Termination Shock

The Line of Actual Control

The easiest way for the Chinese to retreat was up the valley toward the glacier, which is what they did. Following them, and pushing the Line of Actual Control in that direction, wasn’t the smart move from an overall strategic perspective. The smart move was to ignore them and instead advance east up the slope of the ridge on the formerly Chinese side of the valley. The Line could thereby be fixed, at least for the winter’s duration, in a more defensible spot. Besides which, stats-wise, it would add a larger number of hectares to India at China’s expense. It was a way of running up the score. So as soon as they got things sorted at the barracks and made a quick count of who was injured and who was fit to keep going, they began to climb. Laks, who had borrowed snowshoes from one of the School who had suffered a broken cheekbone, led the advance. Spreading out to his left and right were his stick fighters, his rock throwers, his irregulars, a dozen survivors of the barracks siege, and various supporters and streamers. They were, at the moment, the living human embodiment of the Line. And the only thing that was holding back the Line’s advance was snow, an uphill slope, and a lack of oxygen consequent to being at six thousand meters above sea level. But as Laks had discovered on that first exhausting climb up the Rohtang Pass, you just had to not stop. Just keep putting one foot ahead of the other. If you then had to pause and gasp in ten breaths, so be it.

He knew perfectly well that the Gurkhas could have scampered past him and beaten him to the top, but they politely refrained from doing so. Instead they spent their oxygen exchanging war stories from this morning and laughing. So Laks got there first, unless you counted the three video drones from competing Indian television networks hovering up there to record the planting of the flag.

Some ridges, some mountaintops, teased you with false summits. This was not one of them. It was a wind-sculpted snow cornice with an edge like a hatchet. One moment there was nothing in Lak’s field of vision but fresh snow. The next he was looking a hundred kilometers into China.

Closer, of course, there was another valley much like the one behind him. Which was to say, new territory left open by another disappearing glacier. There was nothing down there.

No, wait a minute, there was a line of trucks, maybe four of them, invisible until now because they’d been buried in snow. Now, though, men were clambering over them, peeling back the tarps. The men were wearing those big fur-lined hats with the earflaps. Chinese winter military issue. Definitely regular army, not volunteers. For a moment Laks was afraid that the equipment on the backs of those trucks was going to be rocket launchers or something. That the cease-fire was finally going to be broken and that he would be the first casualty in a new shooting war. But the equipment didn’t look like weaponry. It was just flat round panels mounted on pivots. Like solar panels? But they were not aimed at the sun.

They were aimed at him.

Crickets wasn’t the right way to describe the sound. Crickets were quiet and peaceful and far away. Outside your body, anyway. This was inside his head. As if the cricket had hatched from an egg inside his skull and was sawing its serrated leg directly against his eardrum. He tried to wipe what he assumed were tears from his eyes, for his vision was blurred. But his eyes were dry. His view of China, the valley, and the trucks pivoted downward like a trapdoor as he toppled backward.