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the traffic pattern over the airbase was almost always filled to capacity these days.
    But one section of the airbase was removed from the chaos of these operations. Amidst a bunch of high-tech trailers at the end of the airbase covered with camouflage nettings, were a group of men whose job demanded discretion. Their unmanned aircraft were deployed near to the trailers and were put in small protective shelters. An acute observer at the airbase might have noticed that one of those shelters was wide empty tonight.
    The person wearing a green flight overall put down the phone in one of the trailers and walked up behind the other two sitting in their seats and staring intently at several small digital screens in front of them. One of these men had his right hand sitting on a small black joystick hard-fitted into the console. He deftly piloted the unmanned aircraft from his seat inside this trailer. His partner on this mission sat next to him, staring into a screen of his own but with a different view. This latter person was the operator for the drone’s electro-optical systems that scanned the terrain below. It was this screen that the two other men in the room wearing similar green flight-suits were interested in.
    “That guy must have wiped out half of the village in that first run,” the EO operator noted to the two senior men. One of the two men, with a balding head bordered with thinning white hair, leaned forward at the screen and then nodded in agreement:
    “Indeed! An absolute lunatic. He might have killed some of his own people in there. Not a good sign of FAC coordination.”
    The EO operator switched the view from visual to thermal. Now the screen showed the black and white live-feed video. The screen was showing the struggle of the TI data computer to resolve and correct for the fluctuations in light as white color fireballs raced into the sky and then turned black again in seconds. 
    Three hundred kilometers away and ten thousand feet above them, a Heron unmanned aircraft was silently flying over south-eastern Tibet with its eyes pointed downwards as part of a covert intelligence gathering mission. Part of this mission tasking involved collecting intelligence on PLA dispositions that would later end up in the hands of Lieutenant-Colonel Gephel and his team on the ground below. It was no mistake that they were over the same terrain where Gephel and his team had been expected to meet up with local Tibetan informants before the PLA battalions had ruined that party. So now the high endurance aircraft was orbiting over the village of Shiquanhe, observing from above what Gephel and his team had seen firsthand. But while the latter were now escaping to the north on foot, the Heron crew at Leh was recording on their cameras the devastating J-10 strike against the village outskirts that had left dozens of buildings destroyed or on fire.
    The skies were getting crowded and they had just received word from their contacts within Military Intelligence that Chinese airborne radars had been detected on their way south towards the border. With a powerful Chinese airborne radar aircraft entering the skies, and enemy fighters approaching, it was time to leave.
    The Heron pilot inside the trailer at Leh now pushed the joystick slightly to the right while his eyes remained fixed to the HUD display in front of him. On this display he was essentially seeing what the Heron was seeing. The Heron was quick to respond to the remote pilot commands and it banked to the right before initiating a southern turn. The view on the remote pilot’s optics confirmed the same.
    As the Heron initiated its escape, two hundred kilometers to the north four Chinese Su-27s tore through the skies on their way south...
     
     
    AIRSPACE OVER SOUTHWESTERN TIBET
    TIBET
    MAY 15, 2028 HRS
    Ten thousand feet above the snow clad mountains of Tibet, and three hundred and fifty kilometers away from its Indian counterpart, a ‘red’ IL-76 based AWACS, the