Chapter 322: The Kinetic Equation
March 3, 1978Chief Minister's Office, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh
The early morning sun filtered through the heavy, angled teak blinds of the Chief Minister's office, casting sharp, perfectly parallel golden bands of light across the sprawling expanse of the polished mahogany desk. The room was exceptionally quiet, heavily soundproofed and insulated from the already bustling, chaotic noise of Lucknow's awakening streets. Outside those reinforced walls, cycle-rickshaws were ringing their bells, street vendors were shouting, and the great industrial engine of Uttar Pradesh was coming to life.
But inside the sanctum, the only sound was the slow, rhythmic, metronomic ticking of a towering brass grandfather clock standing in the corner.
Karan Shergill sat in his high-backed, tufted leather chair. He was dressed flawlessly in a charcoal-grey, three-piece suit, his tie perfectly knotted, presenting the image of absolute, unflappable authority. A cup of freshly brewed black coffee—made from premium, single-estate Coorg beans—steamed gently beside a thick, red-bordered stack of classified intelligence dispatches delivered directly from the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) via his own Vanguard internal security couriers.
The heavy oak door to the office clicked open. R.D. Nair, Karan's notoriously ruthless, shadow-dwelling intelligence director, stepped into the room. Nair did not knock; he was one of the few men on the subcontinent with the clearance to bypass the outer secretarial pool entirely.
"Good morning, Chief Minister," Nair said, his voice a low, gravelly rasp. He carried a single, freshly decrypted telex sheet in his hand.
"Morning, Nair," Karan replied, not looking up from his coffee. "You look like a man who has been awake since three."
"Two-thirty, actually," Nair corrected, stepping up to the mahogany desk and sliding the paper across the polished wood. "Vanguard signals intelligence intercepted a flash cable out of the Middle East, confirming a priority R&AW dispatch. I thought you would want to see it immediately before your calls with Delhi begin."
Karan set his coffee cup down. The porcelain clicked softly against the saucer. He picked up the paper and stared intensely at the freshly typed cable.
FLASH: PALESTINIAN MILITANTS HIJACK COMMERCIAL AIRLINER EN ROUTE TO CYPRUS. PASSENGERS HELD HOSTAGE ON TARMAC. DEMANDS PENDING.
Karan slowly lowered the paper to his desk, letting out a quiet, measured breath.
"Details?" Karan asked, his voice entirely devoid of surprise.
"A standard operation, unfortunately," Nair said, clasping his hands behind his back. "Three men, two women. They boarded the flight in Beirut. Walked right through the terminal carrying canvas duffel bags. Intelligence suggests they bypassed whatever minimal security existed by simply bribing a baggage handler or using forged diplomatic pouches. Once the aircraft reached cruising altitude, they pulled out Czechoslovakian vz. 61 Skorpion submachine guns and half a dozen fragmentation grenades."
"And what are they asking for?" Karan asked, leaning back and steepling his fingers.
"The usual theater," Nair scoffed, shaking his head with a veteran spy's deep cynicism. "The release of thirty political prisoners held in various European jails, five million dollars in unmarked American currency, and prime-time television broadcasts of their manifesto. The Cypriot authorities have surrounded the aircraft on the tarmac in Nicosia. They are currently locked in a standoff. The negotiators are offering them safe passage in exchange for the women and children."
Karan closed his eyes.
To the rest of the world, to the politicians in Washington, London, and New Delhi, this was just another Friday in the 1970s. It was the golden age of the skyjacking epidemic—a bizarre, terrifyingly common, globally televised theater of the absurd. The Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Japanese Red Army, Carlos the Jackal, and a dozen other Marxist revolutionary factions routinely utilized commercial aviation as their personal political leverage.
The security paradigm of the era was practically a tragicomedy. Flying in 1978 was treated as a luxurious gentleman's affair. Passengers wore three-piece suits and evening dresses. Stewardesses carved roast beef on carts in the first-class aisles. Ashtrays were built into the armrests. And a man could walk right up to the boarding gate, kiss his wife goodbye, and step onto a pressurized aluminum tube with a loaded revolver and a switchblade in his briefcase, because the concept of mass aviation terrorism was simply not comprehended by the bureaucratic mind. X-ray machines were strictly for hospitals, not airports.
Militants knew this. They would casually walk onto a flight, draw a weapon, hijack the aircraft, and divert it to a sympathetic rogue state. They would trade the terrified, exhausted passengers for their imprisoned comrades, pose for photographs on the tarmac, and disappear into the desert. It was a high-stakes, geopolitical hostage negotiation where the airplane was merely a convenient holding cell with wings.
"The Cypriots will cave," Nair predicted, breaking the silence in the office. "They always do. They will give them the fuel, they will release half the prisoners, and the hijackers will fly to Algiers or Tripoli to claim asylum. It is a predictable equation."
"It is a pathetic equation, Nair," Karan said, opening his eyes, a dangerous, cold light reflecting in them. "It is an equation built on the delusion that terrorists operate with a fundamental respect for human survival. They don't. They simply lack imagination."
Even India was not immune to this terrifyingly lax era of aviation security. Karan's mind flashed back two years, to the tense autumn of 1976.
An armed group had attempted a brazen domestic hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight right out of Palam Airport in New Delhi. They had managed to seize the aircraft, demanding ransoms and political concessions.
"We had our own brush with this madness in '76," Nair noted, following Karan's train of thought. "If they had managed to maintain control of that plane, the ransom demands would have humiliated the central government."
"They didn't maintain control because the Indian armed forces didn't give them the chance," Karan replied, a note of genuine respect in his voice for the state's military apparatus.
It had been a razor-thin, terrifyingly close call, but the Indian government had not capitulated. The military and elite police commandos had executed a rapid, brutal intervention entirely on their own merit. Karan remembered reading the official after-action reports. The commandos hadn't knocked. Using the cover of negotiations to stall the hijackers, they had stormed the fuselage with stunning speed and flawless trigger discipline. In the span of seconds, they had moved through the screaming passengers and neutralized the hijackers before the militants even realized they had been outmaneuvered.
It was a purely Indian victory, executed by the state's own elite forces without a single shadow of Shergill or Vanguard involvement.
"The Palam operation was a tremendous success, Chief Minister," Nair agreed. "It proved our national tactical doctrine works. If anyone tries to hijack an Indian plane on Indian soil today, the army commandos will breach the fuselage and kill them. The state has the capability."
"You are thinking tactically, Nair," Karan said softly, shaking his head. "You are looking at the bullets. I am looking at the bomb."
Nair frowned, confused. "The bomb, sir? There was no bomb on the Palam flight. And the intelligence on the Cyprus flight only mentions grenades."
"Leave the file on my desk, Nair. I need to make a call to New Delhi," Karan ordered gently.
Nair nodded, understanding that the Chief Minister needed the room. He turned on his heel and exited the office, the heavy oak door clicking shut behind him, plunging the room back into absolute, ticking silence.
As Karan sat alone in his office in 1978, possessing a mind profoundly burdened with the inescapable, burning memories of a future timeline, he was no longer thinking about hostage negotiations, political demands, or the bravery of commandos on a runway.
He was thinking about a Tuesday morning in September.
He closed his eyes, and the scent of the freshly brewed Coorg coffee was suddenly overpowered by a phantom, acrid stench in his memory. It was the smell of pulverized concrete, incinerated office paper, and burning jet fuel.
He was thinking about a painfully, brilliantly clear blue sky over Manhattan. He was remembering the horrifying, surreal imagery broadcast on live television across the globe. He saw the silver aluminum fuselage of a Boeing 767 banking sharply, deliberately, over the Hudson River. He heard the screaming, high-pitched whine of massive turbofan engines pushed to maximum, red-line velocity.
And then, he saw the apocalyptic, world-shattering fireball of a commercial airliner slamming directly into the steel and glass of a towering skyscraper, erasing thousands of lives in a fraction of a millisecond.
In this current decade of the 1970s, terrorists viewed airplanes as leverage—a flying bargaining chip to be traded for money or comrades. They wanted the plane on the ground so they could talk to the cameras.
But Karan Shergill knew the horrific, undeniable truth. He knew exactly what would happen the day some radicalized fanatic realized that a passenger jet was not a hostage holding cell. He knew what would happen the day a terrorist decided he didn't want to negotiate—he just wanted to burn the world down.
A modern commercial airliner was not a bus. A Boeing 747 was an aerodynamic leviathan weighing nearly four hundred thousand kilograms. It carried over one hundred and sixty thousand liters of highly refined, incredibly explosive aviation kerosene in its wings. It was capable of traveling at speeds approaching nine hundred kilometers an hour.
Karan understood the sheer, devastating physics of the kinetic equation. When you multiplied that unimaginable mass by that staggering velocity, the resulting energy output dwarfed conventional explosives.
If a fanatic breached a cockpit, slit the pilot's throat, and seized the yoke, the aircraft ceased to be a mode of transportation.
It was a fully fueled, hundred-ton kinetic weapon. Karan opened his eyes. The terrifying, apocalyptic visions of collapsing skyscrapers faded, replaced by the quiet, polished mahogany reality of his Lucknow office. The cold, unyielding pragmatism that had built his industrial empire hardened his features. He knew exactly what had to be done, but he also knew this specific shift required immense political finesse, not unilateral corporate action. He could build the machines, but he needed the state to mandate them.
He reached across his massive desk and picked up the heavy red receiver of the secure, heavily encrypted line. It bypassed the standard secretarial pools and the bustling switchboards, running through a dedicated cryptographic relay directly to the Prime Minister's office in South Block, New Delhi.
It rang exactly twice before a familiar, tired, but remarkably warm voice answered the line.
*"Yashwantrao Chavan speaking."*
"Yashwantrao-ji, good morning," Karan said. His tone was respectful, deliberately stripping away the sharp edges of the ruthless industrialist. It carried the easy, grounded camaraderie of two men who had navigated catastrophic political crises, fought the Western powers, and won massive, nation-defining battles together. "I hope I am not interrupting your morning tea."
*"Never for you, Karan,"* the Prime Minister chuckled over the faint, electric hum of the encrypted line. The sound of rustling papers echoed from the Delhi office. *"I was just looking over the quarterly export figures for the new automotive lines. The European orders for the Kian and the Raj are staggering. Our foreign exchange reserves are overflowing. You have officially made the Finance Minister the happiest man in the cabinet. What is on your mind this morning, my friend?"*
"The treasury's health is always good news," Karan replied, allowing a brief, polite smile before smoothly transitioning into the grim gravity of his actual subject. "But I was just reviewing the morning intelligence briefs from R&AW. Specifically, the Palestinian hijacking situation currently unfolding on the tarmac in Cyprus."
Chavan sighed heavily. The warmth in his voice instantly gave way to the weary, bone-deep exhaustion of a head of state forced to constantly navigate the chaotic violence of the era.
*"A terrible, ugly business,"* Chavan murmured. *"Swaran Singh is monitoring it closely from the External Affairs desk. Thankfully, no Indian nationals are reported to be aboard the aircraft. But this entire decade seems to be defined by this particular brand of televised madness. We are just incredibly fortunate that our own incident at Palam Airport in '76 was handled so flawlessly by our military commandos before that plane could ever leave the runway."*
"Our armed forces performed brilliantly in 1976, Yashwantrao-ji, and they saved a lot of lives," Karan said, his tone gentle but infused with an unyielding firmness. "But we cannot build a national security apparatus on the assumption that our commandos will always be fast enough. Depending on a flawless tactical reaction is not a sustainable defense strategy. I am calling because I want to discuss a fundamental, sweeping overhaul of our aviation security protocols nationwide. I believe we need to act now, while the skies are quiet, before our luck runs out."
*"I am listening, Karan,"* the Prime Minister said, his tone shifting immediately into one of careful, undivided attention. Chavan was a seasoned politician, but he trusted Karan's instincts implicitly. The young Chief Minister had a terrifying, almost supernatural habit of seeing massive geopolitical and security threats years before they materialized on anyone else's radar. *"What exactly are you proposing we do?"*
"Currently, Yashwantrao-ji, our airports operate with the exact same relaxed, archaic security mentality as a municipal railway station," Karan explained, outlining the glaring, fatal flaws of the era's romanticized aviation culture. "People walk directly into the terminals off the street. They stroll up to the boarding gates to kiss their relatives goodbye. They walk onto pressurized commercial jets carrying briefcases and duffel bags with virtually zero screening. We check their paper tickets, Prime Minister, not their pockets. We need to shift that paradigm completely, permanently, and immediately."
Karan pulled a fresh legal notepad toward him, his pen poised over the paper.
"I strongly advise that the Ministry of Civil Aviation instantly mandate an all-time high threat level posture across every single airport on Indian soil," Karan proposed, his voice dropping into a steady, authoritative rhythm. "And I do not just mean the major international hubs like Bombay and Delhi. I mean the domestic airports in Kanpur, in Madras, in Calcutta, in Lucknow. Every single one. Nobody gets near a tarmac without being thoroughly searched."
*"A nationwide lockdown of that scale? Karan, the bureaucracy alone..."* Chavan hesitated, his political instincts flaring. *"The public will complain about the queues. But more importantly, the logistics of equipping every domestic airfield with screening hardware... the Finance Ministry will argue that we do not have the infrastructure budget for that kind of instant, sweeping deployment."*
"Yashwantrao-ji," Karan interrupted gently, a note of fierce, unadulterated pride entering his voice. "We are not a struggling, post-colonial republic anymore. We are the Third Superpower. We are an economic juggernaut with a surplus budget."
Karan leaned forward, tapping his pen against the desk. "We manufacture the most advanced, sub-micron semiconductor processors on the planet in Gorakhpur. Stamping out a few hundred X-ray scanners, magnetometers, and metal detectors is absolute pocket change for our current industrial base. If the Finance Ministry pushes back on the budget, Shergill Heavy Industries will manufacture the machines at cost, and the Asian-African Development Bank will underwrite the deployment. Money is no longer our limiting factor. We have the wealth. We have the technology."
Chavan paused, the truth of Karan's words settling over the line. India was rich now. The days of pleading for foreign aid or rationing industrial equipment were over.
*"You are right,"* Chavan conceded, a newfound strength in his voice. *"We have the capital. What is the operational structure?"*
"We need mandatory, physical bag checks and X-ray screening at every terminal entrance," Karan detailed smoothly, building the fortress in his mind. "And we hand the entire perimeter security mandate over to the Central Industrial Security Force. Heavily armed CISF personnel at every checkpoint. We build a wall between the public concourse and the boarding gates. "...but the hardware on the ground, the scanners and the perimeters, that is only phase one," Karan continued, his voice dropping an octave, settling into a grim, unyielding cadence. "Phase two is the flight deck."
*"The flight deck?"* Chavan repeated, the faint rustle of papers in his Delhi office completely stopping. The Prime Minister's tone was curious, but cautious.
"The pilots," Karan clarified. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the polished mahogany desk. "Right now, the doors separating the passenger cabin from the cockpit on our commercial airliners are little more than flimsy sheets of hollow-core wood and plastic louvers. A grown man could kick one off its hinges in three seconds. I want to propose that the Directorate General of Civil Aviation issue a classified, strictly enforced directive to every commercial and cargo pilot operating under an Indian flag."
Karan paused, making sure the line was completely clear before he delivered the mandate.
"Those cockpit doors must be instantly retrofitted and heavily reinforced with ballistic-grade steel, reinforced titanium hinges, and internal, multi-point mechanical deadbolts," Karan stated. "Shergill Heavy Industries will fabricate the retrofit kits and install them on every Air India and Indian Airlines jet within the month. And from the moment the cabin doors close on the tarmac, to the moment the engines shut down at the destination gate... that cockpit door remains locked."
Karan gripped the heavy red telephone receiver tighter. He was carefully, painstakingly articulating a doctrine that was decades ahead of its time to a man of the 1970s—a man who still believed that human conflicts had boundaries.
"And under no circumstances—absolutely none—is the pilot permitted to open that door during a hijacking."
There was a long, heavy silence on the line from New Delhi. It wasn't the silence of consideration; it was the stunned, breathless silence of a man trying to process something entirely alien to his nature.
*"Karan..."* Chavan's voice finally came through the earpiece. It was deeply hesitant, laced with a sudden, profound horror as the true human implications of the proposal began to dawn on his humanist soul. *"I know you are looking at the mathematics of survival. I know you view these things through a strategic lens, but... my God, Karan, stop and think about what you are actually saying."*
"I have thought about it, Yashwantrao-ji," Karan said quietly.
*"No, listen to me,"* Chavan pleaded, the seasoned politician stripping away his formal composure, speaking now as a grandfather, as a man of the people. *"If four armed men take over a passenger cabin... if they drag a young flight attendant, or a terrified child, up to that reinforced steel door... if they put a gun to an innocent head and scream through the intercom, demanding the pilot open the door or they will execute the hostages one by one... you are telling the pilot to do what?"*
"The pilot keeps the door locked. He declares an emergency transponder code, cuts the intercom feed to the cabin so he cannot hear the threats, and lands the plane at the nearest secured military airstrip," Karan finished for him. His voice was steady, perfectly modulated, but laced with a heavy, reluctant, bone-deep empathy. "They do not open the door. They do not negotiate. They do not surrender the flight controls. Even if they hear gunshots. Even if they hear screaming."
*"My God, Karan, that is..."* Chavan choked on the words. He actually struggled for breath over the line. *"That is incredibly heartless. It is barbaric! You are asking our pilots—civilian men, fathers, husbands—to sit securely behind a locked steel door and actively listen to their own passengers being executed in the aisles! You are asking them to become complicit in murder by inaction!"*
"I know exactly how it sounds, Yashwantrao-ji," Karan said. He closed his eyes, leaning his head back against his leather chair. He stripped away the impenetrable armor of the ruthless industrial titan, speaking simply as a man carrying a terrible, solitary burden. "I know it sounds monstrous. It goes against every single instinct of human compassion. It violates the core of who we are. Do you think I don't know that? Do you think I don't lose sleep over these equations?"
*"Then why propose it?"* Chavan demanded, his voice trembling with genuine emotional distress. *"We have the commandos! We have the NSG! We can storm the planes on the ground, just like we did at Palam! We do not need to sacrifice innocent people in the air!"*
"Because we are operating under an outdated, dangerously naive assumption," Karan said gently but firmly, forcing the Prime Minister to listen to the grim, apocalyptic mathematics of the future. "You are assuming that hijackers just want to fly to a desert airstrip in the Middle East, hold a press conference for the international media, and demand a ransom or the release of prisoners."
"You are assuming," Karan continued, his voice dropping into a quiet, vibrating whisper that chilled the air in the room, "that the men with the guns want to live."
*"What... what do you mean?"* Chavan asked, the anger in his voice suddenly giving way to a creeping dread.
Karan leaned forward over his desk. He opened his eyes, staring blankly at the wall, seeing the ghosts of a timeline only he remembered.
"A modern commercial passenger jet is not a bus, Prime Minister," Karan explained, his tone devoid of all warmth, channeling pure, terrifying physics. "A Boeing 747 is an aerodynamic leviathan. It weighs nearly four hundred thousand kilograms. And it carries over one hundred and sixty thousand liters of highly refined, incredibly explosive aviation kerosene in its wings. It is capable of traveling at speeds approaching nine hundred kilometers an hour."
Karan let the numbers hang in the air, letting the Prime Minister's sharp mind process the mass and the velocity.
"We have to look at the worst-case scenario, Yashwantrao-ji," Karan warned softly. "We cannot build our defense around the hope that our enemies will remain rational. What happens the day a radically fanatic group decides they don't want a ransom? What happens the day they decide they don't want a press conference, and they don't want to survive the operation?"
Karan gripped the phone, his knuckles turning white. "If they breach that cockpit, put a knife in the pilot's throat, and take the yoke... they might not try to land it. They might point the nose down."
The air in the Chief Minister's office felt suffocatingly heavy, suffused with the gravity of a tragedy he was utterly, desperately determined to prevent.
"If they take the controls, Yashwantrao-ji, they instantly turn that aircraft into a hundred-ton, fully fueled living bomb," Karan painted the nightmare for the Prime Minister, forcing the older man to look directly into the abyss. "Imagine an Air India Boeing 747, fully fueled for a flight to London, taken over just after takeoff from Santa Cruz Airport. Imagine the hijackers banking it sharply back toward the city, pushing the throttles to maximum speed, and deliberately flying it directly into the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Bombay."
*"Dear God..."* Chavan breathed, a horrified, rattling whisper over the line.
"Or imagine them diving it into the Secretariat building in Delhi while Parliament is in session," Karan continued relentlessly, sparing neither himself nor the Prime Minister from the horrific visualization. "Or imagine them bringing it down into a packed cricket stadium at Eden Gardens during a test match. At nine hundred kilometers an hour, the kinetic energy of a 747 dwarfs conventional high explosives. The aviation fuel would vaporize instantly, creating a fireball that would melt structural steel and incinerate everything within a square mile."
Chavan's breath hitched audibly over the encrypted line. The Prime Minister of India was an intelligent, seasoned, deeply patriotic leader, and with Karan's agonizingly vivid guidance, the blindfold had been ripped away. Chavan suddenly saw the exact, terrifying vulnerability that existed, hovering above their crowded, bustling cities every single day.
"If that happens, Prime Minister, we are no longer looking at fifty dead passengers in a fuselage," Karan said quietly, delivering the final, crushing truth that ended all moral debate. "We are looking at thousands of dead civilians on the ground. We are looking at a city center turned into a smoldering, toxic mass grave. We are looking at collapsing towers, skies choked with ash, and a national trauma so profound and devastating that it will fundamentally break the psychology of this republic for a century."
The silence from South Block stretched for a long, agonizing minute.
It was no longer a silence of resistance. It was the silence of a man staring into the mouth of hell. Over the encrypted line, Karan could hear Yashwantrao Chavan's heavy, shaky breathing. The rhythmic ticking of the brass grandfather clock in Karan's office seemed to echo like a hammer striking an anvil.
Yashwantrao Chavan had navigated wars with Pakistan. He had managed crippling famines. He had survived the brutal, cutthroat politics of the Indian National Congress. But he had never possessed the sheer, chilling, sociopathic foresight of the twenty-seven-year-old titan on the other end of the line. Karan Shergill didn't just see the immediate, tactical threat on the tarmac; he saw the inevitable, terrifying evolution of asymmetrical terror itself.
"Thousands of dead," Chavan finally whispered. His voice was completely stripped of all argument, drained of all political rhetoric. It was heavy, hollow, and crushed by the terrible burden of supreme command.
"Thousands," Karan confirmed softly, his own voice thick with emotion. "I am a father, Yashwantrao-ji. If my wife or my children were in that cabin, and a gun was to their heads... I would want the pilot to open the door. The human in me would scream for it. But a pilot's ultimate duty is not to the passengers in the cabin. It is to the safety of the aircraft as a whole, and to the millions of people living on the ground below it."
Karan closed his eyes, a single tear of exhaustion and heavy responsibility prickling the corner of his eye.
"If the door holds, the aircraft cannot be weaponized," Karan concluded softly. "It is a terrible, agonizing, soul-destroying choice, my friend. But we are the leaders of this nation. We are the ones who must carry the sins. We sacrifice the few to save the thousands."
Chavan let out a long, shuddering sigh that sounded as though it had been pulled from the very bottom of his lungs.
"You see shadows long before they reach us, Karan," the Prime Minister murmured. The awe in his voice was palpable, deeply mixed with a profound, aching respect, and an undeniable undercurrent of unease at the sheer darkness of Karan's mind. "I pray to whatever gods are listening that the scenario you just described never comes to pass. I pray it is just a nightmare."
"It won't come to pass, Yashwantrao-ji," Karan replied, turning his chair to look out the massive window at the bright, painfully clear blue sky over Lucknow. "Because we are going to lock the door before they even think to knock."
"I will convene the National Security Council this afternoon at fourteen hundred hours,"Chavan agreed, his tone entirely resolute. He was no longer a horrified spectator; he was a wartime leader acting in true, unwavering partnership with his greatest ally. "We will draft the executive orders for the airport security overhauls immediately. No budget debates. It happens now. I will have the Home Ministry coordinate with the CISF to lock down the perimeters."
Chavan paused, his voice hardening with absolute resolve. "And I will personally sit down with the Director General of Civil Aviation today to draft the locked-door directive for all airlines. I will sign the order myself."
"Thank you, Prime Minister," Karan said warmly, deeply grateful that he did not have to fight this battle alone. "Let the press and the public know that the ground security is for their absolute safety. But keep the locked-door directive classified among the flight crews. The passengers don't need to know the grim math behind the curtain. And if the opposition raises a cry about the inconvenience or the cost... point them to me. Have them blame me."
"We carry the burden together, Karan," Chavan replied, the bond between the two men forged even stronger in the fires of a theoretical apocalypse. "No one man should have to hold up the sky alone. Have a good day in Lucknow."
"You too, Yashwantrao-ji."
Karan carefully placed the heavy red receiver back onto the cradle, the metallic click severing the connection to New Delhi. He leaned back in his tufted leather chair, picking up his cup of coffee. It had gone completely cold, but he took a slow, bitter sip anyway.
He stared out the window, watching a small flock of birds circle over the sprawling industrial city. History was a series of predictable, horrific, cyclical patterns. The world was full of men who wanted to burn it down. But Karan Shergill held the pen now. He had rewritten the timeline.
And in the Republic of India, the skies would remain fiercely, impenetrably, and heartlessly secure.