Free Line of Control by Tom Clancy, Steve Pieczenik, Jeff Rovin Page A

were ever revealed, the SFF would be scapegoated and the overseers of the plot would be executed.
        On the other hand, part of him felt that maybe the people behind this deserved to be punished.
        A "vaccination." That was how the SFF liaison officer had characterized Operation Earthworm when he first described it just three days before.
        They were giving the body of India a small taste of sickness to prevent a larger disease from ever taking hold. When the major was a child, smallpox and polio had been fearful diseases. His sister had survived smallpox and it left her scarred. Back then, vaccination was a wonderful word.
        This was a corruption. However necessary and justifiable it might be, destroying the bus and temple had been vile, unholy acts.
        Major Puri reached for the Marlboros on his desk. He shook a cigarette from the pack and lit it. He inhaled slowly and sat back. This was better than chewing the tobacco. It helped him to think clearly, less emotionally.
        Less judgment ally Everything was relative, the officer told himself.
        Back in the 1940s his parents were pacifists. They had not approved of him becoming a soldier. They would have been happy if he had joined them and other citizens of Haryana in the government's fledgling caste advancement program.
        The Backward Classes list guaranteed a gift of low-paying government jobs for underprivileged natives of seventeen states. Dev Puri had not wanted that. He had wanted to make it on his own.
        And he had.
        Puri drew harder on the cigarette. He was suddenly disgusted with his own value judgments. The SFF had obviously viewed this action as a necessary extension of business as usual. Trained jointly by the American CIA and the Indian military's RAW-Research and Analysis Wing-the SFF were masters of finding and spying on foreign agents and terrorists. For the most part, enemy operatives and suspected collaborators were eliminated without fanfare or heavy firepower.
        Occasionally, through a specially recruited unit. Civilian Network Operatives, the SFF also used foreign agents to send disinformation back to Pakistan. In the case ofsharab and her group, the SFF had spent months planning a more elaborate scheme. They felt it was necessary to frame Pakistan terrorists for the murder of dozens of innocent Hindus.
        Then, when the Pakistani cell members were captured-as they would be, thanks to the CNO operative who was traveling with them-documents and tools would be "found" on the terrorists. These would show that Sharab and her party had traveled the country planting targeting beacons for nuclear strikes against Indian cities. That would give the Indian military a moral imperative to make a preemptive strike against Pakistan's missile silos.
        Major Puri drew on the cigarette again. He looked at his watch. It was nearly time to go.
        Over the past ten years more than a quarter of a million Hindus had left the Kashmir Valley to go to other parts of India. With a growing Muslim majority it was increasingly difficult for Indian authorities to secure this region from terrorism.
        Moreover, Pakistan had recently deployed nuclear weapons and was working to increase its nuclear arsenal as quickly as possible. Puri knew they had to be stopped. Not just to retain Kashmir but to keep hundreds of thousands more refugees from flooding the neighboring Indian provinces.
        Maybe the SFF was right. Maybe this was the time and place to stop the Pakistani aggression. Major Puri only wished there had been some other way to trigger the event.
        He drew long and hard on the cigarette and then crushed it in the ashtray beside the phone. The tin receptacle was filled with partly smoked cigarettes. They were the residue of three afternoons filled with anxiety, doubt, and the looming pressure of his role in the operation.
        His aide would have emptied it if a