Reborn in 1970 INDIA

Chapter 423: Chapter 382: Only Action

Chapter 382: Only Action

July 21, 1979

Shergill Heavy Industries Naval Complex, Visakhapatnam • Aboard INS Viraat

At seven-thirty on the morning of the twenty-first of July, the monsoon clouds that had hung low over the Eastern Ghats for a fortnight parted clean across the Bay of Bengal, leaving a ceiling of washed, blinding sapphire above the Dolphin’s Nose headland.

Tied along the three-hundred-and-fifty-metre deep-water carrier pier of the Visakhapatnam complex sat Hull V-01—INS Viraat.

Eighteen months earlier, when she had slipped through the Bosphorus in the February dark under a Liberian cargo flag with shipping containers bolted across her bow, she had been a silent, gutted hull carrying foreign radars and foreign wiring. Today, freshly painted in the deep haze-grey of the Indian Fleet, she looked like a continent of steel that had risen out of the sea floor and decided to stay.

Her flight deck stretched three hundred and eleven metres from the tip of her twelve-degree curving STOBAR ski-jump ramp at the bow to the wide, overhanging fantail at the stern, seventy-two metres across the angled landing deck, towering twenty-nine metres above the swell of the harbour. High on her compact starboard island, where the cavernous Soviet cruiser-style command bridges had been stripped away during Dr. Sanjay Bose’s seventeen-month surgical refit, four flat, octagonal phased-array faces of the AN/SPY-I Thunder-Eye [Netra-3] air-and-surface search radar gleamed dull silver in the morning sun, crowned by the spherical domes of the AkashNet optical-and-satellite communications suite and the Ganesh-4 high-speed tactical datalink array.

Down on the vast, non-skid expanse of the flight deck, arranged in four immaculate chevron blocks around the twin deck-edge aircraft elevators, sat the visible teeth of her seventy-two-aircraft air wing:

Forward on the starboard parking apron sat thirty-six single-seat S-35N Starlighter [Tejas-N] carrier-borne multirole fighters of Indian Naval Air Squadrons 303 (The Black Panthers) and 304 (The Falcons)—their blended-wing delta composite skins coated in dark maritime slate, their folding wingtips locked upright, their reinforced twin-wheel nose gear and heavy arresting hooks gleaming beneath the low-observable S-duct intakes of their navalized Kaveri Mk 2 engines.

Aft along the port quarter and the central foul-line stood twenty-four heavy, two-seat, variable-sweep S-22 Sea-Serpent [Makara] fleet-defense interceptors and maritime strike fighters of INAS 301 and 302, their wings swept back at sixty-eight degrees for deck stowage, each carrying twin under-fuselage pylons wired for the supersonic SS-N-I Mace [Kaumodaki Mk-3] anti-ship missile.

Tucked beside the island superstructure sat four twin-turboprop S-70 Sky-River [Akashganga] carrier-capable Airborne Early Warning and Control aircraft, their six-metre dorsal rotodomes housing the joint Indo-Israeli Trinetra-AEW phased-array radar; and on the aft helicopter spots sat eight rotary-wing aircraft—four Sea King anti-submarine hunters and four newly delivered, stepped-tandem Saras-M Sarus [Project Saras] heavy assault-and-attack helicopters.

Yet two decks below the flight line, inside the Admiral’s Flag Cabin in the forward section of the island superstructure, the atmosphere was not one of solemn naval pageantry.

Prime Minister Yashwantrao Balwantrao Chavan stood at the head of the Flag Cabin’s bolted mahogany wardroom table, wearing a crisp white bandhgala with a fresh rosebud in his buttonhole. Instead of looking out the armoured scuttle at the thousands of sailors and shipyard workers assembling on the pier below, Chavan was staring down at four thick, gold-embossed cream cardstock envelopes arranged in a neat, accusatory row across the green baize cloth.

Across the table stood the Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Jal Cursetji, flanked by Vice Admiral R. K. Sharma (Flag Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Western Naval Command), Rear Admiral P. K. Sharma (Commanding Officer of INS Viraat), and Dr. Sanjay Bose (Integration Programme Director). Seated at the side of the table, enjoying a cup of hot South Indian filter coffee while watching the Prime Minister’s face with undisguised amusement, were Karan Shergill, Defence Minister Jagjivan Ram, and National Security Advisor Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw.

Prime Minister Chavan tapped the first gold-embossed card on the left with his index finger.

“Fourteenth of April, 1979,” Chavan read aloud, his voice mild, dry, and devastatingly conversational. “Baisakhi Day. I had my speech written. The President of the Republic had his ceremonial tunic pressed. Then, on the eleventh of April, Admiral Cursetji walks into my office in South Block looking as though someone had stolen his bicycle and informs me that INS Viraat cannot be commissioned on the fourteenth.”

Chavan moved his finger to the second card.

“Twenty-sixth of May, 1979,” Chavan continued. “We reprint the cards. We reschedule the Cabinet Committee. On the twenty-third of May, I receive a midnight cipher from Visakhapatnam informing me that the sea trials require another twenty-eight days.”

He tapped the third card.

“Nineteenth of June, 1979. We reprint the cards a third time. And on the sixteenth of June, Admiral Cursetji telephones me personally to ask if the Republic of India can wait another month!” Chavan looked up over his spectacles at the four-star admiral. “Jal, I am the Prime Minister of India. It was easier to get thirty-eight foreign finance ministers to sign away the petrodollar in Bombay than it was to get you to hand me an invitation card with a date that actually stayed on the calendar! Three delays in three months! Even the British left India on the first date they announced!”

At the side of the table, Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw gave a loud snort into his handlebar moustache, his shoulders shaking with laughter. Beside him, Jagjivan Ram hid a grin behind his palm, while Karan leaned back in his chair, watching Cursetji’s ears turn red above his stiff white collar.

Admiral Jal Cursetji drew himself up to his full height, his gold shoulder boards glinting under the cabin lights, his face a portrait of wounded paternal indignation.

“Do not blame me, Prime Minister!” Cursetji protested passionately, placing both white-gloved hands flat on the wardroom table as if defending his family honour before a court-martial. “You sit in Delhi and look at calendar dates! Look out that porthole at those eighty-five thousand tonnes of steel! This ship is not a PWD highway bridge or a secretariat building that you can open with wet paint on the walls and fix the plumbing later!

“This carrier is our life, Sir!” Cursetji’s voice rose, thick with the genuine, fierce emotion of a sailor who had spent thirty-five years begging penny-pinching finance ministries for spare parts for pre-war sloops. “She is our child! The Indian Navy has waited thirty-two years since Independence for this child to be born! Do you know what happened on the ninth of April during high-speed recovery trials in the Andaman swell?”

Cursetji pointed an accusing finger at his own Integration Director, Dr. Sanjay Bose, and at Rear Admiral P. K. Sharma.

“Lieutenant Commander Rohan Mehta’s sensors registered a one-point-eight percent hydraulic pressure drop in the number-two cross-deck arresting wire return cylinder after the fortieth trap of an S-22 Sea-Serpent [Makara] at maximum landing weight!” Cursetji said. “One point eight percent! Your Defence Secretary told me on the telephone: ‘Admiral, one point eight percent is well within the twelve percent safety margin, commission the ship on Baisakhi!’

“And I told him no! Then in May, when we ran the Brahma-16 combat management system against a simulated twenty-four-aircraft saturation raid in heavy monsoon rain clutter, Dr. Bose found a zero-point-four-second track-correlation lag between the AN/SPY-I Thunder-Eye [Netra-3] mast radar and the Ganesh-4 datalink aboard our airborne S-35N Starlighters [Tejas-N]! And in June, Commander Arvind Nair wasn’t happy with the harmonic acoustic signature of the port secondary steam-turbine reduction gear at thirty-one knots!”

Cursetji leaned across the mahogany table toward the Prime Minister, completely unrepentant.

“Prime Minister, you are a father! Would you send your only child out into a dark street in the middle of a thunderstorm when his shoelaces are untied and he has a slight cough?! We would not risk our child—not for one single nautical mile—until we were one hundred percent sure that every valve, every arresting wire, every line of code, and every reactor pump was absolute perfection! You can scold me all morning, Sir, and I will stand at attention and take it—but today, on the twenty-first of July, this child is at one hundred percent!”

For three seconds the Flag Cabin was silent.

Then Prime Minister Yashwantrao Chavan’s stern Maratha face cracked into a broad, warm laugh. He walked around the corner of the table and clapped a heavy hand onto Admiral Cursetji’s shoulder.

“A father cannot argue with a defence like that, Jal,” Chavan chuckled, picking up the three expired April, May, and June invitation cards and handing them across the table to Rear Admiral P. K. Sharma, the ship’s commanding officer. “Frame these three cards and hang them in the wardroom passageway, Admiral Sharma. So that every young sub-lieutenant who comes aboard INS Viraat for the next forty years knows that his Chief of Naval Staff made the Prime Minister of India wait ninety-eight days at the gangway until the ship was worthy of her crew.”

“They will be framed in teak before we clear the breakwater tonight, Prime Minister,” Rear Admiral Sharma said, his eyes shining with quiet pride.

Manekshaw set his coffee cup down on its saucer with a crisp clink, his eyes twinkling beneath his bushy brows as he looked at Cursetji.

“Well, Jal,” the Field Marshal drawled, “now that your eighty-five-thousand-tonne baby has finally had his burp, his hot bath, and his shoelaces tied three times—shall we go upstairs and introduce him to the neighbours?”

At zero-nine-hundred hours sharp, under a sky swept clear by a fifteen-knot sea breeze, the commissioning warrant of Indian Naval Ship Viraat was read aloud from the podium on the main flight deck.

Standing in crisp white ceremonial ranks between the angled landing strip and the starboard island were two thousand one hundred officers and sailors of the ship’s company, nine hundred aviators and maintenance crewmen of the embarked Naval Air Wing, and four hundred flag staff personnel of the newly constituted First Expeditionary Fleet.

Across the harbour basin, lining the concrete quaysides of the Shergill Visakhapatnam Shipyard, stood twelve thousand shipyard welders, crane operators, electronics technicians, and systems engineers—men and women who for seventeen months had lived in three continuous shifts inside the belly of the ship, pulling four hundred kilometres of fibre-optic cable, mounting the supercooled Brahma-16 processor bays, and bolting the domestic high-tensile cross-deck pendants into the flight deck. In the front row of the engineers’ enclosure stood Commander Arvind Kumar Nair and the eighty-four veterans of the Sevmash and Nikolayev detachments, alongside Commodore (Retd.) Suresh Pillai and Lieutenant Commander Rohan Mehta.

When the Naval Ensign broke at the mainmast and the long, white commissioning pennant unfurled in the Bay of Bengal wind to the thunder of a twenty-one-gun salute from the harbour battery, the sound was answered from five miles out to sea.

Beyond the Dolphin’s Nose breakwater, arranged in two gleaming, five-mile-long columns across the deep blue water of the roadstead, steamed the ships that transformed INS Viraat from a lone capital vessel into an unstoppable maritime hammer.

For the first time in its history, the Republic of India had assembled Carrier Strike Group One (CSG-1).

As Prime Minister Chavan, Karan Shergill, Jagjivan Ram, Field Marshal Manekshaw, and Admiral Cursetji walked to the port edge of INS Viraat’s flight deck with binoculars in hand, Vice Admiral R. K. Sharma—who at midnight had hoisted his flag as Commander, First Expeditionary Fleet—pointed out the formation riding the swell beyond the harbour mouth.

“Eighteen hulls and ninety-six aircraft, Prime Minister,” Vice Admiral Sharma said, his voice carrying the calm, unmistakable authority of a fleet commander who no longer had to ration fuel or count missile reloads.

At the centre of the outer screen steamed four Type 41 Rajput-class Guided-Missile Destroyers—INS Godavari, INS Mysore, INS Rana, and INS Ranjit—each displacing five thousand tonnes, driven by four Marine Kaveri gas turbines, their foredecks bristling with inclined launchers for the Mach-3 *SS-N-I *Mace [Kaumodaki Mk-3]* anti-ship cruise missile, while their twin **SA-N-I *Sentinel [Vajra-Rakshak]* area-denial missile batteries and ***Thunder-Eye [Vajra-Eye]** phased-array radars formed a hundred-kilometre interlocking anti-aircraft dome around the carrier.

Flanking the destroyers in a wide anti-submarine and point-defence perimeter rode six Type 28 Shivalik-class Guided-Missile Frigates—INS Shivalik, INS Sahyadri, INS Satpura, INS Nilgiri, INS Himgiri, and INS Dunagiri—equipped with variable-depth towed-array sonars, passive infrared *SA-N-I *Sky-Lance [Vayu-Astra]* point-defence missile canisters, and twin 35mm ***Cyclone-35 [Kaal-Chakra]** close-in radar autocannons, all slaved into a single real-time shared battle picture through Dr. Meenakshi Subramaniam’s Ganesh-2 / Ganesh-4 fleet datalink ring.

Aft of the combat screen rode the logistical spine that Commander Ashok Bhalla and Lakshmi Venkataraman had engineered at Chennai: two fifteen-thousand-tonne Project 95 Urja-class Fast Combat Support and Replenishment Ships—INS Urja and INS Prana—their double-hulled tanks carrying thirty thousand tonnes of aviation turbine fuel, marine diesel, refrigerated rations, and armoured vertical-launch reload canisters capable of keeping the entire strike group at sea for ninety consecutive days without touching land.

And two miles to the south of the replenishment ships rode the amphibious sword of the fleet: two broad-beamed, flat-decked Project 90 Samrajya-class Amphibious Assault Ships (LHDs)—INS Airavata under Captain Rajan Nair and her sister ship INS Varuna—with the third sister, INS Sindhu, standing by in reserve.

Karan raised his binoculars, focusing the lenses on the full-length flight deck of INS Airavata gleaming in the sunlight beyond the breakwater.

Fourteen months earlier, after the bruised, chest-deep surf landings of Exercise Sagar Yuddh at Wheeler Island, Major General Abhimanyu Singh Rawat and his intelligence chief, Major Prakash Ramachandran, had identified the single largest equipment gap in the Manduk (Indian Amphibious Corps) order of battle: the absence of an organic, heavily armoured attack-and-assault helicopter that could lift special-forces shock teams off an amphibious deck while suppressing coastal armour and bunkers with precision fire, alongside fixed-wing close air support from the amphibious ships themselves.

Parked along the starboard edge of INS Airavata’s reinforced flight deck—right where Dr. Caetano Fernandes had built in the structural steel margins three years earlier—sat six navalized short-takeoff strike jets, and forward of them, rotors folded in salt-resistant grey-green camouflage, sat twelve newly commissioned *Saras-M *Sarus [Project Saras]** heavy assault-and-attack helicopters.

Originally engineered at Gorakhpur as The Himalayan Workhorse (named after Grus antigone, the Sarus crane) and validated at 5,800 to 6,500 metres altitude at Joshimath with a twelve percent hover-out-of-ground-effect margin carrying four fully equipped soldiers or a 400-kilogram load, the navalized Sarus was a flying tank built around a ‘wide-shouldered’ SPEI carbon-fibre composite fuselage and composite rotor blading powered by twin Kaveri-T turboshaft engines delivering 1,540 shaft horsepower each at sea level under a digital power management computer interface. Forward, the pilot and weapons officer sat in an aggressive, stepped-tandem armoured cockpit above a chin-mounted Kaal-20 20mm twin-barrel autocannon with a 500-round magazine, slaved directly to the weapons officer’s helmet-mounted sight at a 100-Hertz update rate. Aft of the cockpit, inside an internal armour capsule protected bay, the helicopter could carry a six-man Manduk special-forces assault team (or two stretchers and a medical attendant in MEDEVAC configuration), while its advanced lifting stub-wings—which provided twenty-five percent of the craft’s cruise lift—carried four hardpoints armed with eight Night-Stalker [Nishith] laser-guided anti-tank missiles and two Hailstorm [Vrishti] unguided rocket pods, all networked via an onboard Ganesh-2 processor and datalink node to a mast-mounted Trinetra-E millimetre-wave fire-control radar.

Below that flight deck, embarked inside the troop decks and floodable well-decks of INS Airavata and INS Varuna, sat two thousand two hundred battle-ready soldiers of the 1st Manduk Brigade under Colonel Sukhwant Singh Dhaliwal, overseen by Major General Abhimanyu Singh Rawat himself.

“And what you cannot see from this flight deck, Prime Minister,” Admiral Cursetji said quietly, lowering his binoculars and pointing down toward the dark blue water sixty metres beneath the keel of the fleet, “are the two shadows already on station ten nautical miles ahead of the screen.”

Out in the deep water of the Bengal shelf, running silent at two hundred and fifty metres beneath the thermocline at twenty knots without a single cavitation bubble coming off their skewed seven-bladed bronze propellers, prowled INS Chakra (S-71) under Commodore Arun Prakash and her newly commissioned second-of-class sister boat, INS Khanderi (S-72)—the 7,800-tonne, 112.5-metre Project 97 Chakra-class nuclear-powered attack submarines. Encased in their non-magnetic Kaveri-grade titanium outer hulls and HY-80 steel inner pressure shells coated in anechoic rubber tiles, their modified 180-megawatt VM-4 reactors isolated on composite acoustic rafts, both boats had their Trinetra bow sonar domes sweeping the ocean basin one hundred and fifty miles ahead of the fleet while twelve supersonic SS-N-I Mace [Kaumodaki Mk-3] missiles sat primed in each submarine’s dorsal vertical-launch block alongside twenty-four heavy wire-guided torpedoes.

Prime Minister Chavan lowered his binoculars slowly.

For a long moment, the sixty-six-year-old veteran who had taken over the Defence Ministry in the dark, shattered winter of November 1962—when Indian jawans had fought in the snow of NEFA with single-shot Bolt-Action Lee-Enfields and canvas shoes—stood at the edge of the eighty-five-thousand-tonne nuclear flight deck and looked out at the armada riding the Bay of Bengal.

He did not say anything to the press microphones behind him. He simply turned to Karan Shergill, Field Marshal Manekshaw, Jagjivan Ram, and Admiral Cursetji.

“Downstairs,” Chavan said quietly. “To the Flag Plot. We have sailing orders to sign.”

Three decks below the island bridge, inside INS Viraat’s electromagnetically shielded Flag Plot and Combat Information Center, the heavy steel hatch was dogged shut by two armed Marine Commandos.

The room was cool, lit by the soft sapphire-and-amber glow of the Brahma-16 high-resolution tactical projection wall. Across the main four-metre digital chart, fed by live orbital telemetry from ISRO’s Rohini-Khagol reconnaissance satellites and the AkashNet naval shore array, glowed the entire expanse of the northern Indian Ocean—from the Strait of Malacca in the east to the Bab-el-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz in the west.

Seated around the steel command table were ten men: Prime Minister Y. B. Chavan; Defence Minister Jagjivan Ram; Chief Minister Karan Shergill; National Security Advisor Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw; Minister of External Affairs Sardar Swaran Singh; Chief of the Naval Staff Admiral Jal Cursetji; Chief of the Army Staff General Arvind Malhotra; Commander, First Expeditionary Fleet Vice Admiral R. K. Sharma; Commandant General of the Manduk Corps Major General Abhimanyu Singh Rawat; and Defence Secretary S. Krishnamurthy.

Admiral Cursetji stepped to the illuminated chart with a brass pointer and tapped the glowing blue icon of CSG-1 off Visakhapatnam.

“At fourteen-hundred hours today, Prime Minister,” Cursetji said, his tone now all flint and operational precision, “upon receipt of your signed directive, Carrier Strike Group One—comprising INS Viraat with her full seventy-two-aircraft wing, the amphibious assault ships INS Airavata and INS Varuna embarking the 1st Manduk Brigade and twelve Saras-M Sarus [Saras] attack helicopters, four Rajput-class destroyers, six Shivalik-class frigates, the replenishment ships INS Urja and INS Prana, and the nuclear attack submarines INS Chakra and INS Khanderi—will weigh anchor and steam south around Sri Lanka into the Arabian Sea at a sustained fleet speed of twenty-six knots.

“Our first operational deployment—Operation Varuna-Danda—is permanent sea-control station at Twenty-Four Degrees North, Fifty-Eight Degrees East: the deep-water approaches to the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz, sixty nautical miles outside Iranian and Omani territorial waters. From that station, our airborne S-70 Sky-River [Akashganga] AWACS aircraft and our S-35N Starlighter [Tejas-N] and S-22 Sea-Serpent [Makara] combat air patrols will maintain twenty-four-hour radar and strike coverage over the entire Strait of Hormuz, the southern Iranian oil terminals at Kharg Island and Abadan, and the shipping lanes carrying the world’s petroleum.”

Defence Minister Jagjivan Ram looked across the table at Karan and Cursetji.

“With INS Viraat and CSG-1 deployed permanently to the Gulf of Oman to guard the western throat,” Jagjivan Ram said, “that leaves the aging INS Vikrant and the Eastern Fleet destroyers holding the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman approaches to Malacca. Admiral Cursetji—what is the exact construction status of Carrier Hull V-02 in the covered building dock next door?”

Admiral Cursetji glanced at Karan, a proud gleam in his eye.

“Minister,” Cursetji said, “under the original 1975 Naval Development Programme, we had projected starting the indigenous follow-on carrier—Project Akashvani (Hull V-02)—in 1981 or 1983. However, because Commander Nair’s hundred engineers brought back the complete modular block-fabrication methodology from Nikolayev and Sevmash, and because Shergill Steel’s Jamshedpur mills delivered the rolled HY-100 armour plate nine months early, we did not wait for 1981.

“Three months ago—on the fifteenth of April, 1979—the keel of INS Akashvani (V-02) was officially laid down inside Building Dock Two right here at the Shergill Visakhapatnam Shipyard. Seventeen thousand tonnes of her lower modular hull sections and the twin indigenous VM-4I nuclear reactor containment rafts are already welded on the blocks. She will launch in late 1980 and commission into the fleet in early 1982.”

Around the table, a quiet murmur of satisfaction rose—and then Prime Minister Yashwantrao Chavan raised his hand.

Chavan was not looking at the Visakhapatnam dockyard chart. He was looking at the vast, four-million-square-kilometre expanse of blue water stretching from the coast of Mozambique and the Persian Gulf to the Strait of Malacca, where thirty-eight nations had just bound their ports, their mines, and their railways to the Indian Rupee two weeks earlier under the Belt and Road accords.

“No,” Prime Minister Chavan said quietly.

The room went still. Everyone turned to look at the Prime Minister.

“Two carriers by 1982 is not enough,” Chavan said, his deep voice calm, deliberate, and carrying the full sovereign weight of the Republic.

He placed his palm flat on the steel table.

“Look at the mathematics you naval officers yourselves taught me during the submarine briefings in Orissa last September,” Chavan said, looking straight at Cursetji and Vice Admiral Sharma. “To maintain one nuclear vessel permanently on combat station in the Arabian Sea and one permanently on combat station in the Bay of Bengal and the Malacca Strait—accounting for reactor maintenance, hull refits, and crew work-up cycles—two hulls is a half-measure! The moment INS Viraat enters drydock at Visakhapatnam for a three-month maintenance cycle in 1982, one of our two ocean gateways is left without a supercarrier!

“Two weeks ago in Tokyo and Bombay, we became the central bank of global energy and the guarantor of the Belt and Road maritime lanes across two continents. Our Indian National Petroleum Endowment and our Naval Development Fund are receiving billions of dollars in hard revenue every month. We have the money. We have the shipyards at Visakhapatnam, Cochin, and Kandla. We have the ocean and the trade lines of half the earth to protect, and we have the sovereign power to project!”

Chavan looked directly at Defence Secretary S. Krishnamurthy and Karan Shergill.

“We will not wait until INS Akashvani is launched to order the third hull,” Prime Minister Chavan commanded. “I am instructing the Defence Secretary today to draft the Cabinet Committee on Security authorization for the immediate keel-laying of our third eighty-five-thousand-tonne nuclear supercarrier at the heavy slipway in Kandla-Cochin this autumn.

“She will be named INS Vikramaditya (Hull V-03)—after the legendary emperor who drove out the foreign invaders and ushered in the Golden Age of India. I want three nuclear supercarriers—INS Viraat, INS Akashvani, and INS Vikramaditya—in the water or on the final fitting-out berths by 1982! And when the third keel leaves the slipway, you will lay the fourth and the fifth right behind her!”

Admiral Cursetji’s mouth opened slightly, and then his weathered face broke into a grin so fierce he looked twenty years younger. Beside him, Vice Admiral R. K. Sharma sat up ramrod straight, his eyes fixed on the Prime Minister in undisguised reverence.

At the end of the table, however, Defence Secretary S. Krishnamurthy—doing the exact job a careful civil servant was paid to do—cleared his throat and looked nervously from Chavan to Foreign Minister Swaran Singh.

“Prime Minister,” Krishnamurthy said carefully, adjusting his spectacles, “on the fiscal and industrial side, the Naval Development Fund’s twelve percent statutory petroleum allocation can cover the construction of INS Akashvani and INS Vikramaditya concurrently without straining the civil budget. Our shipyards have the steel and the workforce.

“However, I must place the diplomatic calculation before you. Under the February 1978 Geneva Annex, Washington agreed to look the other way on INS Viraat because she was already built and afloat. If the Pentagon’s satellites see India simultaneously constructing a second and a third eighty-five-thousand-tonne nuclear supercarrier—backed by sixteen Chakra-class nuclear submarines—while we steam CSG-1 directly to the Strait of Hormuz today… Washington will view this as an existential challenge to American maritime primacy. We will trigger a full-scale naval arms race with the United States.”

In the quiet of the Flag Plot, Karan Shergill leaned forward, resting his forearms on the brushed steel table.

He did not raise his voice. He looked at Krishnamurthy with a calm, level gaze that cut through the bureaucratic caution like a laser.

“Secretary Krishnamurthy,” Karan said softly, “are we not already in an arms race?”

Karan reached over, pulled the classified yellow Directorate of Naval Intelligence folder lying in front of Admiral Cursetji across the table, and flipped it open to page four.

“Read the United States Congressional Armed Services Committee authorizations from last month,” Karan said, tapping the printed intelligence summary with one finger. “While we were busy hosting youth football tournaments in Lucknow and stabilizing oil prices in Tokyo, President Jimmy Carter and the United States Congress signed the FY-1980 Naval Shipbuilding Act.

“Do you know what they just ordered, Krishnamurthy? They just authorized full-rate construction on their fourth, fifth, and sixth eighteen-thousand-tonne Ohio-class nuclear ballistic-missile submarines! They just funded six more Los Angeles-class fast-attack nuclear submarines in a single twelve-month budget! They are building thirty-one Spruance-class destroyers and the first of their new Ticonderoga-class Aegis guided-missile cruisers! And three weeks ago, the Newport News Shipbuilding yard in Virginia received long-lead funding for CVN-71—the Theodore Roosevelt, their fourth ninety-thousand-tonne Nimitz-class nuclear supercarrier!”

Karan closed the folder with a quiet, definitive thud.

“The United States has fourteen aircraft carriers in commission today and is building more as fast as its slipways can weld the steel,” Karan said, his dark eyes sweeping the table. “Did Jimmy Carter telephone New Delhi to ask if building the Carl Vinson and the Theodore Roosevelt would hurt our feelings or trigger an arms race? Did the Pentagon pause its Los Angeles-class submarine line out of sensitivity for Asian diplomacy?

“An arms race, Secretary, only frightens a nation that cannot afford to finish the race. We produce our own steel in Jamshedpur and Bhilai. We fabricate our own three-micron and sub-micron silicon in Gorakhpur. We pump our own oil from Bombay High, Barmer, and the Andaman Sea. And we build a seventy-eight-hundred-tonne titanium-hulled nuclear submarine or an eighty-five-thousand-tonne supercarrier in our own yards at forty percent of what it costs Newport News or Electric Boat to build theirs!

“We do not want a war with the United States in the Atlantic or the Caribbean,” Karan continued, standing up and walking two steps to the glowing digital map of the globe.

He placed the tip of his index finger at the southern tip of Africa—Thirty-Four Degrees South, Eighteen Degrees East.

“We will make the rules of coexistence crystal clear to Washington, London, and Moscow,” Karan said, drawing a vertical line straight down from the tip of Africa to the ice of Antarctica. “The Meridian of the Cape of Good Hope.

“Everything west of the Cape of Good Hope—the Atlantic Ocean, the Americas, the Mediterranean, the North Sea—is their hemisphere. We will not send Indian carrier battle groups to patrol off New York or Lisbon or Murmansk.

“And everything east of the Cape of Good Hope—from the Mozambique Channel and the Strait of Hormuz across the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal to the Strait of Malacca and the Andaman Sea—is our ocean. If an American or Soviet warship wishes to transit peacefully through these waters on innocent passage, they are welcome to buy fresh vegetables in Colombo and pass through politely. But the days when a foreign superpower could park a carrier group in the Indian Ocean to dictate political terms to New Delhi—or to any partner of the Asian-African Development Bank—ended at nine o’clock this morning when that flag went up on INS Viraat!”

Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw tapped his swagger stick twice against the leg of the table in sharp approval. “Clean geometry, Karan. Even an American admiral can read a map when there are three nuclear carrier strike groups and sixteen Chakra-class hunter-killers standing on the line.”

Then Manekshaw tilted his head, his sharp, soldier’s eyes narrowing with a sudden, knowing curiosity as he looked closely at the operational order for CSG-1 displayed on the secondary screen.

“Speaking of geometry, Karan,” Manekshaw said, pointing the silver tip of his stick toward the amphibious icons on the Gulf of Oman deployment chart. “Sending INS Viraat, four destroyers, six frigates, and two nuclear submarines to the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz is textbook blue-water deterrence.

“But why, pray tell, are we sending INS Airavata and INS Varuna right alongside her—packed to the gunwales with two thousand two hundred of Abhimanyu Rawat’s Manduks, thirty landing craft, and a full squadron of these ferocious new Saras-M Sarus [Saras] attack helicopters armed with anti-tank missiles? You don’t use two thousand amphibious shock troops and tank-busting helicopters to escort oil tankers in deep water. Who are General Rawat’s boys planning to visit on the beach?”

Around the steel table, every head turned toward Karan.

Major General Abhimanyu Singh Rawat sat perfectly straight in his olive-green Manduk beret with the gold coiled-frog badge, his face a mask of disciplined stone, though the corner of his mouth twitched by a fraction of an inch.

Karan leaned back against the edge of the chart console, folded his arms across his chest, and arranged his features into an expression of such pious, choirboy innocence that Swaran Singh immediately reached up to rub his forehead.

“Why, Field Marshal,” Karan said in a voice dripping with solemn humanitarian concern, “have you not been reading the intelligence cables from Baghdad? President Saddam Hussein of Iraq has been growing more erratic and bellicose by the day. Just this week he purged another dozen officers in Baghdad and moved two Republican Guard armoured divisions down toward Basra and the Shatt al-Arab waterway.

“Think about it, Sam,” Karan continued, placing a hand over his heart with deadpan gravity. “What if Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial ambition gets the better of him and he launches an unprovoked invasion into southwestern Iran to seize the Khuzestan oilfields while Iran is bleeding from its civil war? Or what if some fanatical warlord or neighboring Arab regime tries to strangle the Strait of Hormuz?

“If such a tragedy were to occur,” Karan said, his dark eyes gleaming with pure, shameless wickedness, “how could we simply stand by and watch? We might be forced—reluctantly, and with heavy hearts—to send General Rawat’s Manduks ashore under the guns of INS Viraat and launch a humanitarian liberation operation to protect ‘democracy’ in that country.”

For two seconds, the Flag Plot was dead silent.

And then Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw threw his head back and roared with laughter.

Admiral Jal Cursetji choked on his tea, coughing and laughing into his white handkerchief. Across the table, General Arvind Malhotra and Vice Admiral R. K. Sharma broke into wide, helpless grins, while Defence Minister Jagjivan Ram shook with silent, belly-deep chuckles, slapping his palm softly on the steel armrest of his chair. Even Prime Minister Chavan and Sardar Swaran Singh couldn’t keep their faces straight, Chavan shaking his head and chuckling behind his hand at the sheer, brazen shithousery of it.

“Protect democracy?!” Manekshaw gasped, wiping a tear of laughter from the corner of his eye as he pointed his swagger stick at Karan. “In Ba’athist Iraq and war-torn Iran?! Good God in heaven, Karan, you sound like a smooth-talking Presbyterian Secretary of State from Washington! Even Lyndon Johnson and Henry Kissinger would blush if they heard you say that with a straight face!”

“Why should Washington hold an exclusive patent on the finest vocabulary in international relations, Sam?” Karan asked wickedly, his grin widening as the laughter echoed around the steel bulkheads of the CIC. “For thirty years, every time the Americans or the British wanted to secure an oilfield, topple an inconvenient government, or seize a canal, they went to the United Nations with tears in their eyes and announced they were intervening to ‘restore democracy and human rights.’

“Well, look around this room, gentlemen! We are the Republic of India! Seven hundred million voters! We are, by an overwhelming mathematical margin, the largest democracy on the face of the earth! Surely, as the world’s largest democracy, we have an even greater moral responsibility than Washington to export and protect ‘democracy’—especially when that democracy happens to sit on top of two hundred billion barrels of Persian Gulf crude and the coastline of the Strait of Hormuz!”

Another wave of laughter and appreciative chuckling rippled around the command table. Major General Abhimanyu Singh Rawat grinned openly now, tapping the folder of hydrographic beach surveys of Abadan, Bandar Abbas, Faw, and Kharg Island sitting in front of him.

“My Manduks are deeply committed to democratic constitutional principles, Chief Minister,” Rawat said dryly. “Especially at four-thirty in the morning from a flooded well-deck with twelve Saras-M Sarus [Saras] gunships clearing the beachhead ahead of us.”

And then, as the laughter gradually subsided, Karan’s smile faded.

He uncrossed his arms and turned back to the glowing four-metre digital map on the bulkhead. The playful irony vanished from his voice as though a steel shutter had dropped, replaced by the cold, surgical stillness that every man in the room recognized as the true architect of India’s rise.

“Laugh at the pretext all we like in this room, gentlemen,” Karan said quietly, his voice dropping an octave until the only other sound in the Flag Plot was the faint cooling hum of the Brahma-16 processors. “We will give the newspapers and the United Nations whatever polite language they need to sleep at night.

“But look at that map—and understand the grand strategic prize we are actually playing for.”

Karan picked up Admiral Cursetji’s brass pointer and rested the tip squarely on the territory of Iran and Afghanistan, directly west and northwest of Pakistan.

“In February, in the South Block bunker, we watched the beginning of the Iranian implosion,” Karan said, his eyes hard and unblinking. “Right now, three outside powers think they are being terribly clever in Iran. Leonid Brezhnev and the KGB are smuggling weapons across the Caspian Sea to the Marxist Tudeh and MEK factions, dreaming of a Soviet warm-water port on the Persian Gulf. Jimmy Carter and Brzezinski are flying C-5 Galaxies full of ammunition to a crumbling military junta in Tehran, terrified of losing their geopolitical buffer. And in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein is greasing the treads of his T-62 tanks, waiting for the Iranian army to bleed enough so he can march into Khuzestan and crown himself emperor of the Gulf.

“Let all three of them play,” Karan said coldly. “Let the Soviets, the Americans, and Saddam Hussein pour their money, their prestige, and their ammunition into that furnace. Because whichever way the dice roll in Tehran or on the Shatt al-Arab, the only country that is going to walk away owning the board is India.”

Prime Minister Chavan and Swaran Singh leaned forward, their eyes fixed on the map where Karan’s pointer traced a great geopolitical crescent from Kabul through Tehran down to Bandar Abbas and the Arabian Sea.

“Think about the history of the subcontinent since August 1947,” Karan said, his voice ringing with quiet, relentless clarity. “For thirty-two years, why has Pakistan been able to punch above its weight, launch wars against us in 1947, 1965, and 1971, and drain our military attention toward our western border?

“For two reasons.

“First: they dreamed of acquiring a nuclear equalizer to cancel our conventional and industrial superiority. Well, that dream is already dead and buried. Over the past four years, Kao-saab’s operatives in Europe and our technical counter-proliferation cells have systematically strangled Pakistan’s covert nuclear procurement network in its crib. Every front company they set up in Holland or Switzerland to smuggle maraging steel, high-frequency inverters, or uranium hexafluoride gas has been sabotaged, bought out, or exposed; their key metallurgists and centrifuge couriers have been neutralized day and night before a single cascade at Kahuta could ever spin to weapons grade. Pakistan will never become a nuclear power. We have broken their atomic spine in the dark, and we will keep breaking it every single night for the next fifty years.

“And what was the second reason Pakistan survived?” Karan tapped the border between Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran.

“Geopolitical real estate! For thirty years, Washington and London treated Pakistan as their indispensable frontline asset—their ‘most allied ally’ in CENTO and SEATO—because Pakistan sat between the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, Iran, and the Indian Ocean! Whenever Washington wanted to pressure India or project power into Central and West Asia, they used Pakistan as their unsinkable aircraft carrier and poured billions of dollars of weapons into Rawalpindi!

“Now look at what happens when Carrier Strike Group One drops anchor at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, and when India steps into the Iranian and Afghan vacuum at the decisive hour to reconstruct their economies, secure their oilfields, and bring both Iran and Afghanistan permanently under India’s strategic and economic wing!”

Karan swept the brass pointer around the borders of Pakistan—North, West, East, and South.

“It absolutely finishes Pakistan once and for all!” Karan said, his voice like cold iron.

“Look at the encirclement! To Pakistan’s east stands the Republic of India—ten times its size, fifty times its industrial might. To Pakistan’s north and northwest stands an Afghanistan linked by rail, trade, and security treaties to New Delhi. To Pakistan’s west stands an Iran whose oil terminals, pipelines, and military reconstruction are guaranteed by Indian engineering, Indian capital, and the Manduk Corps! And to Pakistan’s south, thirty miles off Karachi harbor, prowls INS Viraat and our Chakra*-class nuclear submarines!

“When India holds Iran and Afghanistan under its wing, Pakistan becomes a strategic dead-end! A landlocked geopolitical irrelevance boxed in on all four sides by Indian power! The United States will never again be able to use Pakistan as a dagger against us—because you cannot use a country that is completely surrounded inside an Indian lake!”

General Arvind Malhotra and Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw stared at the map in total silence. For two soldiers who had spent their entire adult lives fighting and planning two-front wars along the Radcliffe Line and the Line of Control, Karan had just described the ultimate strategic checkmate—solving the Pakistan problem not by grinding through Lahore with tank divisions, but by swallowing the entire geopolitical map around Pakistan until Rawalpindi couldn’t breathe without New Delhi’s permission.

“And look thirty miles south across the water from Bandar Abbas,” Karan added, moving the pointer across the narrow blue neck of the Strait of Hormuz to the southern shore of the Persian Gulf—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kuwait.

“For the last ten years,” Karan said, his eyes narrowing into dark slits, “every time Pakistan ran out of money to buy Mirage fighters or fund anti-Indian propaganda across the Islamic world, where did the cash come from? It came from the royal treasuries along the southern shore of the Persian Gulf. Those desert monarchies sat safely behind American security guarantees, pumping oil out of the sand and quietly funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in grants, oil subsidies, and ideological poison into Pakistan to destabilize us, believing that India could never reach across the Arabian Sea to touch them.

“In six days, INS Viraat, seventy-two strike fighters, twelve Saras-M Sarus [Saras] gunships, two thousand two hundred Manduks, and twenty-four submerged SS-N-I Mace [Kaumodaki Mk-3] supersonic cruise missiles will be sitting right at the gate of the Strait of Hormuz.

“Every single supertanker leaving Ras Tanura, Das Island, or Mina al-Ahmadi will have to sail past the bow of an Indian nuclear supercarrier and under the radar lock of Indian S-35N Starlighters [Tejas-N]. We will hold our hand directly on the carotid artery of the Gulf. From next week onward, every King, Sheikh, and Emir on that peninsula will wake up knowing a simple truth: if a single dinar or riyal of their money goes to finance hostility or propaganda against the Republic of India, their oil stops moving before noon, and there is no power east of the Cape of Good Hope that can save them.”

Karan set the brass pointer down on the steel table.

In the sapphire light of the Brahma-16 display wall, not a single man around the table spoke. The Prime Minister, the Defence Minister, the Foreign Minister, the Field Marshal, and the Chiefs of Staff sat looking at the twenty-eight-year-old man who, in eight years, had taken a country that once begged for wheat shipments and turned it into the master of the hemisphere.

“For a thousand years,” Karan said, his voice quiet, clear, and resonant in the sealed heart of the ship, “from the day Mahmud of Ghazni rode through the Khyber Pass to the day Vasco da Gama’s ships dropped anchor off Calicut, the history of India was written in the passive voice. We stayed inside our borders. We waited for the storm to gather on the horizon. We waited for foreign empires to arm our neighbours, to buy our traitors, to sail into our waters—and only after they struck us did we react.

“Reaction is the doctrine of the victim. Reaction means you fight on your own soil, bury your own citizens, and pay for peace with your own territory.

“Look at the screen behind me. Look at the deck above our heads.”

Karan placed both hands on the steel table and looked each man in the eye—from Prime Minister Chavan to Admiral Cursetji to Major General Rawat.

“Gentlemen, the era of Indian passivity is over. From this hour forward—no more reaction. Only action.”

Prime Minister Yashwantrao Chavan reached into his breast pocket, drew out his gold fountain pen, and unscrewed the cap.

He did not ask for any further debate. He pulled the leather-bound folder containing Operational Directive 01/79 — First Expeditionary Fleet (CSG-1) across the steel table and signed his name across the bottom of the parchment, followed immediately by Defence Minister Jagjivan Ram and Admiral Jal Cursetji.

Chavan closed the folder and handed it to Vice Admiral R. K. Sharma and Rear Admiral P. K. Sharma.

“Take our child to sea, Admiral,” the Prime Minister said softly. “And let the world see what she has grown into.”

At fourteen-hundred hours, under the glare of the afternoon sun over the Bay of Bengal, the last heavy steel mooring hawsers were cast off from the Visakhapatnam carrier pier.

Deep inside the armoured belly of INS Viraat, the control rods of her twin pressurized water reactors rose smoothly to cruising power, sending two hundred thousand shaft horsepower surging through her four massive bronze screws. With a long, deep blast of her typhoon horn that rolled off the hills of the Eastern Ghats and rattled the windows along the Beach Road for five miles, the eighty-five-thousand-tonne leviathan slid away from the berth and pointed her ski-jump bow toward the open sea.

As she cleared the Dolphin’s Nose breakwater and turned south into the deep sapphire swell, the eighteen warships of Carrier Strike Group One formed up into battle disposition around her—the четыре Rajput-class destroyers and six Shivalik-class frigates fanning out in a twenty-mile defensive ring, the replenishment ships INS Urja and INS Prana falling into station astern, the amphibious assault carriers INS Airavata and INS Varuna steaming on her port quarter with Major General Rawat’s Manduks and their Saras-M Sarus [Saras] attack helicopters ranged on deck, while two hundred and fifty metres down in the lightless cold of the abyss, INS Chakra and INS Khanderi turned west toward the Arabian Sea.

On the angled flight deck of INS Viraat, the blast deflectors rose from the steel plates with a hydraulic hiss.

Wing Commander Vikram Rathore—seated in the cockpit of the lead navalized S-35N Starlighter [Tejas-N] of Squadron 303—pushed his throttle forward into full Kaveri Mk 2 afterburner. The deck shook with the roar of twin-spool fire; the hold-back bar released; and the slate-grey fighter hurtled up the twelve-degree ski-jump ramp, leaping into the sky over the Indian Ocean to establish the first permanent combat air patrol of the new age.

Standing on the high flag bridge of the island, with the thirty-knot wind of the ship’s passage whipping at his white uniform, Rear Admiral P. K. Sharma watched the first pair of Starlighters bank west toward the horizon—toward the Arabian Sea, toward the Strait of Hormuz, toward an ocean that finally belonged to the name it bore.

End of Chapter 382