Chapter 1: Death across the Salt Desert
March 4th, 2074,
Indus Rangers Forward Operation Base, Shehida Wadi, Sindh-Kutchch border
The land was barren, dry and monotonously flat. The midday Sun scorched the sandy plains. It was so hot and I was so hungry, that I began to fantasize about frying an egg of the bonnet of the squad-utility vehicle. There was a sickly sweet smell of death all over the fort. Perversely, I realized that I enjoyed that smell. The medical supplies were dwindling fast. We wouldn't survive another raid. The promised day when the supplies should have arrived, had passed days ago.
The Spooks came down on the base in hordes today at 0300 hours. We were barely able to drive them off. The recon-team had gone on a 12 hour sortie across the border to gather food and fuel but almost all of them were slaughtered in an ambush. And those that came back with Spooks hot on their trail were in no condition for combat. Those on patrol-duty, who were outside the fortress wall, were left to fight outside. When they attack came, they faced the Spooks head-on. Since they were lightly armed, it was a vicious melee; the Spooks with their sticks, rocks, poisonous fangs and nails and our troops with rifle butts, combat-knives, spanners, wrenches and spades. The Spooks were faster and stronger but our boys had actual weapons. The result was a bloody stalemate and the spooks retreated. They came back in the morning at 0510 hours. I was stationed on the eastern rampart of the base. The squad I was part of used to be a crack sharp-shooter team before the Amrit disaster, picking off smugglers from across the Indian border. Now our job was hunting. I acted as a spotter for Asif. In all the confusion, he remained cool- almost as if anticipating a good sport. I quickly told him where the pack-leaders were. I began to panic; "For God's sake, Asif! Take the damn shot!"
He didn't reply. He never did, before engaging the target. Like always, he started chanting a weird prayer in Arabic, "I am a single bullet. I have no free will. I go where I am pointed. May the hand of God guide me to my target."
He tracked the movement of the alpha-Spook nearest to the wall of the fortress. When the creature was just about to hurl the stone he was carrying, Asif's hollow point 5.56 NATO round blew a hole, the size of a cricket ball into its face; gore splattering the sand. Seeing their pack-leader shot down, the vanguards quickly retreated. Like always, I had hoped that a fight for the leader's place to erupt but instead they grunted and squeaked among themselves and rallied to where another Spook-pack was taking cover behind a sand dune. This wasn't good. The rate of evolution of their intelligence was alarming. The pack-leaders let out a blood-curdling shriek. I assume that it was an order to charge.
Lt. Zubair lobbed grenades blowing them to kingdom come. There was a deluge of fowl-smelling Spook blood. I was scared out of my wits. I fired my ancient m1992 Beretta indiscriminately into the frenzied throng in hopes of slowing them down. They quickly scattered themselves across the dunes. The 9mm bullets were useless at that range against individual targets. Everyone on the ramparts opened fire and the spooks fell like flies. But for every fallen spook, another took his place. They hurled sticks and stones at us in feeble defiance until soon they were upon the fortress gates. They thumped the Iron Gate. We hurled grenades, and threw Molotov cocktails at them. Lt. Zubair came to our aid once again when he quickly fashioned an IED from a box of nails for coffins and some ammonium nitrate we used as fertilizer. Activating the device, he chucked it at the spooks.
"Everybody get your arse down!" he shouted.
The next second there was an earth-shaking, ear-splitting explosion. After that there was a deathly silence. Opening my eyes painfully, I got up and looked over the rampart and saw that the spooks lay in pieces. Heads ripped from torsos, limb dismembered from limb, more of that nauseating sour-smelling blood and guts making a grotesque paste with the arid soil. Seeing a sight like that, I felt motions of retching. I went down on all fours waiting to hurl. Only spittle and bile came out. Dimly I registered that Lt. Zubair had got his head blown off and his decapitated body was laying limply a few paces from me.
I lost consciousness after that and when I woke up, it was already noon. I did a cursory check on myself for wounds. I was relatively unscathed- just a gash on my chin. Asif hadn't fared so well. The right side of his face was swollen to twice its original size and covered under a heavy cotton bandage; blood seeping all over his face.
"What the hell happened to you?", I asked him.
"One of 'em lobbed a wock a' me and hi' me in the face.", he muttered with some difficulty.
I saw some of the boys going and retrieving the massacred bodies of those who had fought the spooks head-on. Matching heads with torsos was a thankless job.
Asif leaned against the wall and slid on his haunches. He gingerly placed a roll Tendu-leaves in his mouth and lit it. Absent-mindedly I recalled how he had gotten hold of those leaves.
He murdered a couple of Indians who'd lost their way in the salt desert and pinched the leaves off them. I recalled with horror, what the lieutenant forced us to do the bodies. Because of severe shortage of food, we took to roasting spooks on a spit and eating them. But when one of the recon squad died after binging on spook flesh, we realized that the spooks were poisonous. Lt. Zubair was a hard man. He forced us to pick every inch of charred flesh off the wanderers' bones. In desperate hunger I tried biting into a thigh, immediately vomiting after that. After that, the Lieutenant never ordered us to eat human flesh again. I reckon even he was revolted at what he had forced us to do.
I closed my eyes and the exhaustion of nearly eight hours of combat made me succumb to an uneasy slumber.