Lieutenant General Sandhu was sitting calmly on a small folding chair, sipping a cup of tea, almost oblivious to the bustle around him. He got up slowly and walked to his command vehicle, a converted armored personnel carrier. A dozen things were going through his mind.  On his command, the XIth Corps would launch the largest armored attack in the subcontinent's history, and he had to be sure he had everything worked out.

He was less than ten kilometers from the frontline. Sandhu would not have entertained any notion of staying back and directing the battle from some room in Delhi. He would, of course, not take part in combat directly, but he wanted to be as close as possible.

He looked at his aide and nodded. `Okay, let's begin Operation Payback.'

Those who had fought in earlier Indo-Pakistani wars would have found it hard to relate to the way this war was going to be conducted. The first to cross over the border were not tanks, or even IAF strike planes. They were six unmanned Searcher planes. The six craft flew over the border at a leisurely 200 knots, their cameras sending back details of Pakistani artillery batteries and defensive emplacements.  They were too small to be picked up on any Pakistani radar. The E-3s may have had a chance, but they were no longer in the picture. Also, at just over two meters long and powered by two turbo-props, they did not give off enough of a heat signature to be a likely victim to heat seeking SAMs. The only way they could probably be downed was to be hit by a very accomplished, or lucky, ack-ack gunner. The fact that at 5000 feet, their small size made them almost invisible, made even this a remote possibility.

Back at his command center, Sandhu was piecing together the pieces of an intricate jigsaw puzzle, which when completed, would show him in precise detail exactly what he was up against. From what he already knew, he was going to up against tough odds. The Pakistanis seemed to have at least 250 T-80s facing him, along with two or more infantry divisions. The T-80s would definitely be a huge headache, and throw in the Pakistani’s Cobra attack helicopters, and he knew that his tankers would pay a heavy price for any advance into Pakistan. What he knew he could count on was that the Indian Air Force was promising heavy support now that it could divert a lot of assets which had been tied up in the fighting over Kashmir. Also, a constant worry for the Indians had been that the Pakistanis would swing one or both AWACS from over Kashmir to the plains. That would complicate things a bit, as the AWACS could also help them locate ground targets like artillery concentrations. The unexpected news that the PAF AWACS were no longer operating, and one had in fact been shot down, had caused Sandhu to accelerate his schedule, without some of the painstaking methods he had devised to camouflage and conceal his artillery concentrations.

Pakistan had UAVs of its own, much like the Indian Searcher, and some in fact with better cameras and sensors. However, with the PAF AWACS gone, and the Indian AWACS still very much active over the battlefield, the Indians had a huge advantage in tracking these PAF UAVs and directing ground fire towards them. At least three Pakistani UAVs had already been shot down by concentrated ground fire as they tried to probe the Indian positions. The Indians had so far lost only one UAV, and in the critical battle of intelligence, India was beginning with a distinct advantage. The neutralization of the AWACS was going to have much wider repercussions than just the Battle for Uri.

Sandhu’s staff had been collating information on Pakistani force displacements for some days now, and he had a fair idea of where he could expect the toughest resistance when he did give the order to advance. But his first target was to be the Pakistani artillery, to prevent them from hitting his forces when they moved in. And now, as he marked positions on his map, the Searchers were relaying back exact positions of Pakistani artillery batteries near Wagah and Atau, both within thirty kilometers of the border.

Sandhu did not want to wait for perfect knowledge- as soon as he had a rough idea of the positions, he gave the order to fire.

It sounded like a giant thunderstorm. Men all around stood or crouched with cotton in their ears, otherwise they would have been deafened. Over two hundred Indian artillery pieces opened up in a deadly salvo, raining death on their Pakistani counterparts. The Pakistanis had two artillery regiments near Atau and at Wagah. The first salvo destroyed nearly a third of the guns at Atau, and only slightly less at Wagah.

The stunned Pakistani gunners now began to swing into action, but their strength had already been depleted. They did not have an exact fix on the Indian positions, as they had neither UAVs nor AWACS, but they worked back the trajectories of the Indian shells using their superior artillery targeting radar, and responded with salvos of their own.

Sandhu knew that he would take serious losses in the initial exchanges. The Pakistani gunners were superb, and their US made howitzers the equal of his guns. But he had the element of almost complete surprise and a far better picture of where the enemy was, and after the first couple of salvos, the Pakistani artillery had ceased to be a decisive factor on the battlefield.

The Indian tanks and APCs now swarmed across the border. And for the first time in over thirty years, the armies of India and Pakistan met in all out war.