Black Tornado: The Military Operations of 26/11

Author:Sandeep Unnithan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Published: 2014-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

Each L-shaped floor had seventeen rooms. But after clearing a few rooms, it was evident the task would be arduous. Each door opened into an antechamber that led into the room. The space was only ten feet long and three feet wide. It would be tactically unwise to crowd five men in. Kandwal changed the drill. Now on, only a two-man buddy pair would enter. Five buddy pairs would alternately clear rooms to avoid exhaustion.

The abandoned rooms were snapshots of life rudely interrupted by the terror attack – unmade beds, stale food from room service the previous night on the table, digital cameras plugged into laptops and the steady trickle of baths overflowing. The guests who were trapped inside whispered to their relatives on phones, the fearful ones hid in their closets and under beds. One US-based NRI businessman, had been furiously chanting the Hanuman Chalisa when he was rescued.

‘Sierra Six to Sierra One. Movement on floor ten. Window. Friendly. Over,’ Jasrotia radioed Sheoran.

Jasrotia and his sniper teams watched all the guests who stood at the windows or walked about in their rooms. The CO relayed the message to Kandwal.

Rescued guests were gathered in a safe room on each floor. Once an entire floor had been searched and cleared, Kandwal deputed one hit team of five commandos to escort the guests downstairs to the Op Centre. By 6 p.m., forty-six guests had been brought down this way. A dozen more floors remained. The commandos had been awake for nearly two days. They had shed their alert bags with its food supplies in the IL-76. These were to have been brought back later by the Mumbai police, but no one knew where the bags were. So, the commandos scooped up the mineral water bottles, soft drink cans and dry fruits they found in the rooms into laundry bags. That would be their only food for more than a day.

As the commandos cleared the hotel spaces, a critical deficiency now came to light: they did not have the manpower to guard the rooms they had cleared. A second planeload of commandos sent from Delhi was yet to arrive. Sheoran tried to fill the breach with a dozen CRPF commandos. The policemen would act as ‘stops’ or barriers in the Chambers and the first floor. They would cut off the terrorists’ escape downstairs. But Sheoran was too optimistic. A few hours later, he heard shots. The CRPF commandos had rushed back down into the lobby because they had heard movements there, and had fired. Sheoran sighed and pushed his five-man hit team to man the first floor to replace them. He waited for reinforcements to fly in from Delhi with Lt Col Sundeep Sen.

Around 8 p.m., reinforcement strickled in. Captain Anil Jakhar and twenty commandos moved up to the Taj Tower to assist Kandwal’s room clearance. Kandy was edgy. The stream of requests from NSG brass to evacuate certain guests on priority was beginning to play on

his nerves.

Meanwhile, his search parties pounded up the stairs to the twelfth floor of the Taj Tower.

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