Chapter 306: The Knife in Eight Countries
August 16, 1977Makurdi Air Force Base, Nigeria; Mafraq Air Base, Jordan; RMAF Butterworth, Malaysia; Moi Air Base, Nairobi; Al Dhafra Air Base, United Arab Emirates; Takoradi Air Base, Ghana; Julius Nyerere International, Dar es Salaam; Leh Air Force Station, Ladakh — and the specific, ordinary, terrifying fact of Indian aircraft, maintained by Indian hands, holding the skies of eight sovereign nations simultaneously.
The morning inspection at Makurdi Air Force Base in the sweltering heat of Benue State, Nigeria, began at exactly five forty-five.
It was the exact same time it had begun every single working day for the past fourteen months. It was the specific hour that Senior Technical Advisor Kamalakar Rajan had rigidly specified when he first designed the local maintenance schedule back in October 1975. The schedule had not changed by a single minute, because the schedule worked flawlessly, and in aviation, things that kept pilots alive were not altered for convenience.
Rajan was thirty-four years old, hailing from Coimbatore. He had been bleeding hydraulic fluid for Shergill Aviation since 1971, when he had joined the company as a junior maintenance engineer on the highly classified Kaveri engine test programme. He had been deployed to Makurdi since June 1976—the third month of the Nigerian Air Force's Operation Baaz, when the first six S-6 fighters had been delivered on the tarmac.
He was the senior commander of twelve elite Shergill Aviation technical staff stationed at Makurdi. Those twelve men were absolutely not there to maintain the Nigerian aircraft by themselves. That was not the geopolitical design. Their stated role, written in the glossy brochures handed to the Nigerian Ministry of Defence, was to "manage the maintenance operation, and train the Nigerian Air Force's own technicians in the progressive depth of Baaz maintenance."
The Nigerian government deeply, genuinely believed they were paying for a five-year knowledge transfer program. They believed that at the end of sixty months, they would be an entirely self-sufficient air force.
Kamalakar Rajan knew the cold, brutal truth.
There was absolutely no "knowledge transfer" of anything that actually mattered.
That was the genius of Karan Shergill's empire. It was the razor and the blades. Rajan's men taught the eager Nigerian mechanics how to change the heavy tires. They taught them how to refuel the tanks safely, how to swap out the modular brake pads, and how to read the surface-level fault codes on the cockpit display.
But the core of the Surya-1 turbofan engine? It was sealed with proprietary, tamper-evident titanium bolts. The fly-by-wire avionics source code? It was locked behind heavy military encryption keys that only the master servers in Gorakhpur possessed. The radar diagnostics? A black box that simply popped out and was shipped via armed courier directly back to Uttar Pradesh the moment it malfunctioned.
Rajan's strict, unwritten orders from the Shergill corporate board were absolute: Give them the illusion of competence on the flight line, but never, under any circumstances, hand over the keys to the engine overhauls or the software architecture. They must remain tethered to our supply chain for the next thirty years.
The twelve aircraft sitting on the baking apron in the Makurdi morning light looked like Apex predators resting in the dust. The Nigerian Air Force had ordered eighteen jets in total. The remaining six were currently rolling off the massive production lines at Gorakhpur.
Flight Sergeant Victor Okafor was conducting his walk-around on aircraft N-BAZ-07 when Rajan strolled onto the apron, a clipboard tucked under his arm.
Okafor was twenty-six years old, a sharp, incredibly proud mechanic from Enugu. He had been in the Nigerian Air Force for four years, previously breaking his back trying to keep their aging, British-made SEPECAT Jaguars in the sky. He had gone to Gorakhpur for a twelve-week orientation course and had returned feeling like he had stepped into the future.
"Good morning, Boss," Okafor greeted Rajan, wiping sweat from his brow.
"Morning, Victor," Rajan replied easily. "How does zero-seven look today?"
"Clean as a whistle," Okafor smiled, patting the fuselage. "But the port-side hydraulic actuator gave me a micro-stutter on the diagnostic readout. Code 402."
"Don't waste time trying to bleed the line," Rajan instructed instantly, waving a hand. "Just pull the entire modular actuator unit. I'll have my boys issue you a fresh, factory-sealed one from the forward depot. We'll ship the stuttering unit back to India on the Friday cargo flight."
Okafor frowned slightly, his mechanical pride stung. "I can strip the actuator down, Boss. I know how to replace the internal seals. Save the shipping costs."
"Company policy, Victor," Rajan smiled, a polite, impenetrable wall. "Depot-level structural components are factory-sealed for warranty purposes. If you open it, you void the Nigerian Air Force's guarantee. Just swap the box."
Okafor sighed, but he didn't argue. He couldn't argue with the results.
When Okafor had worked on the British Jaguars, the maintenance manual was four thousand pages of archaic English. When a specialized Jaguar part broke, the Makurdi depot had to order it from the UK. The lead time was an agonizing, infuriating eleven weeks. For eleven weeks, a multi-million-dollar fighter jet sat rotting on the tarmac, entirely useless.
The Baaz was a revelation. Shergill Aviation maintained a massive, locked, climate-controlled parts depot exactly twenty meters from the apron. It was stocked with a mandated ninety-day supply of every single modular component on the aircraft. When a part broke, Rajan simply handed Okafor a new one in a sealed box. The jet was back in the sky in three hours.
The availability figure for the Nigerian 301 Air Combat Group over the last twelve months was a staggering 88.4 percent. The British Jaguar wing at their sister station was operating at a pathetic 58 percent.
Okafor signed off the morning inspection report and handed it to Rajan. "She's ready to fly. You Indian boys... you know how to build a machine."
"We know how to keep them flying, Victor," Rajan corrected softly, countersigning the document.
As Okafor walked away to prep the next jet, Rajan looked down at the signature on the paper. He thinks we are partners, Rajan thought to himself, feeling a brief, fleeting pang of guilt. He doesn't realize we own his Air Force. The moment his government stops paying our extortionate annual maintenance fees, I lock the depot doors, cut the software licenses, and his entire fleet turns into eighty million dollars of useless metal paperweights.
It wasn't malice. It was the Shergill Doctrine.
Mafraq Air Base, Jordan
In the burning, arid expanse of the northeastern Jordanian desert, the relationship between Captain Ahmad Al-Rashid and his S-6 Baaz was fundamentally different in scale and lethality.
Al-Rashid was thirty-one years old, hailing from a proud military family in Zarqa. He was a veteran fighter pilot who had spent years flying the French Mirage F1 for the Royal Jordanian Air Force.
Jordan was not a peripheral buyer. Driven by the deep, bottomless pockets of their defense budget and the terrifying, immediate geopolitical realities of sharing borders with Syria, Iraq, and Israel, King Hussein had not ordered sixteen jets.
Jordan had ordered a massive, staggering fleet of eighty S-6 Baaz fighters.
It was an order that had completely shifted the balance of air power in the Levant. All eighty aircraft had been delivered in a massive logistical airlift from Gorakhpur. They were heavily concentrated at Mafraq, forming the absolute, lethal backbone of the RJAF's 1st and 2nd Fighter Wings.
Al-Rashid had loved his French Mirage. It was a beautiful, elegant delta-wing interceptor. But it was a fragile European aristocrat. The French support contractors took six weeks to answer a telex for spare parts.
The Baaz was a street brawler. It was rugged, incredibly agile, and completely unforgiving.
On the morning of August 16th, Al-Rashid was flying a high-altitude combat air patrol near the Syrian border. He was cruising at 8,000 meters, staring out over the vast, barren expanse of the Syrian desert.
Suddenly, a sharp, electronic tone pinged in his helmet.
His heads-up display illuminated. The Indian-designed Netra-2 pulse-doppler radar had locked onto an unidentified, fast-moving contact forty-five kilometers to the north, flying low in the ground clutter.
Al-Rashid instantly keyed his radio. "Mafraq Control, this is Baaz One-One. I have a fast-mover painting on my scope. Bearing zero-one-zero, angels low, speed Mach point-nine."
"Copy, Baaz One-One," the ground controller's tense voice crackled back. "Intelligence confirms Syrian Air Force MiG-23 Flogger on an aggressive intercept heading. He has crossed the buffer zone."
Al-Rashid's heart rate spiked, but his hands remained perfectly steady on the HOTAS stick. The Syrian MiG-23 was a brutal, swing-wing Soviet interceptor. In a straight-line drag race, the MiG was significantly faster than the Baaz.
But Al-Rashid wasn't going to drag race.
He banked the Baaz hard to the right, bleeding airspeed to drag the MiG into a turning fight. He pulled back on the stick. The fly-by-wire system flawlessly translated his violent physical input into aerodynamic poetry. The massive canards bit into the thin air, and the Baaz whipped around in a sustained, agonizing 14-degree-per-second turn that pressed Al-Rashid deep into his ejection seat under the crushing G-force.
The Syrian MiG-23 pilot, attempting to follow the turn, realized instantly that his heavier, less maneuverable Soviet jet was bleeding energy too fast. If he stayed in the turning circle for another twenty seconds, the Baaz would effortlessly slide onto his tail and acquire a lethal missile lock.
The MiG pilot panicked, broke off the engagement, lit his afterburners, and ran for the safety of Syrian airspace.
Al-Rashid leveled out, his breathing heavy inside his oxygen mask. He watched the red blip vanish from his radar scope. He hadn't fired a single shot, but he had completely dominated the airspace simply by demonstrating superior aerodynamic capability.
When he landed back at Mafraq an hour later, his flight suit soaked in sweat, he strode into the air-conditioned debriefing room.
A Shergill Aviation software engineer, a quiet man named Krishnaswami, was already sitting at the computer terminal, downloading the encrypted flight telemetry data directly from Al-Rashid's jet via a heavy umbilical cable.
"Good morning, Captain," Krishnaswami said without looking up from the scrolling lines of code. "The telemetry shows a sustained high-G maneuver and a hostile radar lock sequence. How did the Netra-2 track the target in the low-altitude clutter?"
"Flawlessly," Al-Rashid said, pouring himself a cup of strong black coffee, his adrenaline still humming. "The Syrian thought he could hide in the ground bounce. The radar painted him right through the terrain. The new software patch you uploaded last week... it completely eliminated the ghosting."
Krishnaswami nodded, typing rapidly. "Excellent. I will transmit this engagement data back to the central servers in Gorakhpur tonight. The combat algorithms will learn from your intercept geometry. The entire global fleet will receive an updated threat-library patch next month based on how that MiG tried to evade you."
Al-Rashid stopped with his coffee cup halfway to his mouth. He stared at the Indian engineer.
He suddenly realized the terrifying, magnificent scale of what Karan Shergill had built. His single, isolated dogfight over the Syrian border wasn't just a local victory. It was raw data. It was instantly being beamed back to India, fed into a massive intelligence machine, and used to silently, wirelessly upgrade the radar systems of Baaz fighters sitting on tarmacs in Nigeria, Malaysia, and Kenya.
The aircraft was a living, learning, interconnected nervous system.
Al-Rashid remembered sitting in the officers' mess the previous week, listening to the furious radio broadcast of Jimmy Carter's speech. The American President had accused India of building an insidious "economic empire" and trapping developing nations in "neo-colonial dependency."
Al-Rashid took a slow sip of his coffee. Carter is absolutely right, he thought to himself. We are completely, helplessly dependent on Gorakhpur's servers and Gorakhpur's spare parts. If India cuts the cord, my eighty fighters fall out of the sky.
But, Al-Rashid smiled darkly, Carter doesn't understand that we don't care. My jet just humiliated a Soviet MiG-23 because an Indian engineer updated my software overnight. It is a golden leash, but it gives me the sky.
RMAF Butterworth, Malaysia
At the sprawling Royal Malaysian Air Force base in Butterworth, the atmosphere was thick with the suffocating humidity of the tropics, and the specific, highly charged political tension that only a former British colony could generate.
Malaysia's situation was radically different from the Middle East. The Malaysian Ministry of Defence was still deeply, institutionally entangled with the British defense establishment. When Kuala Lumpur had initially floated the idea of buying Indian fighter jets, the furious British diplomats had aggressively lobbied against it, calling the Baaz an unproven, dangerous piece of third-world engineering.
The Malaysian government, however, had ignored London. Driven by the fierce independence of their defense minister, Dato Razif, Malaysia had ordered twenty-four Baaz fighters.
But Dato Razif was no fool. He had sat in the Gorakhpur presentation in 1975, listened to the Shergill executives, and instantly recognized the deadly "razor and blades" monopoly trap that Karan Shergill was laying. To counter it, Razif had aggressively negotiated an "accelerated knowledge transfer" clause into the Malaysian contract, legally demanding that Shergill Aviation hand over 80 percent of the deep maintenance capability and software diagnostic tools within thirty-six months.
On the tarmac at Butterworth, the eighteen Indian technicians assigned to the base smiled politely, saluted the Malaysian officers, and happily complied with the letter of the contract.
They handed over thousands of pages of maintenance manuals. They taught the Malaysian mechanics how to rebuild the landing gear. They certified them on hydraulic flushes.
But they absolutely did not hand over the encryption keys to the engine's electronic control unit. When the Malaysians demanded access to the deep structural diagnostic software, citing the contract, the Shergill executives in India politely replied that the software was "classified under Indian national security export laws," and therefore legally exempt from the commercial transfer agreement.
The Malaysians were furious, but they were trapped. They owned the jets, but India owned the digital soul of the fleet.
Flight Lieutenant Siti Rahimah cared absolutely nothing for the boardroom politics. She was twenty-eight years old, hailing from Selangor, and she was a trailblazer. She was one of three female pilots selected by the RMAF for the Baaz conversion course.
She had gone to Gorakhpur, expecting the Indian instructors to treat her with the condescending patriarchy typical of Asian militaries. Instead, she had found a completely ruthless, emotionless meritocracy. The Shergill test pilots did not care about her gender; they only cared about her G-tolerance and her spatial awareness scores in the simulator. She had ranked second in a combined international cohort of twenty-two pilots.
On the morning of August 16th, Rahimah was strapping into her Baaz for a Dissimilar Air Combat Training (DACT) sortie over the South China Sea. Her opponent was a veteran RMAF pilot, Flight Lieutenant Azri, flying the American-made Northrop F-5E Tiger II. The RMAF was maintaining a mixed fleet, keeping the American jets for top-end speed while using the Baaz for sheer maneuverability.
They merged at fifteen thousand feet.
Azri, with twelve years of experience, came into the mock dogfight expecting to easily dominate the younger female pilot in the new Indian jet. He knew the F-5E was considerably faster in a straight line, and he planned to use vertical energy tactics to bleed her out.
But the moment they crossed flight paths, Rahimah threw the Baaz into a violent, sustained horizontal turn. The massive delta wings bit into the humid air, generating staggering amounts of lift.
Azri tried to pull his F-5E through the turn to get his nose on her, but his American jet shuddered, the wings buffeting as he approached a high angle-of-attack stall. He couldn't sustain the turn rate. Rahimah held the Baaz in a crushing, relentless 14-degree-per-second sustained turn for a full sixty seconds.
Azri bled off too much airspeed trying to follow her, overshot his trajectory, and suddenly found Rahimah's Baaz perfectly positioned directly on his six o'clock. The piercing tone of simulated missile lock filled his headset. He was dead.
An hour later, in the humid debriefing room, Azri wiped the sweat from his neck and looked at her with newfound respect.
"The first engagement, I thought I had you," Azri admitted, tracing his hands in the air to mimic the planes. "You were slow climbing out of the merge."
"You had the kinetic energy advantage," Rahimah nodded, sipping water. "But you overshot the apex."
"The second engagement broke every rule I know," Azri said, shaking his head. "You pulled an angle of attack that should have stalled you out and dropped you into the ocean. How did you keep the nose tracking?"
"The fly-by-wire system at high alpha is terrifyingly stable," Rahimah explained, her eyes shining with the thrill of the flight. "The flight computers constantly adjust the canards micro-seconds faster than humanly possible to prevent a stall. The aircraft explicitly told me it was fine. I simply believed it."
Azri stared at the telemetry printout. "I am going to have to heavily brief my entire F-5 squadron about your turn rate at medium altitude. If we ever fight an enemy flying these things, our American tactics will get us killed."
"Yes, sir," Rahimah smiled. "They probably will."
Programme Management Centre — Gorakhpur, India
The sprawling Programme Management Centre in Gorakhpur was a massive, newly constructed glass-and-steel building that hummed with the quiet, terrifying efficiency of a global corporate monopoly. It had absolutely not been part of the original, modest factory design. It was frantically built in early 1976 when Karan Shergill realized that his export programme was exploding to a scale that required dedicated, ruthless infrastructure.
The Centre was not staffed by engineers. It was staffed by corporate sharks.
The Commercial Director of the global export programme was Parvati Subramaniam. She was forty-one years old, possessed a mind like a steel trap, and had been aggressively poached by Karan directly from the commercial division of Tata Steel. She was a woman completely, ruthlessly comfortable with vast, multi-billion-dollar complexity. She managed the global fleet through systematic, uncompromising digital tracking that made international dominance legible on a spreadsheet.
On the morning of August 16th, Parvati sat behind her massive desk, compiling the highly classified, quarterly Global Fleet Status Report. This document would be transmitted directly to Karan Shergill, to Manmohan Singh at the Finance Ministry, and to the highest levels of military intelligence.
She pulled the raw data feeds streaming in via encrypted telex from the international maintenance teams, the production line logistics software, and the banking division.
She typed out the staggering, updated numbers:
Total S-6 Baaz Orders Received (As of August 16, 1977):
Indian Air Force: 224 aircraft (Massive wartime expansion order following the spectacular, devastating combat performance during the Indo-Burma campaign).Jordan: 80 aircraft.United Arab Emirates: 40 aircraft.Malaysia: 24 aircraft.Nigeria: 18 aircraft.Kenya: 12 aircraft.Ghana: 8 aircraft.Tanzania: 6 aircraft.Uganda Transitional Authority: 6 aircraft.
Total Global Fleet Ordered: 418 aircraft.
Parvati stared at the number on the screen. Four hundred and eighteen advanced fighter jets.
The sheer, monumental scale of it was breathtaking. The most optimistic, wild projections during their initial November 1975 pitch had aimed for perhaps a hundred exports over a decade. They had obliterated that target in twenty-two months.
The American F-5E Tiger had taken seven long years of heavy diplomatic arm-twisting to reach one hundred and fifty export orders. The French Mirage 5 had taken five years to reach a comparable volume.
Shergill Aerospace had seized the global south in under two years.
Parvati knew exactly why. It was not merely because the aircraft was a masterpiece of aerodynamics. It was the lethal brilliance of the Shergill Doctrine support contract. It was the irresistible combination of a deeply subsidized, below-market initial acquisition price, paired with an inescapable, iron-clad maintenance support package.
They sold the jet at cost. They made their billions on the spare parts.
She compiled the Revenue Status section.
Total Contracted Programme Value: ₹8,450 crore (Including massive multi-year support agreements for Jordan and UAE).Revenue Recognized to Date: ₹3,200 crore.Post-Acquisition Recurring Revenue (Maintenance, Software, Spares): ₹1,450 crore per year at current delivered fleet size.Projected Recurring Revenue at Full 418 Fleet Delivery: ₹2,800 crore per year.
Parvati leaned back in her plush leather chair, letting out a long, slow breath.
Nearly three thousand crore rupees in pure, recurring, inescapable revenue. Every single year. Compounding for the next thirty years. It was an endless, geushing river of foreign capital pouring directly into the Indian economy.
If Jordan wanted their radars to work, they paid. If the UAE wanted their engines overhauled, they paid. If Nigeria wanted new brake pads, they paid whatever price Gorakhpur demanded.
This was the terrifying "economics of the knife" that Karan Shergill had designed.
She opened a new tab on her report and added a mandatory section addressing the geopolitical fallout of Jimmy Carter's explosive speech.
The US President's speech of August 2nd, aggressively characterizing India's international commercial relationships as a form of insidious 'neo-colonialism,' has been widely noted by our international government partners, Parvati typed, her fingers flying across the keys. Preliminary intelligence from our embedded deployment teams suggests absolutely no negative impact on our fleet operations.
Nigeria — Zero change in commitment.Jordan — Zero change. Their pilots rely entirely on our software updates for survival.United Arab Emirates — Absolute ambivalence to American complaints. The Emiratis bought forty jets to secure their airspace against regional threats, and they view our strict maintenance lock-in as a guarantee of premium service.Malaysia — Minor, theatrical political whining at the ministry level to appease British diplomats, but zero operational impact. They cannot fly without our diagnostic codes.
Parvati paused, staring at the blinking cursor.
Carter had called it an empire. Parvati, possessing a razor-sharp commercial mind, knew that Carter was absolutely, one hundred percent correct. It was an empire. But it was an empire built on efficiency and performance, not on gunboats. The host nations were willing, eager captives, happily locking the golden handcuffs around their own wrists because the alternative was the horrific, unreliable incompetence of Western supply chains.
She hit 'Transmit'. The report vanished into the encrypted ether, bound for Lucknow.
Al Dhafra Air Base, United Arab Emirates
In the blistering, shimmering heat of the Arabian Peninsula, the immense wealth of the petro-state met the cold reality of Indian engineering.
The UAE had not bought eight jets. Flush with unimaginable oil wealth and terrified of the shifting power dynamics in the Persian Gulf, the Emiratis had aggressively ordered forty S-6 Baaz fighters to completely modernize their fledgling air force, violently replacing their aging, unreliable French Mirages.
At Al Dhafra Air Base, the heat off the tarmac distorted the air like looking through water. The availability rate of the massive forty-jet Emirati fleet was currently sitting at a staggering 94.2 percent.
Suresh Nair, the forty-year-old Senior Technical Director of the UAE deployment, wiped the grease from his hands. He was a veteran of the Kaveri engine program, a man who knew the internal pressures of a turbofan better than he knew his own heartbeat.
He was standing in a massive, air-conditioned mega-hangar that the Emiratis had built specifically for the Baaz fleet. It looked like an operating room.
An Emirati Air Force Colonel, a man whose watch cost more than Suresh's entire lifetime salary, walked into the hangar, flanked by aides.
"Mr. Nair," the Colonel said smoothly in accented English. "I see the fleet is fully operational for the massive joint-exercise scheduled tomorrow."
"Ninety-four percent availability, Colonel," Suresh replied politely. "We have three jets down for scheduled 100-hour deep inspections. They will be back on the flight line by Thursday."
The Colonel nodded, looking at the sleek, deadly Indian jets resting in the hangar. "President Carter gave a very angry speech in Washington recently. He implied your government is tricking us. He implied you are holding our military hostage by keeping the deep maintenance capabilities locked in India."
Suresh didn't blink. He knew the geopolitical tightrope he was walking.
"Colonel, with all due respect to the American President, does an American defense contractor answer your frantic call for replacement turbine blades at two in the morning on a Sunday?" Suresh asked softly. "Does the French government guarantee a ninety-percent fleet readiness rate in writing?"
"No. They do not," the Colonel admitted, a cynical smile touching his lips. "They take our oil money, and they treat us like arrogant children."
"We treat you like premium clients, Colonel," Suresh said, the perfect corporate lie rolling off his tongue. "We keep the deep maintenance centralized in India purely to ensure absolute, uncompromising quality control for your safety. You pay for performance. We deliver it. That is not a hostage situation. That is a premium service contract."
The Emirati Colonel laughed out loud. "Mr. Nair, you Indians are brilliant. You are absolute mercenaries, but you are incredibly competent mercenaries. Keep my planes flying, and we will happily keep paying your exorbitant invoices."
"Yes, Colonel. We will."
Suresh watched the billionaire officer walk away. He turned back to the jet, picked up his proprietary diagnostic terminal, and plugged it into the aircraft's belly, locking the Emiratis out of their own machine.
Leh Air Force Station, Ladakh, India
At 3,600 meters above sea level, the Leh Air Force Station operated in an environment completely hostile to human life and mechanical engineering. The air in the high-altitude Himalayas was simultaneously thinner than aerodynamic theory preferred, and colder than aviation fuel was designed to withstand.
Wing Commander Rajiv Mishra zipped his heavy winter jacket tight against the biting wind on the morning of August 16th.
The Indian Air Force had not merely 'bought' the Baaz. The IAF had recognized the sheer, devastating potential of Karan Shergill's creation and had ordered a massive, staggering fleet of 224 aircraft.
They were not just flying them on peaceful patrols. The IAF had brutally, effectively blooded the S-6 Baaz in the skies over Burma during the catastrophic invasion the previous winter. The Baaz had not just survived the Indo-Burma war; it had dominated it. Flying deep-strike missions over Rangoon, dropping laser-guided munitions into dense jungles, and securing absolute air superiority against the Burmese remnants, the Baaz was now a heavily combat-proven, battle-scarred veteran.
But at Leh, its mission was different. Its mission was sheer, unadulterated high-altitude survival.
Mishra had twenty-four Baaz fighters permanently stationed on the frozen tarmac at Leh, specifically customized for the mountain patrol requirement.
The availability figure for his squadron in the brutal Himalayan conditions was an astonishing 87.3 percent. The obsolete, tiny Gnats they had replaced used to hover around a pathetic 61 percent, spending most of the winter grounded, completely frozen solid.
Mishra remembered the defining moment of the winter trials back in February.
The temperature on the Leh apron had plunged to a catastrophic, historically freezing minus 31 degrees Celsius. At that temperature, lubricating oil turned to sludge. Metal snapped. The old Gnats required thirty agonizing minutes of external hot-air pre-heating from ground carts just to prevent the engines from exploding on startup. At minus 31, the Gnats simply died.
Mishra had stood on the freezing tarmac, his breath pluming in the dark, alongside a Shergill engine specialist named Pillai.
Pillai had casually climbed into the freezing cockpit of a Baaz that had been sitting in the ice all night. He didn't connect a pre-heater. He simply flipped the main power switch and engaged the starter sequence.
The modified Surya-1 turbofan engine, equipped with a revolutionary, proprietary triple-igniter system designed specifically for low-density, freezing air, screamed to life. It spooled up to stable idle in exactly 43 seconds.
Mishra had stared at his stopwatch in sheer disbelief.
"Forty-three seconds from dead frozen to combat ready," Mishra had whispered, his mind instantly grasping the tactical implications. In a surprise border war with China, those twenty-nine minutes saved could mean the difference between launching an intercept, or being bombed on the runway.
Now, standing in the operations center on an ordinary August morning, Mishra reviewed the day's patrol roster.
Twenty-one of his twenty-four jets were fully armed, fueled, and ready for launch at a moment's notice. His operational capacity had doubled, while his maintenance headaches had vanished.
He didn't care about Jimmy Carter. He didn't care about the billions Karan Shergill was extorting from foreign governments in maintenance fees. He didn't care about the geopolitics of the global south.
He cared that when he pushed the throttle forward over the Himalayas, the engine roared.
The machine worked. The deadly, brilliant, inescapable monopoly of the Shergill empire was functioning exactly as designed, spinning its web of steel and software across the globe.
There was still massive work to do to secure the skies.
There always was.