Termination Shock

The Line of Actual Control

Laks had at least done enough research by this point to expect the PowerPoint deck, so that was no surprise. And Ravi had found online crib sheets for the quiz, which looked pretty easy once you knew how to spot the trick questions.

The deck, making no effort to put a cheerful face on the business, opened with old stock footage of mushroom clouds rising from nuclear detonations. The voiceover was in English with Hindi and Punjabi subtitles. Dates and words were superimposed on the fireballs: USA 1945, USSR 1949, China 1964, India 1974. “Nuclear bombs have existed for the better part of a century, and yet they have only been used in battle twice, at the very beginning of the atomic age, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Pictures now of devastated Japanese cities and maimed civilians. “It is extraordinary in all of human history for man to have developed a weapon but then voluntarily refrained from its use. Why? Because it was understood that the consequences were undesirable.” Pretty dry understatement there, as they were now watching clips of old sci-fi movies showing grisly post-nuke effects and horror-show makeup.

The next slide was an abrupt transition to a series of images depicting guns of various kinds down through the ages, starting with Chinese hand cannons and fast-forwarding through Western flintlocks, six-shooters, and twentieth-century military rifles to culminate in Kalashnikov and Armalite variants. “Much less powerful than nuclear bombs, but responsible for far more deaths, are conventional firearms.”

Now a map of Asia, with China in red and India in blue, zooming in slowly on the border region between them in the Tibetan plateau. As it got closer, Laks was able to pick out the bent Chinese salient that had come to be known as the Yak’s Leg, crossing over the long boomerang-shaped lake of Pangong Tso (right now they were only a short distance west of the “knee” in the leg, above the lake’s northern tip). A simple animation showed the border moving this way and that, like a sail luffing in the wind. Old grainy footage of Chinese and Indian military units trudging through snow and shooting rifles completed the picture. Shooty and explody sound effects echoed harshly from the hard floor of the room. But then suddenly it went silent, except for an old-time trumpet fanfare. In huge black numerals, “1962” covered the map. The red/blue frontier froze. An animated line snaked along the boundary and a label appeared: LINE OF ACTUAL CONTROL. “The cease-fire of 1962 put an end to armed conflict between India and China along their shared border—which remains disputed to this day. A peace agreement signed by Zhou Enlai and Jawaharlal Nehru referred not to the border but to the Line of Actual Control—a diplomatic phrasing that enabled the cease-fire to be formalized without either party acknowledging the other’s territorial claims.” This bit was helpfully illustrated by stock footage of the respective leaders inking documents. “Since 1962 the position of the Line of Actual Control has shifted this way and that. However, the cease-fire itself—the mutual agreement not to use firearms—has remained as perfectly unbroken as mankind’s collective agreement not to use nuclear weapons. Three-quarters of a century has passed without a bullet disturbing the high mountain border zone. This in spite of the fact that it is heavily militarized on both sides by units of the Indian and Chinese military. This does not, however, mean that no conflict has taken place in the area—only that no firearms have been used. Occasionally, patrolling units of the two opposing sides have come into direct contact in areas where the exact position of the Line is not precisely charted. Indian military has respected the Line but Chinese have taken advantage to make small invasions of Indian territory. Added up over time, if allowed to endure, these move the Line, causing major loss of strategic high ground to our aggressive neighbor to the north. How to punish the invaders and move them firmly back to where they belong, while still preserving cease-fire? With sticks and stones, and, if need be, fists. Incidents of this type, once rare, became common in first decades of the twenty-first century. It is not known when volunteer units first began to arrive at the front. Now it is commonplace on both sides. By stepping out yonder door you are entering a zone of low-intensity but very real warfare that can become a hot shooting war at any moment should a combatant on either side discharge even a single bullet from a firearm. We, the men and women of the Indian Army, welcome volunteers from all over our great country, and indeed the world, who come to this place to push back the invaders and stabilize the Line in its rightful spot. However, we must always be on the alert for hotheads who do not respect the rules, or foreign spies who would seek to infiltrate volunteer ranks in the role of agent provocateur. Hence the procedures enacted in this facility. Thank you and good luck in your adventures at the front!”

The deck concluded with an image of two strapping Indian men—one Sikh, the other not—striking heroic poses atop a glacier, crossing their sticks in a big X against the dark blue sky.

The lights came up and a woman wearing an ankle-length puffy coat over a sari came in, followed by a uniformed soldier pushing a cart laden with sticks and stones. The lady gave a talk, much more interesting to Laks than any PowerPoint, about what was and wasn’t acceptable. People were always trying to bend the rules. Sticks could be as big and heavy as you liked, but they could not have any metal attachments or anything whatsoever grafted onto them that could make a penetrating or cutting wound. Any sort of wood was allowable provided it was not liable to break off in a way as to form a sharp point. She held up a cheap pinewood closet pole such as you might buy at a home improvement store. It had fractured along an angled grain boundary to become a sharp spear. Other exhibits—baseball bats with protruding nails, cricket bats with attached blades, sword canes—were more blatantly against the rules, but fun to look at.

Less information needed to be imparted to the rock throwers (“rockers”) since there was only so much you could say about rocks. They did actually need to be rocks, locally sourced. Some mischief-makers had tried to smuggle in eggs made of lead. You were not allowed to use slings or atlatl-like arm extenders. You had to throw the rock from your hand with a normal baseball- or cricket-like motion. As a way of driving the point home, the soldier took up a position about ten meters away from a sheet of plywood, very much the worse for wear, and used a sling to hurl a lead egg at it. The egg punched a neat hole right through the plywood. “Of course the rules apply on both sides of the Line,” the lecturer said, “and that is where you, our intrepid streamers, have your role to play. Keep a sharp eye on our adversaries! If you collect any footage of Chinese volunteers transgressing these strict rules, upload it at once, timestamped and geotagged, to our server.”

There followed the quiz, which was not all that difficult, and then a strip search and collection of blood and saliva samples. They were strangely uninterested in seeing anyone’s official papers. Bella, a couple of days ago, had suddenly looked up from a screen and remarked, “It’s like the French Foreign Legion.” Laks hadn’t known what she’d meant by that. But now he got the gist. They didn’t care who you were or where you came from. They just wanted the biometric data and then to shoot a chip into your arm.

In due course Laks was reunited with his clothing and personal effects. He’d removed everything except his patka—the base layer of a proper turban. Many days he didn’t bother to wear anything more than that on his head. But he was aware that he was being shunted into a separate lane, as it were, for Sikhs. So he pulled a long piece of fabric out of his bag and devoted a few minutes to wrapping his head in a full dhamala, which was a style of turban associated with going into battle. Down low it was close to the sides of the head, but a lot of material was piled up above, making it flare wider as it rose above the top of his skull. It added a couple of inches to his height.

Once he was fully dressed, he and other observant Sikhs were taken aside and given a stern talking-to by an officer about their kirpans: the daggers worn by all Sikhs as emblems of their faith and of their status as saint-soldiers. All other knives had been confiscated, but Sikhs could carry their kirpans under a religious exemption on the condition they never draw them from their sheaths—no, not even in a fight.

Their luggage was waiting for them on the other side of all these barriers, and it was clear that it had been rifled by clinically paranoid officials. Vehicles were not allowed to cross over—it would have been too difficult to inspect those for concealed weapons—and so once they had repacked their bags they found themselves wandering around an open-air bus bazaar where scores of vehicles ranging from motorized rickshaws up to full-sized buses were competing for passengers.

But Sue had already identified a place along the south shore of the Pangong Tso where a new unit of Chinese volunteers calling themselves the Bonking Heads had been posting high-spirited videos within the last twenty-four hours. While their visual flair was undeniable, they were far from the most impressive such group. For that reason, though, they seemed a wise choice for a Fellowship untried in combat. Ravi had arranged a ride on a specific minibus. All they had to do was walk to it and climb on board.

The bus worked its way down the inevitable switchbacks, and after an hour made contact with the dirt track that ran parallel to the southern shore of the lake. From there it was reasonably easy going on a flat road. Laks was actually able to just look out the window and observe the scenery. The Pangong Tso reminded him of some of the long, deep glacier-gouged lakes in the Selkirk Range of British Columbia, such as Kootenay. The key difference was that the latter was surrounded by hills green and rich in wildlife, because its altitude was all of about five hundred meters. Whereas Pangong Tso—a bit high at the moment because the glaciers feeding it were succumbing to global warming—was at 4,250. And it was salt water, because it had no outlet and so was just a big evaporation basin. The upshot was that it was as lifeless as the moon. Neither the rocky slopes rising from its shores nor the transparent blue water itself supported any kind of plant or animal that Laks could see. Every few kilometers they would pass a military supply depot (neat grids of tents and shipping containers) or a volunteer logistics hub (smoking, steaming chaos of tarps and vehicles) but humans, supported by long supply chains, were the only life-forms up here.

He forgot where he was and dozed off. But suddenly the bus had stopped. “There!” said the driver in English, pointing out the window on the other end of the dashboard. But the salt-rimed glass was impossible to see through with late-afternoon sun crashing into it. Laks got up, pulled his bag and his stick down from the overhead luggage rack, and walked down the bus’s side stairway until his feet were on solid ground: bouldery dirt, streaked with white salt.

A rock about the size of an egg came bouncing and tumbling across the ground toward him, as if in greeting, and came to rest a couple of meters away from his foot. Odd. Laks turned in the direction from which it had flown and looked across fifty meters of open ground into the People’s Republic of China.

The Bonking Heads were standing there, drawn up in a sort of battle line, flanked by their goggle-wearing, drone-piloting streamers, picking up rocks and desultorily throwing them. But the bus driver had been wise enough to stop just out of range, to spare his windows.

In homage to a late-twentieth-century rock group, the Bonking Heads wore black dress suits over their voluminous down-stuffed under-layers. The suits were tailored after normal business attire but comically oversized to make room for all that insulation. They were neatly accessorized with white shirts and narrow black neckties. Having perceived the futility of throwing rocks from this distance, they were now just brandishing sticks and shouting imprecations. Some of them were striking wide-based martial stances that Laks vaguely recognized as characteristic of northern kung fu styles. They would be able to develop a lot of power, but their legs were vulnerable. Others of the Bonking Heads seemed to have noticed his turban, for they had begun prancing around in what was apparently meant as a cruel parody of gatka footwork. At a glance, he thought there were maybe four of those preening stick fighters, flanked by a total of half a dozen or so rockers.

Buzzing, whining noises to either side made Laks aware that he was being filmed in high-resolution video from two different camera angles. But Pippa wasn’t even out of the bus yet. Their abrupt arrival had caught them all flat-footed. These were drones that had been sent out by the Bonking Heads to capture B-roll of their opponents. They seemed to have two streamers, flanked way out to the sides and a little behind the line, as if to emphasize their non-combatant status.

And what were these streamers seeing in the feeds in their goggles? Laks, in a motley collection of observant Sikh and granola-munching backpacker togs. Sam and Jay, looking a bit more pulled together in their football supporters’ regalia—the closest that anyone in the Fellowship had to a snazzy uniform, yet sadly down-market compared to the Bonking Heads’. Ravi came sleepily and clumsily out of the bus unlimbering his cricket bat, wearing a hideous purple sweater that his mother had knitted for him.

Still transfixed by that, Laks heard shouting, and turned to see Sam and Jay sprinting directly toward the Bonking Heads, sticks held high.

While not a good idea tactically, the frontal assault of the Englishmen did have the good effect of causing the remainder of the Fellowship to pile out of the bus as if it were on fire. The usually even-tempered Pippa was spitting nails over having been caught unprepared. She was already filming with her phone as she rattled down the bus’s stair. Once she got clear and established her bearings, she reached into her coat pocket, pulled out a video drone, and tossed it straight up into the air. It turned itself on, unfolded its rotors, and hovered in place. Bella came out of the bus pulling what looked like ski goggles down over her eyes, then stuffed her bare hands into warm pockets where it could be guessed control devices were to be found. The drone, reacting to her touch, began to dart this way and that. She got a vacant look on the portion of her face that was still visible and began to turn her head to focus on things no one else could see. Either she was having a schizophrenic break or the goggles had established a three-dimensional video link to the drone.

Laks turned around to see how Sam and Jay were getting on. They weren’t. They were just kneeling on the ground, hunched forward, rib cages heaving. They’d made it perhaps two-thirds of the distance to the Bonking Heads’ position before it had occurred to them that they had no oxygen. Stopped in the open, gasping for breath, they had become target practice for the rockers, and pretty easy targets at that.

“We must go help them!” Gopinder exclaimed, and took a step forward, but Laks reached out and put a restraining hand on his arm. “We’ll end up just like them.” He looked around and picked out his bag and Gopinder’s, lying on the ground where the bus driver had just flung them. The bus’s rear wheels spat rocks as it pulled forward and veered off. “Get your dhal. Move slow and breathe fast, bhai.”

The dhal was a traditional shield, basically identical to what in Europe would be called a buckler, about the size and shape of a dinner plate. It was a staple of gatka and so both Gopinder and Laks had cheap but rugged injection-molded ones that they used in training. They kept them carabinered to the outsides of their bags. Both men now unsnapped their dhals and gripped them in their left hands. A knuckle pad on the back, under the handle, cushioned the grip. The fingers were still free to grab a short stick as well. In his right hand each man was holding his full-length staff.

During all this fumbling around with gear Laks was painfully aware that Sam and Jay were exposed and under fire. But at some point he began to hear a strangely familiar voice shouting in Mandarin. He looked up to see Ilham walking alone and unarmed directly toward the Bonking Heads, but angling in on a different vector. A stream of verbiage was coming from the lad’s mouth, directed at the opponents, who had all turned to look at him. His voice was thready but perfectly clear in the cold thin air. As far as could be discerned from body language at this distance, the Bonking Heads were shocked at first, then indignant.

“What’s he saying?” Pippa asked Sue.

Sue could only shake her head. “Most terrible things,” she answered, “I cannot even explain.”

“Well, if his objective is to have rocks thrown at him, it is quite successful!” Ravi said.

To this point in his life Laks had never struck anyone in anger, aside from a few playground scuffles in primary school. Though the Sikhs were perceived by outsiders as a martial race, their religion laid down clear boundaries as to when it was acceptable to resort to the use of violence. Those boundaries were actually quite restrictive. You could fight back when attacked, basically, or when you needed to intervene in a situation where someone else was being victimized. All of which was a good fit with Laks’s personality. One of the only concerns he’d had during his long journey to the front was that when he finally arrived he might not have it in him to just walk right up to a Chinese counterpart and hit him with a stick. That might speak well of his basically peaceful nature, but it would render the entire journey somewhat pointless.

The hasty, and so far disastrous, attack mounted by Sam and Jay, and Ilham’s verbal assaults, were all completely useless from one point of view. But they did serve the unintended purpose of forcing Laks to take action. All his misgivings on that front had been swept away.

“Keep breathing,” Laks said to Gopinder, and he began to trudge across the flat but treacherously rock-strewn battlefield. He heard another drone get into the act and guessed that Sue was piloting this one. Pippa was bringing up the rear, filming handheld. She had lugged a motorcycle helmet all the way from Wellington and now had finally put it on. A few hundred meters behind her, the bus had pulled up to a safer remove and was awaiting the outcome. In the center, Laks was taking point, flanked on his right by Gopinder and on his left by Ravi. Ravi didn’t have a dhal, but he was having some early success using his cricket bat to smack away incoming rocks. For, having chucked a few at Ilham, the rockers were now zeroing in on what they perceived as the real threat. Ilham, having succeeded in giving Sam and Jay a few minutes’ respite, was now backing away from the front. “Earbuds!” he shouted as they came abreast of him. Then he ducked around behind them.

Keeping his dhal aloft, Laks stopped, leaned his big stick against his shoulder, and rummaged in his pocket until he’d found those. He used his thumbs—tingling from a combination of cold, adrenaline, and hyperventilation—to stuff those into his ears. Gopinder and Ravi were doing likewise.

“We will draw fire from the rockers,” Laks explained, “so that Sam and Jay can get up.” During the interlude provided by Ilham’s stream of profanity, the two Englishmen had flattened themselves against the ground to present smaller targets, but as soon as they tried to get up they’d be sitting ducks. “We’ll swing wide right around them,” Laks continued. “Ravi, get right of Gopinder.” Ravi, who had been on the left, cut behind Laks and Gopinder as instructed. “Stay wide, so you don’t accidentally hit Gopinder with your follow-through.”

They were definitely succeeding in drawing fire. Laks took a direct hit to the top of his head, but that was where the dhamala’s fabric was piled thickest, and so it bounced off harmlessly. No wonder his forefathers had used this style in combat! But it was a lesson to keep his dhal at the ready. Rocks, it turned out, were small, fast, and hard to see coming.

“Watch the throwers,” Ravi advised, batting away an incoming missile. “Not the rocks.”

This was terrific advice. There were only so many rockers, and their throwing motions were obvious even if the rocks themselves were hard to see in flight. To avoid being flanked by Laks, Gopinder, and Ravi, the rockers who’d formerly been on the Indians’ left flank—shifted one at a time to the Indians’ right. Laks risked taking his eye off them long enough to glance left at Sam and Jay, now almost abreast of him. He got a rock in the rib cage for his trouble but saw Sam roll over onto his back and give a thumbs-up. Jay was up on his elbows pressing a soccer scarf against a laceration above his eye. “If you can, tuck in behind us,” Laks said.

“Roger that,” Sam responded. The mere fact that he could talk suggested he had got his wind back. As Laks moved past them, the Englishmen planted their sticks in the ground and used them to get up to their feet, then swung in behind. “You’re going to be my left wing when we get closer,” Laks said. “Make sure we don’t get flanked on that side.”

“Yes SIR!” Jay responded. Military style. Not sarcastic.

“Ilham. The stick guys. What’s that on their faces?” They’d now drawn close enough to see that the Bonking Heads stick fighters—who, to this point, had done nothing but make fun of them—had some kind of weird objects stuck to their noses.

Ilham, who was now trailing a safe distance in their wake, had access to all three video feeds, as well as image-stabilized binoculars. “Little cups strapped to their noses. Tubes coming out of them.”

Laks had heard of them, but never seen one, while working in the oxygen langars. “Nasal masks,” he said. “Like a mini oxygen mask, but it doesn’t cover the mouth. They’re on supplemental oxygen.”

“Explains why they won’t fucking shut it,” Jay remarked. He and Sam had belatedly got their earbuds in and joined the feed.

Laks asked, “Sue or Bella, can you get line of sight to the source?”

“On it,” Bella announced. Laks heard a drone bank and veer.

“Nice, Bella!” Ilham said a few moments later. “It’s a big oxygen tank, like welders use, lying flat on the ground behind them.”

“Gopinder and Ravi. When we engage, draw them away from the tank,” Laks said. “Don’t make it easy for them. At some point they’ll have to lose the masks. Sam and Jay, which of you is in better shape?”

“I’m going to say that’s me,” Sam answered. “Jay’s got blood in his eyes.”

“Sam, wing me on my left,” Laks said. “Jay, after we engage, see if you can cut around their flank and cut the oxygen lines.”

“Rockers are pulling back,” Ilham reported. “They’ll stand off and throw from a distance when they have a clear shot.”

“Jay!” Laks called and tossed Jay his dhal.

“Thanks, mate!”

But Laks did not hear it because at this moment—having not moved at anything faster than a geriatric mall-walker’s pace since exiting the bus—he pivoted toward the Bonking Heads’ position, sprang forward, and came at their foremost stick fighter—obviously their best guy, their ringleader—full speed, in exactly the same light-footed prancing style that this asshole liked to make fun of. Which worked great, actually, on a boulder field. At the same time Laks was whirling his stick up to a velocity where it almost disappeared. He was pleased to note that, at this altitude, air resistance was less of a factor. Despite the speed and suddenness of Laks’s advance, this guy was good enough that he reacted just in time, drawing back instinctively, rear weighted, front leg poised out in front of him. Laks performed a move he had been practicing against heavy bags in the gym since he’d been eight years old, letting his stick hand pass behind him for a moment and then bringing it out so that his entire body, from the soles of his feet up through his legs and torso and arm, cracked like a bullwhip. The end of the whip was the stick, whose last six inches impacted the shin of his opponent just below the knee with a crack whose reverberations were probably detectable on seismographs in Pakistan.

Nowhere near as loud, though, as the scream that followed a moment later. Enraged, the man moved forward to take a swing at Laks. But Laks was already drawing back, forcing him to over-commit. All his weight came forward onto the injured leg, which buckled. As the man staggered forward in an effort to remain upright, his oxygen tube snapped taut behind him, his head reared back, and the little mask popped off his nose and bounced in the dust. All these distractions ruined him, leaving him wide open for Lak’s follow-up, which was a simple pool-cue strike into the liver.

Another stick guy was trying to come around from the left, but Sam held the line on that flank. The Englishman made no effort to match the attacker’s kung fu rocket science but just barreled in close, stuffing and stifling the other’s moves, forcing him to back up on the terrible ankle-spraining ground. Sam had a walking stick that he gripped in its middle, tucked along the bone of his forearm so that he could either block attacks while protecting his arm, or else deliver short elbow strikes intensified by the knob on the stick’s end.

When they and half a million of their closest friends watched the videos later, after Pippa had had time to cut it all together, it was clear that the fight was already over at this point. Gopinder engaged another Bonking Head and gave as good as he got. At one point he got the tip of his short stick, in his left hand, under the guy’s oxygen tube and flicked it off.

Ravi pretty much got his ass kicked. He didn’t land a single good blow. He was forced to retreat. His opponent advanced to the end of his oxygen tube and faltered. This guy had put his outfit on after donning the nasal mask, so the tube was running under his clothes. He couldn’t just pull the thing off his face to get free.

Meanwhile, on the left flank, Sam had given his opponent a real gusher of a bloody nose by landing an elbow shot. The guy had retreated and sat down to go into shock.

He had to have been in shock not to see what Jay was doing right next to him. Jay during all of this had crept around to the oxygen tank. This began to peal like some exotic Tibetan gong as rocks struck it. For the rockers, standing off at a distance, had begun to zero in on his position. Jay used the dhal in his left hand to protect his bloody head. At the top of the oxygen tank was a round valve wheel—the main shutoff. Angling off to one side of that was a regulator with two dials. Sprouting from the low-pressure side of the regulator, then, was a Rube Goldbergian tangle of tees and wyes that had been kludged onto it so that it would feed something like a dozen separate oxygen tubes.

In a classic I’m-just-going-to-cut-this-fucking-Gordian-knot moment, Jay noticed that he was sitting on a big rock, flat and sort of triangular, like an arrowhead the size of a tabloid newspaper and a good six inches thick. It was heavy. He dropped the dhal, stood up, got his back into it, then his legs, and heaved it up off the ground. He cleaned and jerked the thing, got it above his head for one glorious moment, and then brought it down on the regulator.

On the video, Jay then disappeared in a huge cloud of oxygen-rich dust produced as high-pressure gas shrieked out of a crevice in the metal. That cloud moved away from him, though, as the cylinder began spinning and skidding across the moonscape like a pinwheel firework. The regulator and the tree of fittings were still hanging on. The tube attached to the guy who’d been fighting Ravi went tight, pulled him back onto his ass, and dragged him a short distance before his suit gave way at the seams and was stripped off his body.

The Bonking Heads retreated in disarray. The Fellowship advanced, reclaiming about a hundred meters of territory for India, but stopped and held their ground when other Chinese volunteer units began to converge. It might have gone badly for them then, but Indian crews, who’d seen this all happen from a distance, rushed forward to camp out along the new position of the Line of Actual Control.