eyes that protected him from eye diseases and from the glare of the snow in winter. The local peoples facial skin always looked stretched and sunburned with a red glow in their cheeks. The older men always had a generous line of crow feet beneath their eyes. Most men had sharp features and light colored eyes, ranging from chestnut brown to flaked turquoise blue to black. These men did not fit the picture and on a gut-level, kneejerk instinct both Jaideep and Naib Subadar looked at each other and said, Search these men thoroughly. The thorough search started with a body search and yielded nothing of interest. All four were ordered to remove their sports shoes, which showed on the giveaway tag that they could have been purchased in Srinagar. Next, their baggage was searched: they were just small hand bags and their content yielded the normal trappings of a poor man. Only one bag had a plastic razor with an open packet of 7 Oclock made in Lahore blades. Then the men were interviewed, separately by the Naib Subadar and each gave the name of one or the other hamlet nearby. But what gave them away were their Hindustani-Punjabi accents and their ignorance of the local dialect. These men were unarmed and looked harmless, and Jaideep ordered their detention on the grounds of illegal immigration. Jumma Post and Divisional Headquarters at Uri were immediately informed. Divisional Headquarters immediately dispatched military police to escort the four intruders, Rashid and the driver along with their truck to Uri. Jumma post was ordered by the Divisional Headquarters to detain Masood at Jumma post. The intruders looked like harmless traders escaping from the turmoil in Pakistan, whose towns had been ravaged by the onslaught of the Pakistani Army that had bullied and labeled every adult male assuming them to be in league with the Taliban. Businesses suffered and whole families disappeared under the persecution and ruthlessness. The question of how these men got past the Pakistani Army patrols and the vigil on the LOC had no convincing answer. When asked to account for the fifth person, they said that they were shown the route by a smuggler who went back across the LOC. So that explained the six beeps on EBNET.
11

Deepak Shergill

Rashid, for his part, pleaded that he did have contacts with smugglers across the border and helped them in smuggling anything manageable that sold in the black market in Pakistan, from pornographic material, to Bollywood movies to Pony stitching needles. This, he claimed, was the first time that he had helped men cross the border as the payment for this task was very lucrative. Masood, he swore, knew nothing about this and was innocent. Jaideep knew that the truth still lay hidden and it was beyond his jurisdiction to look into the matter too closely. He filled up the prescribed Army Regulation Form AR 67/21A for each individual, giving the basic details of the detention. The four intruders, along with Rashid and the driver, were detained in separate locations in the post under guard, till the detachment of Military Police from Uri arrived. The two elderly intruders, as per the identity paper, were Afzal Hazoor and Umid Din .The younger ones were identified as Hazzar and Lalan Khan. Jaideep knew that these were not their real names. Instinct told him that these men definitely had terror organization links. It was not his job to interrogate these men. The Army intelligence unit did this. But Jaideep would never come to know that the four had links to the Al Qaeda.

12