The Thar Incident - I

I am still struggling with my scanner, so in the meanwhile I am putting up parts of a story I wrote a few years ago.

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Part I.

With a thunderous roar the two Mig 21 MFs attached to the 46th Wing at Bikaner were airborne. At 1500 feet the airplanes leveled off and swung north in the direction of Rohtak. The boys of Viper flight were on their usual night training mission. After the great Indo-Pak crisis of 2002, what had seemed like strenous but boring training sorties in the late nineties, now appeared in a more serious light. There was another somewhat amusing dimension, that the Viper leader, Sqn. Leader Jagan (Jags) Mehra thought about as he radioed the flight control tower at Nal.

"Viper1 to Indigo, Flt 19 at India-5 Papa-89. request route clear".

The control tower at Nal replied :

"Indigo to Viper1: route clear steer to waypoint 1."

Viper1: "roger Indigo".

With that relatively benign conversation, the interesting part of "Jags" night began, training sortie 19 had just ended and Op Wake-Up was now go. "Nothing like putting a little fear of God into the Pakistanis.." thought Jags.

After a relatively sharp blinking of the lights the two migs dove into a sharp turn and came up along a southward facing direction. The Pakistani TPS-73 radar at Fort Abbas had seen Flight 19 dissappear from it screen about 30 clicks north of Nal and could not see the migs now flying at 200 feet.

The migs shot southwards towards that immense sea of sand between Bikaner and Jaisalmer and after about 10 minutes of flying sub-sonic, they reached waypoint 1-Bravo some 50 kilometers from the Pakistani border, right across the TPS-73 at Fort Abbas. It was at this point the lights on the lead mig went off and the wingman followed in suit.

Jags gunned the engine and his Mig 21 - light as a feather due to the absence of any weapons load shot up into the night sky at an astounding Mach 1.5. Wingman Dharam (Dhak) was right behind him.

Some 100 km away at the Pakistani Air Force's 75th Radar Sqn. at Fort Abbas chaos was breaking out...

The duty officer was screaming into the phone to the Air Defence Center at Sargodha, "Bogey inbound, angels 5 and rising.. speed mach 2. "

Wing Co. Mirza at the other end of the line in Sargodha was not very impressed, it appeared that the duty officer was new from the Quetta sector. Op Wake-Up was a nightly event. The Migs were unarmed.

Co. Mirza gripped the phone, "Listen Karim... its alright it happens everyday.. and.."

Karim cut him off..."There is another one, its moving too fast, descending, high altitude and same bearing..."

Co. Mirza was puzzled, "What?! check your instruments" (or head he thought... these boys from radar school what a pain...).

Karim continued, "Sir, bogey and number three object are now same heading almost same altitude.."

Co. Mirza was baffled, "Karim what are you talking about..." he then turned to his duty officer, a more experience PAF Sqn ldr recently posted here from Gilgit. "Aqif can you go down to the data relay center and see what is going on..."

The men in the Aravali hills saw the same thing and moments later Indigo was recieving the same information from another channel. The Indigo duty officer reacted instantly,

"Viper1 warning warning same altitude break off break off..."

Jags and his wingman were puzzled and then perhaps a second too late they saw it...

The fireball that erupted was visible for miles... perhaps it was all a little too close for Lt. Amar Singh of 26 Para (SF) whose unit was present near the border for reasons no one would really want to talk about anyway.

It was havildar Karnal Singh that saw the objects fall some two miles from their position, but Lt. Amar's people weren't the only ones watching, in the sky above a Divya-6 class earth observation satellite from the NRSA was seeing things too.

The men at the regional reception facility saw what the Divya was seeing, and hit the relay button, which put the image on screen at the National Command Post at Kalagarh near Mohammedpur in H.P.

Was Lt. Amar surprised to hear his radio man recieve an encrypted trasmission from the mission controller to head in the direction of the fallen object? perhaps not... but the physicist who was roused out of his sleep by a captain of the 58 Engineers Regt. at Pokharan certainly was. As he groggily answered the phone, his anger at being woken up was replaced by total surprise as he realized who was on the line, and within minutes he charged out of the room and ran past the captain to a waiting Dhruv helo that had mysteriously appeared in the night.

- to be continued.