Termination Shock

The Blue Herons

There was a trope in the martial arts videos that was so shopworn that even Laks, generally not one for fancy critical terminology, knew that it was a trope, and that it was called a trope. It would be the traditional move for a filmmaker to make at this juncture, were it the case that Laks was a fictional character in a low-budget martial arts film called, say, Big Fish. It was called a montage. Not a training montage, for Laks’s training days were behind him. More of a “learning the ropes” sort of montage combined with a “meteoric rise to fame” one. The sort of montage that would conventionally end with Laks, head wrapped in a perfect Chand Tora Dumalla, climbing out of the back seat of a limousine in downtown Mumbai and cheerfully flinching from an onslaught of paparazzi and nubile fangirls.

In this particular case the montage would consist of quick cuts among a number of battle scenes up and down the Line of Actual Control, featuring various triumphs and setbacks. But mostly triumphs. Makers of martial arts videos did this so that they could cover a lot of story in a few minutes of screen time, and it worked. But in a way, what happened to the Fellowship next seemed even faster, more compressed in time, than that. Now obviously that wasn’t the case; it was spread out over a few weeks. But there simply was not time at any point to stop and collect one’s wits and tally up the passage of time. Just mad dashing from one place to another. All those places were hot spots along the Line, where the services of Big Fish and his crew—which was rapidly growing—were deemed useful by people like Major Raju.

But if someone had come along for the ride and calmly watched it all happen and actually kept track, what they would have reported was that Big Fish ended up with a crew (“The School”) consisting of: a dozen handpicked gatka practitioners in color-coordinated turbans, including Gopinder; a similar number of Gurkha rock-throwing specialists; and a ragtag irregular contingent of limited military effectiveness but mighty social media presence. Sam, Jay, and Ravi got shunted into that. Sam and Jay had become famous among British persons of South Asian ancestry. They had gotten some professional advice on how to wear turbans that would hide their scandalously non-observant buzz cuts. Since the School had started out with no particular color scheme, they took the path of least resistance and patterned their look after the red and yellow logo-wear used by Sam and Jay’s football team in England. Ravi had his own following among non-Sikh Indians, which to put it mildly was a significant demographic.

Bella declared victory at some point and flew back to Argentina. Sue found an important role as the liaison between Big Fish’s crew and the online community of K-Pop stans. Pippa gradually got nudged out of the way by Indian streamers chosen for them by the military. Laks tried to become indignant on her behalf. She insisted she didn’t mind. Her career goals did not lie in grinding out propaganda. She had other objectives, difficult to articulate to anyone who did not live immersed in the film industry, having to do with portrayal of martial arts content in emerging three-dimensional formats, all under the heading of “performative war,” a term it was pointless to google since she had coined it, and what few hits came back all pointed back to her. Apparently she had worked out an understanding with their minders that enabled her to tag along and gather the materials she needed provided she didn’t get in the way. So Laks saw less of her, which was sad but probably good since he wanted to sleep with her in the most desperate way and that would have been a disaster. Somehow Laks’s expired visa problem got ironed out and hints were dropped that the pathway to Indian citizenship was wide open.

Ilham faded from the picture with no explanation, but when Laks thought to ask about him—which, to be honest, took an embarrassingly long time—he was assured that the troubles of Ilham and family were behind them, at least as far as immigration, food, and shelter were concerned. With a moment’s reflection, of course, it was clear why Ilham—who still had family in Xinjiang—would not want to become world famous doing what Big Fish’s School was doing.

The Chinese, of course, were not without resources of their own. So there were no more victories as easy as that over the Bonking Heads. Laks lost some fights against wushu stick fighters who knew what they were doing—and who, he realized, had spent time watching videos of Laks’s earlier duels. “Opponent-specific training” was what Major Raju called that. Laks now had to do it too if he didn’t want to fall off the leaderboard.

Meanwhile, the temperature was dropping, and even in these high arid places, snow was falling. The time would come quite soon when the Line of Actual Control would freeze in its current position until spring. Ski- and snowshoe-borne regulars might patrol, maneuver, and trade harsh language and snowballs, but almost all the volunteers would go home.

They were, in other words, building up to the season finale. And there weren’t a lot of options as to where that would happen. When there were only a few pieces remaining on a chessboard, you could guess where the moves were going to be made.

It turned out to be a valley between two ridges that had been bare during the summer but during the last couple of weeks had become covered with snow to a depth of a meter. Farther up that valley, at about fifty-eight hundred meters of altitude, was the foot of a glacier whose meltwater created a stream that ran down the valley toward the salt lake of Pangong Tso. In former days, the glacier had extended quite a bit farther down. At its foot, after the 1962 cease-fire, the Indian Army had set up a base and constructed a few buildings, of which the only one that wasn’t a total ruin was a barracks. This was a stone and mortar crackerbox consisting of two stories of soldiers’ quarters above a ground floor with a mess hall and other common rooms. It had long since been abandoned by the receding glacier, which because of the valley’s curve could not even be seen from its windows. The ridge to its west was almost always on the Indian side of the Line. From its top you could look west into territory that was, beyond all dispute, Indian. The ridge to its east was almost always on the Chinese side, and from there you could see the sun rising over China.

The barracks had been garrisoned by Indians until late in the current campaign season, when Chinese volunteers had broken into the ground floor and occupied it. The Indians who’d been using it as a base retreated up the stairs to the first story, then, a few days later, to the second story and the roof. Since then, after being resupplied by drones, they’d made some headway with a counteroffensive down a fire stairway, but at the moment held only a beachhead on the disputed first story, three-quarters of which was still Chinese-held. Barricades had been thrown up by both sides to fortify that line. The Line of Actual Control, in other words, had become a three-dimensional Surface of Actual Control, and you needed augmented-reality glasses to visualize its convolutions.

Which was not a mere figure of speech. The army had given Laks’s crew access to such equipment. In virtual-reality mode, sitting far from the front, you could pull up a 3D map, Google Earth style, and pan and zoom up and down the length of the Line all day long, or until you were overcome by motion sickness. From a distance it looked fat and solid but as you zoomed in, it frayed to a loose-spun yarn. He remembered taking art classes in school, learning that instead of laying down a simple firm stroke you should make many fine scratches and gradually thicken the ones that were in the right place. That was how the Line looked when you zoomed in, each scratch being the record of where it had been for ten minutes three weeks ago.

When you put the device in augmented-reality mode it showed you nothing unless you were actually there, with line of sight to that fiber bundle. The day before Laks and the School were inserted, Major Raju drove him, in a snow machine, up to the top of the western ridge so that he could have a look down into the valley. The barracks, hundreds of meters below, looked like it had been trapped in glowing red cobwebs. Laks used the UI to filter out all but the last month’s data. He was then able to watch in time lapse as the front crept down from the opposite ridgeline, then suddenly formed a fist-like salient that snaked down a tributary ravine and punched in the door of the barracks. For a few days this beachhead had been connected to the main Chinese position only by a frail stalk, but they’d broadened and fortified it while the Indian defenders had been distracted trying to maintain their toehold on the upper story.

The Indians weren’t without tricks of their own. For a while they’d been cut off, since the Chinese salient completely surrounded the building. All resupply had been through drones. There’d been no way to send in or to evacuate personnel. But on the west or Indian side of the barracks, the valley wall was extremely steep: virtually a cliff rising to slightly above the height of the building before laying back to a more moderate slope that ran up to where Laks was looking down on it. During the last couple of weeks, the slot between the building and that cliff had become about half filled in with snow. Volunteers higher up the slope had encouraged more snow to avalanche down. In this way they had managed to fill it in entirely. The roof of the barracks, previously an island, was now connected to the slope just above and west of it by a snow bridge: a narrow tamped path that could be crossed by volunteers, one at a time, on makeshift snowshoes. To either side of that path the snow angled down like a rampart to the valley floor around the barracks.

The Chinese occupying the ground floor could, in theory, just go outdoors and walk right up that rampart to the path, but climbing it was nigh impossible when reinforced and well-fed Indian volunteers were raining down hard-packed snowballs the size of watermelons. The Chinese had made an effort to undermine it, but the volunteers above them on the ridge could fill in any new excavation with targeted avalanches faster than the Chinese could dig.

This was the point where the AR interface became more trouble than it was worth. Laks just shut it off and used the device as plain old see-through glacier glasses, the better to watch the arrival of Lan Lu.

Performative warfare (to adopt Pippa’s terminology) followed a logic opposite to that of the twentieth century, when concealing troop movements had been all-important. So they knew exactly when Lan Lu was going to come down from the eastern ridge. They could watch it on the live streams from four different camera angles, with chyrons streaming across the bottom in layers showing the Vegas and Macao betting lines plus live comment feeds in four alphabets. For Lan Lu had been at the top of the leaderboard for three months.

The only reason not to just watch it that way from the warmth of a command tent kilometers away was so that they could grab some footage of Big Fish brooding down over the barracks as his soon-to-be nemesis made his triumphal entry to the ground floor at the head of his crew.

Laks didn’t understand how Mandarin worked but it seemed like Lan Lu was both a singular and a plural noun depending on how you used it. Here, in its singular usage, it denoted one guy. It meant Blue Heron. Plural, it meant his whole crew of Blue Herons, who were called the Flock. They favored knee-length changshan jackets in dark blue slubbed silk, textured and yet shimmery, with protruding white cuffs, and gray trousers beneath. They were from Hong Kong. They practiced a style of wushu that had originated in Tibet but had been somehow exported to Kowloon late in the twentieth century and re-interpreted by wushu schools there. Much had been made of its Tibetan origins by Chinese propagandists who wanted to get people to believe it was an example of benign cultural integration. But this dude Lan Lu was a Cantonese speaker by upbringing, a Mandarin speaker when it suited him. And as far as Laks could tell there was no trace of Tibetan ancestry in any of the Flock. Their style relied on enveloping arm movements, said to be inspired by herons’ wings, out of which came vicious pinpoint strikes like the ones that herons used to stun and impale small ground-dwelling creatures with their beaks. Whenever possible those strikes were aimed at nerve centers where they would inflict crippling pain out of proportion to their apparent power.

Laks could well understand how effective that system would be inside the barracks. He’d spent hours scouting the place in VR. The building was low-ceilinged and cluttered: not a good environment for whirling a long stick around. Lan Lu would have good odds of closing distance and getting into close quarters fighting range where he would have an advantage. Not that gatka fighters didn’t know how to grapple. Kabaddi was half grappling. But by convention most of their practice took place in rule-bound competitions where the dangerous nerve center strikes were against the rules. So they didn’t have that stuff programmed into muscle memory. And when the adrenaline kicked in your muscle memory was all you had to go on.

It took Laks all of about sixty seconds to come up with a plan of attack. It was simple and kind of obvious—but the more experience he got, and the more he perused old historical accounts of his forebears’ tactics in the Punjab, the more certain he became that simple and obvious would defeat complicated and clever 90 percent of the time. “We’ll play kabaddi,” he said, “until we don’t.”