Deadly Shadows

By Rajinder Prabhakar

ONLY ONE MAN STANDS BETWEEN INDIA AND ITS ANNIHILATION.
When a series of deadly attacks carried out by a mysterious weapon strike remote parts of India, it takes the country to the edge of panic and chaos. To make matters worse, the government and its intelligence agencies fear that these attacks are building to something truly catastrophic – a final strike that would bring India to its knees and spell the end of its sovereignty.

As the clock runs down, Adit Ohri, an elite operative of the 53 SAG, a strike force buried deep inside the nation's military infrastructure, is assigned to chase down a lead from his past and find those behind the attacks. But even as the needle of suspicion points towards India's traditional enemies, the mission leads Adit on a trail of smoke screens and deceit, until he finds the final shocking truth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jan 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9789389165098

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PROLOGUE

15 April 2012

Hyderabad, India

Calling Ibrahim Nagar a town would be a misnomer. It is a Muslim settlement in the shadow of Charminar, one of the landmarks of Hyderabad.

A burgeoning IT hub, Hyderabad is the only competition to the IT capital of India, Bangalore. It is a political hotbed, which was earlier the capital of the erstwhile undivided state of Andhra Pradesh; now, it is the common state capital of Telangana, carved out of the original state, and Andhra Pradesh.

The affluent parts of the city are cleaner with wider roads, clean water and regular supply of electricity, a rarity in most parts of India. However, Ibrahim Nagar is a settlement on the fringes of the city that mushroomed and spread over a period of time. If one took an aerial view of this small fringe town, identifying any road between the many rows of houses would be a challenge. All one would see is unplanned houses or tenements jammed closely as if the residents wanted to squeeze out every inch of space to pack in another member of the family. The air is dense with the putrid smell of stale urine, garbage and excretions of more than nine thousand residents. Settlements like Ibrahim Nagar are common in all big cities across India.

It was a joyful day in the locality. Children were playing with more excitement than usual in the narrow bylanes; the elders were either standing in the few open areas designated for communal meetings or lounging near the small mosques scattered across the area. Today was a day of celebration and joy; in addition to it being a Sunday, a holiday for those with a job, today was also the day when Ibrahim Nagar was going to have clean and fresh water for the first time since it sprung up on the landscape of Hyderabad. Each and every house had been connected with a complex network of pipelines channelling water from the nearby Godavari River.

CWW, also known as Clean Water Works, an NGO dedicated to providing clean water supply to the backward parts of major Indian cities had undertaken this mammoth project a year ago. CWW went about completing the project in the most professional and methodical manner. Ibrahim Nagar was divided into grids and each grid got a station equipped with one of the most advanced water purification and filtration plants in the world. Each grid had its own project manager responsible for planning and executing the complex network of pipelines, which would supply water to each and every home.

Getting the permissions to start the project had been surprisingly easy, when even to break down an illegally built wall was a near-impossible task in most Indian cities, due to the cumbersome bureaucracy and rampant corruption. The chairman of CWW, Raghu Verma, was a highly influential personality. His influence was bought by liberally spending millions on dispensing favours to the right people.

At precisely 4 p.m., the town of Ibrahim Nagar erupted with joy. People came out of their homes, hugged each other and distributed sweets among themselves. Some just stood in front of the running taps inside, watching fresh water flow for the first time within the privacy of their houses. Children bathed and played in their small, closet-sized bathrooms. Some of them even threw water down on people celebrating in the streets. It almost seemed like the Hindu festival of Holi was being celebrated in this Muslim neighbourhood. Human nature at the core is the same—just warmth and comfort are desired during moments of joy; religion is not even a factor. The town of Ibrahim Nagar had water for the initial time since the first tent was pitched on its grounds 57 years ago.

As the night descended, Ibrahim Nagar was lively with celebration. Candles were lit, celebratory lights were hung outside most houses and the air in the vicinity had the fragrance of freshly cooked biryani and feast prepared in every home. For once, the town of Ibrahim Nagar did not smell of stale urine, garbage and excretion. Instead, it smelled of happiness and celebration.

By 3 a.m. on 16 April 2012, the entire population of Ibrahim Nagar was dead.

17 April 2012

Lucknow, India

The men dressed in blue with the name of the NGO they represented, ‘Sanicity’, emblazoned on the backs of their overalls worked through the narrow lanes of Gopal Nagar. Each man carried a tank on his back with an attached hose from which they dispersed chemical into the running stream of sewage flowing in front of row upon row of tightly packed, small brick houses. To call them houses would be an overstatement of their size. They were one-room blocks, with the largest being a 10-feet square, in which families of four to six, or sometimes eight, members lived and breathed.

The town on the outskirts of Lucknow, the capital of India’s most populated state Uttar Pradesh, had a population of approximately seven thousand, most of them Hindus. The outbreak of dengue fever, caused by the Aedes aegypti mosquito which thrives on poor sanitary conditions, had forced the city’s civic authorities to implement serious preventive measures. Instead of creating infrastructure for better sanitation, they had engaged small organizations, NGOs and independent pesticide control companies to help control the disease. With the onset of summer, these measures were now enforced across Lucknow.

At 11 p.m., the town of Gopal Nagar burst into flames. Within an hour, before the local firefighting teams and police could even begin to respond, the town along with its entire population was reduced to ashes.

PART I

1

June 2018

The team of four men infiltrated into Pakistan through the route taken by most terrorists—Khyber Pass into Peshawar. Each man took the bus service from Jalalabad in Afghanistan, though at different times. Their papers identified them as fruit merchants from Peshawar.

Pakistan is the main source of bringing agricultural and paper products to Afghanistan. The route from Jalalabad to Peshawar passes through Khyber Pass, one of the most dangerous places in the world with an ever-present danger of a Taliban attack or even a US drone strike. The main highway, reconstructed in 2006, theoretically secures the completion of the journey in less than two hours, but the checkpoints on both sides of the pass, manned at regular intervals by heavily armed security forces, make each trip about three hours long.

The men with perfectly forged papers identifying them as Pakistani nationals were, in fact, part of an elite counterterrorism unit buried deep inside the National Security Guard (NSG), better known as Black Cat commandos because of the black combat uniforms that have come to symbolize them.

India’s premium counterterrorist force NSG recruits commandos from all security forces—army, navy, police and other paramilitary forces. On recruitment, each commando undergoes a brutal training programme to become a part of the force. They are trained in urban warfare, anti-hijacking, bomb disposal, surveillance, intelligence gathering, unarmed combat and the use of a vast array of weapons. NSG’s service to its nation has been of distinction and ferocious bravery. Most recently, they flushed out the terrorists who attacked Mumbai, the financial capital of India, on 26 November 2008.

The city of Mumbai was gripped by panic and chaos when ten well-trained and heavily armed terrorists belonging to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a terror group based in Pakistan, had entered Mumbai via sea route. The terrorists had walked around the densely populated hotspots of Mumbai, firing indiscriminately at innocent civilians before holing up inside two prominent luxury hotels. The local police was caught unprepared and confused; the initial reaction from the security forces had been chaotic until the NSG was called in. The NSG lost two brave soldiers in the operation, but still completed their job and quietly left for their base near New Delhi, true to their motto—‘Omnipresent Omnipotent Defence’.

The four men infiltrating deep into Pakistan were part of a strike force under the direct command of the National Security Council (NSC) of India headed by the PM of India. The NSC designated them as the 53 Special Action Group (SAG) commanded by Abhi Thakur, formerly a commando in the Indian Army and a colonel in the Defense Intelligence Agency. The purpose of the 53 SAG was to strike where none of the other special forces could and conduct operations unheard-of, all of them above top secret. This force had some of the best commandos and combat officers in the intelligence community. While the 51 SAG and 52 SAG of the NSG command were well known and celebrated for their valour, 53 SAG officially did not exist. The funding for this group was buried under administrative costs of multiple agencies.

The members of 53 SAG are the epitome of excellence among the combat soldiers in India, but excellence in combat is not the only criteria for their selection. The selection criteria for 53 SAG are uncompromising and exacting; each candidate is required to be fluent in multiple languages and have advanced intelligence gathering experience. After selection, each member is trained above and beyond the training given to the NSG commandos of the other units. Being the ultimate best is a fundamental job requirement. They conduct pre-emptive strikes against groups or individuals planning attacks on Indian soil; in some cases, they also carry out strikes to avenge the attacks carried out on Indian soil. The mission of 53 SAG is to instil fear of death in the hearts and minds of anyone even dreaming to plan a terrorist attack on Indian Territory.

The team heading to Pakistan was led by Adit Ohri, a former commando with the hallowed 9 Para Regiment of the Indian Army. Adit had been drafted into RAW, the intelligence agency responsible for gathering intel from outside Indian borders, from the army as a field operative because of his exceptional talent. He was already an unnamed legend within the intelligence and counterterrorism community, having single-handedly dispensed justice to all the terrorists behind the 26-11 attacks on Mumbai. He not only tracked down all the members of LeT who had planned the attack, but also personally put a bullet in their heads, whether they were hiding in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Malaysia. All those previous operations had been one-man missions. He liked working alone for the advantage of speed and stealth it provided.

This, however, was not a mission to kill, but to bring back the man behind a series of bombings targeting Indian soldiers and army installations in Kashmir Valley. In the last two years, nearly 140 Indian soldiers, both from army and paramilitary, had been killed and almost twice as much seriously wounded.

Kashmir Valley, on India’s northernmost tip, is a part of the Jammu and Kashmir state. It is referred to as one of the most high-risk places on earth by the Western media, mainly due to the relentless proxy war being waged for over two decades by Pakistan, who stakes a claim on Kashmir despite the fact that the erstwhile king of Kashmir had ceded to India post the end of the British imperial rule.

In 2016, this proxy war took a devious turn when terrorists dressed in army uniforms sneaked into an Indian army camp in Uri. They killed over 40 soldiers while they slept. The terrorists were killed in a swift counteraction by the other soldiers at the camp. India struck back and took Pakistan by surprise. Indian Army commandos in a precisely planned lightning attack destroyed terrorist compounds on Pakistan’s side of the border. It sent a statement to Pakistan, and to the world at large, that India would not tolerate transgressions from Pakistan anymore.

However, 53 SAG was not in the business of making statements, it struck right into the heart of the enemy. Their operations were more subtle and covert. Operatives went in and out of the enemy territory without anyone realizing that they had even been there.

While the world discussed the Indian surgical strike, the 53 SAG remained busy collecting intelligence and information through the liaison officer assigned to them by RAW. A network of RAW agents in Pakistan was activated to trace the attacks on Indian Armed Forces in Kashmir. This was a delicate and tough job for any agent since the army and the ISI, not to mention a clutch of jihadi soldiers, protected these terrorists in Pakistan.

They struck gold in early 2018 when an intelligence operative identified the man who had designed and built the bombs used in the terror attacks. A team of RAW agents had monitored these terrorists for four months until a window of opportunity opened to nab him.

The other three members of Adit Ohri’s team for the operation in Pakistan were Aman Ahuja, Kush Mehra and Junaid Aziz. They were experienced and battle-hardened soldiers, experts in all forms of black combat arts and killing. All four had grown long unkempt beards and hair as was the norm in these parts. They wore the traditional Pashtun dress of salwar kameez with woollen blankets called as patoo, or patu, on their shoulders and old, worn-out locally made running shoes. Kush was the tallest, over six feet. The men were lean and muscular; with their tanned skin and attire, they looked like other Pashtun merchants travelling through the rough and rocky terrain.

Each of them had to get off their respective buses at Hayatabad, a small village just outside of Peshawar, and wait for the others to reach the roadside tea shop next to the bus stop. The team had last spoken to each other before they had boarded their flight from New Delhi to Kabul, where they had gone as a part of the medical assistance team training doctors and nurses.

They had travelled from Kabul to Jalalabad separately to avoid inviting any suspicions. Reaching the tea shop was required to confirm that each one had made it or the operation plan would have to be changed. None of them acknowledged the others as they entered the tea shop. As professionals, they were well aware that the difference between success and failure, or in their case life and death, could be just a simple misplaced micro expression.

Crossing over to Pakistan through Wagah border, near Amritsar in Punjab, would have made a shorter journey to Lahore, but with tensions running high after the Indian strike in Pakistan, it was too risky.

2

When Abu Jamal opened the door of his nondescript apartment on the fringes of Gulberg, a residential and commercial area in Lahore, he had expected to welcome the boy he was going to spend the afternoon having sex with. His contact had promised to deliver a 12-year-old boy with smooth skin and he spent the morning dreaming of the despicable acts he would perform on the boy, defiling his innocence. More than the sex, he was aroused by stripping someone of their innocence. But as he opened the door, it was slammed right back into his face.

Adit moved into the apartment with his Heckler & Koch (H&K) handgun ready. He found the terrorist bleeding profusely from the forehead looking at him with a dazed and shocked expression. Abu could not fathom how anyone had managed to find him. Not even his ISI handlers or the security detail knew his whereabouts.

Abu, like every devout Muslim, offered prayers five times a day, except one day, every month. On this one day, he would enter the mosque for his evening prayers and slip out from the back. He would then quickly walk over to the apartment for his perverse monthly engagement.

Adit pinned Abu down with the weight of his knee and choked him with a vice-like grip around his neck, ‘Fucking paedophile! Your perversion has led us to you!’

He spat on the terrorist’s face.

The RAW team tracking Abu had quickly found out about his monthly routine and had followed the young boys back to the man who arranged them to meet Abu. One of the agents posing as a police officer had visited the pimp, who willingly, in exchange for not being arrested, had divulged the time of Abu’s next visit to the apartment.

This was the window of opportunity the Indians had been waiting for. Adit and his team were briefed and assigned to infiltrate Pakistan and kidnap the bomb-maker. The plan was to interrogate him and get information on the terror cells that executed the bombings in Kashmir and the supply lines of the explosives they used. The information would help intelligence agencies to also trace the organizational framework of LeT.

‘Your bomb-making days are over, asshole,’ said Adit as he flex-cuffed the man. ‘So are your days of fucking young boys.’ He kicked Abu in the balls and looked around the apartment for Abu’s laptop. The techies back home would crack it open and get all the information. Though Adit despised the person, the piece of garbage, whimpering at his feet and would have loved to beat the crap out of him, he had to move fast. He was a professional operating in enemy territory, but the thought that this man was responsible for killing his brother soldiers was hard to suppress.

‘The meat is cut and ready,’ he spoke into his bone microphone as he found the laptop on the table in Abu’s bedroom.

‘Ummm, can’t wait to eat the biryani,’ replied Kush, who was on sniper duty at the top of a commercial building across the road.

‘Rendezvous in three minutes.’ Adit ignored Kush’s remark, even as he heard chuckles of his team members from the other side.

The bomb-maker had not expected to be found, still Adit remained cautious as he examined the laptop before touching it. He was experienced enough to know that these maniacs rigged their laptops with explosives, presuming theft. He stuffed the laptop and the hard drives in the backpack he carried.

‘Get on your feet and move,’ he ordered Abu, pointing his gun at him. ‘One wrong move and I will put a bullet in your ass.’ The terrorist followed Adit’s command as he nudged him out of the door with his gun.

The team had reached Lahore last night in separate buses, the last one arriving after 10 p.m. They went to a little garment shop owned by a deeply embedded RAW agent Naseer in the densely populated old city area of Lahore. They had finally gathered around a dining table above the shop to go through the plan. Each man had shaved and cut his hair, changed into jeans and t-shirts to merge in with the urban population of Lahore.

Naseer provided them with arms and ammunition—an H&K 9 mm pistol for each man, with extra clips, AK 47 assault rifles and an H&K 7.62 sniper rifle. The team hit the sack after a final run-through of the plan. Sleep was a weapon, even if they were right in the middle of deadly enemy territory. The agents of 53 SAG were accustomed to operating on the edge, sometimes without sleeping for days, under high-stress situations and in tough hostile conditions. Sleep was a precious commodity for them because once the operation started, they had no idea when they would get the opportunity to rest again. It was critical for them to use every such opportunity to rest optimally. It helped them stay sharp during missions.

On hearing Adit’s message on his earpiece, Kush scanned the area through the scope of his H&K 7.62 mm sniper rifle from atop the building diagonally opposite Abu’s apartment. Satisfied that there was no danger posed to the extraction, Kush disassembled the rifle and stashed it in a gym bag. Then, he casually strolled across the street and hopped into the Toyota Land Cruiser parked across the street.

‘Take me for a long drive, sweetheart. Let’s listen to Meat Loaf,’ he said to Aman as he sat inside the vehicle. Aman stifled a laugh as he drove the SUV into the underground parking lot of Abu’s building. The car came to a halt just as Adit come out of an elevator with Abu.

Adit quickly cleaned the blood flowing down Abu’s forehead and threw a coat over his shoulders to avoid him being seen in handcuffs. After driving for two blocks, they picked up their backup, Junaid, from a street corner. An hour later, as they made their way through the desert landscape towards the Indian border, they were in a heightened state of alertness. The operation had gone off too smoothly and anything could go wrong between then and their crossing the border. The Pakistan government would love to parade four Indian soldiers who wanted to cross the border with a kidnapped Pakistani citizen—never mind Abu’s Saudi nationality.

As they drove down a sand dune in their Toyota, Aman and Kush, sitting in the front, kept their eyes peeled for any movement, while Abu sat in the back between Adit and Junaid. Their plan entailed abandoning the SUV half a mile before the border and walking through the opening created by the Indian Border Security Force. Adit looked at his digital wristwatch to confirm the schedule; the Pakistani Ranger patrol was still 30 minutes away.

Just as they came down another sand dune, the Land Cruiser was lit brightly by headlights and surrounded by Pakistani Rangers, their assault rifles all pointing at the SUV. All four men in the car reached for their guns but knew they were severely outgunned. At any moment, they expected the rangers to open fire and shred the Land Cruiser.

Each of the four Indian soldiers focused their attention in different directions; they were in a hopeless situation. If any of them made an attempt to step out of the vehicle, the rangers would open fire. They could open fire any moment anyway.

Adit was perplexed; the rangers should have done something by then. They should have either asked them to get out of the SUV with their hands raised or should have opened fire.

He noticed a faint glow of headlights approaching the stand-off from a distance. The lights got brighter as the vehicle got closer, finally coming to a halt, just outside the ring formed by the rangers. A uniformed officer wearing the insignia of a major walked through the cordon towards the Toyota.

‘I don’t think my days of fucking young boys are over just yet,’ Abu sneered, looking towards Adit.

Pointing his pistol at the terrorist’s crotch, Adit muttered under his breath, ‘You utter a word and I will blow your fucking nuts off!’

The Pakistani officer walking towards them ordered his men to maintain their positions and switched on the flashlight he held as he neared the SUV. Adit’s finger on the trigger guard tightened as the Pakistani major approached closer. There was no way he was letting this worm of a terrorist live, even if they were caught.

The Pakistani officer stood right next to the SUV. Adit could smell the cigarette smoke off his breath as he leaned over the window and pointed the flashlight directly at Abu’s face.

After surveying the insides of the vehicle with the flashlight, he casually enquired, ‘Going somewhere, gentlemen?’ He looked directly into Adit’s eyes and smiled, ignoring the pistol Adit was pointing at Abu’s crotch.

The next thing that happened stunned everyone, more so Abu. The major turned around and said to his soldiers, ‘They are our people; let them pass.’

3

Sergei Koponov stayed in the shadows with his eyes peeled to the gate of a farmhouse. Any moment now, the huge wrought iron gates would open and a caravan of three cars would roll out. He looked at his worn-out watch; it was 8.47 p.m. His team was waiting for his signal just a short distance away. None of them were visible to the untrained eye, but then no one expected them to be there.

Ex-KGB officer Sergei had relocated to Goa after the fall of the USSR and had used his considerable skills and contacts to build an empire of drugs and prostitution. He was also available to carry out contract killings, provided the price was right. The price he had taken for killing Naresh Chandra, an executive committee member of one of the major national parties, was way above his normal price. He was paid $1 million in cash. Sergei never concerned himself with the reason behind any killing as long as he was paid his money.

Naresh Chandra was attending a private party by one of his rich industrialist friends at a sprawling farmhouse on the outskirts of Jaipur. Sergei had complete details of his security—there were three armed police guards in an SUV in the front and four more in an open SUV at the back, with Chandra’s white Mercedes S 500 sandwiched between them. The Mercedes had no armour or bulletproof windows.

Sergei shook his head and smiled. These third-world politicians think having more guards around them makes them safe!

At 9.22 p.m., the three vehicles rolled out of the farmhouse and Sergei asked his team to be ready over an untraceable cell phone. The small motorcade maintained a uniform speed, keeping a distance of 10 metres both ahead and behind the S 500.

The motorcade had driven 5 miles from the farmhouse when a large goods carrier truck came screaming down the side lane and smashed against the security vehicle in the rear. At the same time, in a well-orchestrated move, a white minibus drove straight towards the leading vehicle, screeching to a halt a few metres from it.

The impact of the heavy truck barrelling into the rear vehicle, hitting it flush on the