Tom Clancy - Locked On

In the first week of December, a cold steady rain fell, beating on the tin roofs of the grain shacks that lay just four hundred yards from the edge of the rail line.

General Riaz Rehan, his second-in-command Colonel Khan, and Georgi Safronov lay on prayer mats in the dark, tucked in a shed behind a rusted-out tractor that hopefully would afford them protection from stray gunfire when the attack commenced.

Rehan was awaiting a radio call from a spotter in Chabba Purana, a village just southeast of Phularwan. The fifty-five Jamaat Shariat gunmen, the students from the Haqqani camp in Miran Shah, were spread out in the field on the west side of the tracks. They were positioned one man every three yards, and every fourth man held a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, and the rest wielded Kalashnikovs.

The Dagestanis, led by ex — ISI officers handpicked by General Rehan because of their paramilitary experience, were positioned fifty meters or so away from the track, and a ten-meter-long stretch of rail had been removed just moments before. The speeding train would come off the rails right there in front of Jamaat Shariat, it would grind into the dirt, and then the North Caucasus fighters would quickly go to work killing every last living thing in each and every car.

Rehan had forbidden smoking ever since the six big truckloads of men arrived earlier in the evening. Even though there was no one around for several kilometers in each direction, he also forbade speaking other than in a whisper, and all but essential radio communication.

Now his radio crackled to life. It was on an encrypted channel, but still the message was in code. “Ali, before you go to bed the hens must be fed. They will be hungry.”

Rehan patted the nervous Russian space entrepreneur crouched in the shed with him, then leaned into his ear. “That is my man up the tracks. The train is coming.”

Safronov turned to Rehan and looked to him. Even in the low light of a rainy night, the man’s face looked pale. There was no reason for Safronov to even be here for this attack. Rehan had argued against it, telling the Russian that he was too precious to the overall mission. But Safronov had insisted. He demanded to be with his brothers each step of the way on this operation. Though he had left the training early in North Waziristan, that was only because, at that point, he was working twenty-hour days in Moscow organizing the three rocket launches in Baikonur, and ensuring that only his handpicked scientists and staff would be there with him when the time was right.

But there was no way he would have missed tonight’s fireworks, Rehan’s dominant personality be damned.

Rehan had finally acquiesced to letting Georgi come along for the op, but he held his ground on having him take no part in the attack itself. He even demanded that the man wear a chest plate and remain in the shed until they loaded everything on the trucks, and Rehan had put Colonel Khan himself in charge of making sure the Dagestani remained safe.

There were a few other men nearby, as well, who would not be part of the gunplay because they played a bigger role in the op. The cold, calculating general knew that selling the fantasy that a band of mountain men from Dagestan could pull off such an incredible operation in Pakistan would be difficult if not impossible. Many in the know would immediately place blame on the Islamists in the ISI for helping them. To deflect this blame, Rehan had set up one of the organizations with whom he’d been working for more than a decade. The Muslim United Liberation Tigers of Assam, an Islamic militant group in India, had been penetrated by agents from India’s National Investigation Agency a year prior. When Rehan learned of MULTA’s infiltration he did not get angry, and he did not immediately cut ties with them. No, he saw this as an opportunity. He took men from MULTA who were insulated from the NIA penetration, and he brought them into his fold. He told them they would be part of an incredible operation in Pakistan that would involve stealing a nuclear weapon, returning with it to India, and detonating it in New Delhi. The men would be martyrs.

It was all a lie. He documented their movements as he documented Indian intelligence’s infiltration of their organization, saving evidence that he could use later to cover the tracks of the ISI in the theft of the bombs. He had plans for the four MULTA men here tonight, but it had nothing to do with them leaving these fields with the bombs.

These men would take the fall for the theft of the weapons, and by association the Indian government would have to explain their involvement with the group.

In furtherance of this ruse, Rehan and his men planned the attack with an appearance of sloppiness. A group of Islamic fighters from India being duped by Indian intelligence into working with Dagestani partisans in Pakistan would not possess any semblance of military precision, and for this reason the plan involved mayhem and chaos to achieve its objective.

Rehan heard a radio call from the unit farthest to the north. They reported the lights of the train in the distance.

The mayhem and chaos would begin within moments.

Rehan’s plan never would have worked if the Pakistani government put as much effort into securing its nukes from terrorists as it did securing them from their neighbor to the east. The bomb train could have been longer, full of an entire battalion of troops, it could have had helicopter gunship escorts for the entire route, and the Pakistani Defense Force could have stationed quick-reaction troops along the tracks in advance of the train’s leaving Kamra on its way to Sargodha Air Force Base.

But all these high-profile measures that would virtually eliminate the chance that a terrorist group could overpower the train and take the weapons would also telegraph to Indian satellites, drones, and spies that the nukes were under deployment.

And the Pakistani Defense Force would not let that happen.

Therefore, the security plan for the train relied on supreme stealth, and an onboard force of one company of troops, just more than one hundred armed men. If stealth failed and terrorists hit the train, one hundred men would, under virtually all circumstances, be sufficient to repel an attack.

But Rehan was prepared for one hundred men, and they would not stand a chance.

The lights of the train appeared in the flat distance, just a kilometer away now. Rehan could hear Safronov’s heavy breathing over the pattering of the rain on the tin roof. In Arabic the general said, “Relax, my friend. Just lie here and watch. Tonight Jamaat Shariat will take a first important step in securing a Dagestani homeland for your people.”

The Pakistani’s voice was full of confidence and fake admiration for the fools out there in the grass. Inwardly he was hoping they wouldn’t fuck it up. Out there with Jamaat Shariat were a dozen of his own men, also ready with small arms and radios to organize the attack. He had no idea how well the Haqqani trainers had prepared these fifty-five mountain men, but he knew he was seconds away from finding out.

The train itself appeared in the rain, screaming forward in the night behind its white light. It was not long, only a dozen cars. Rehan’s contacts at Kamra Air Weapon Complex had no way of knowing which car the devices would be loaded into, and he had no one at Taxila railroad station to confirm this either. Obviously it would not be in the engine, and common sense said it would not be the rear car, as the security detail would logically post a portion of the force at the back in case of attack from the rear. So Jamaat Shariat had been ordered to fire their RPGs only at the engine and the last car, or at any large clusters of dismounted troops only when they were well away from the train. The RPGs could not set off a nuclear explosion even if they hit the bombs themselves, but they could very easily damage the weapons or set the rail car containing them on fire and make it difficult to extract the two big bombs.