Page 1 of Into the Gray Zone

Chapter1

A full moon created a kaleidoscope of reflections on the Arabian Sea, but Kamal could smell the rain coming. It was the tail-end of the monsoon season, and they would get wet tonight, he was sure. In more ways than one.

He watched a rubber Zodiac skiff lowered over the side of the larger boat, waited until it was stable, then scampered down a cargo net into it. He turned, took a duffel bag from the man above him, set it on the deck, then began helping the others. The last of the four slipped coming down, bouncing off the rubber side and falling backwards toward the hull of the mother ship. He let out a scream, the sound cut short when his body went beneath the water.

Kamal scrambled to the stern, holding the skiff away from the larger boat to prevent his man from being smashed between the two in the light chop of waves.

He shouted, “Agam! Randeep! Grab him.” The two others in the boat leaned over and snatched the man by his arm and clothes, hoisting him over the gunwale. The man sat up and Kamal saw it was Manjit, his second-in-command and the one who was to guide the skiff to their target.

With a sheepish smile, Manjit shook his head, throwing water like a dog coming out of a lake. He said, “That’s not a good beginning.”

Kamal looked up at the larger boat and saw the man they only knew as Mr.Chin staring back at him. Mr.Chin raised his fist with a thumbs-up, the gesture a question. Kamal said, “Manjit, start the outboard.”

Manjit scrambled to the back, pulled a cord, and the little motor sputtered to life. Satisfied, Kamal returned the thumbs-up. Mr.Chin shouted, “See you in an hour. Remember, he either comes out alive, or you kill him yourself. Leave no one to talk if the mission fails.”

Kamal nodded, a little disgusted. He didn’t fully understand who Mr.Chin represented, but he knew the reason behind the order: China could not be implicated in interfering in India’s affairs.

Kamal turned to Manjit and said, “Let’s go.”

Within seconds they were bouncing across the soft waves, the lights of the shore growing larger, the mother ship lost in the darkness. He felt the wind tussling his hair and realized it was the first time he’d had that sensation since he was a little boy.

Like the men in the boat with him, Kamal was a Sikh, and as such, was required by his religious duty to wear a dastaar covering his head whenever he was outdoors, only unwrapping the cloth when inside his home. Like him, none of his men wore one on this night, and neither did the man they hoped to rescue. In fact, the very reason they were conducting this nighttime operation was precisely to prevent the authorities from learning the man they held was not a potential Muslim terrorist but a Sikh.

Kamal Singh and his men were all from a small village in the Punjab state of India, and all of them had spent time in jail as agitators for a separate Sikh state—regardless of whether that was true or not. Called Khalistan, the aspirational goals of a Sikh state within the borders ofIndia were something the Indian government was incredibly sensitive about.

In today’s world, it’s usually Muslim terrorists that make the news. Al Qaida, the Islamic state, and, for India, Pakistani groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba. But in the not-so-distant past, it was members of the Khalistan Commando Force—Sikh separatists looking for a state they could call their own.

In the 1980s, the KCF caused most of the Indian national terrorist deaths, to include aircraft bombings in Canada and murderous attacks all over the Indian state, so much so that Indira Gandhi, then the prime minister of India, decided to stop it once and for all. In 1984 she ordered the storming of the holiest of Sikh religious sites looking for the leaders of the movement, ultimately killing upwards of four hundred innocent Sikhs in the process.

The action directly led to her own demise, as she was assassinated shortly thereafter in retribution—by her own Sikh bodyguards. That killing ultimately led to the destruction of the Khalistan Commando Force, as the Indian population erupted, slaughtering Sikhs in an orgy of violence while the state itself made a concerted effort to snuff out the irredentist tendencies.

To a great extent, they succeeded, at least on the surface, but the fear of the Khalistan myth within the Indian government persisted like an abused housewife fearing the return of the husband, with Sikhs who professed any discontent being arrested and charged with wholesale offenses against the state. Which is how Kamal had been arrested.

He’d never been particularly in tune with the underbelly of Sikh separatism and had little knowledge of Khalistan aspirations. His father had been infatuated with the cause, but his mother less so. Kamal was only ten when his father had died in a car accident. After that, his mother steered clear of anything resembling Sikh independence, forcinghim to try to blend his Sikh faith into a multicultural world. Which is to say, he’d heard about Khalistan, but it wasn’t something he put any thought into. He’d gone to school, learning computer network operations, and had a solid job working remotely for a U.S. company, doing customer support for computer systems. That all changed once he was incarcerated.

Arrested for some inflammatory social media posts and connections to friends who were being tracked as separatists—something that everyone in his Sikh-majority town fell prey to—his life had been upended. Prison had caused his anger to fester, and also introduced him to others who’d been unjustly arrested. They began to talk, fantasizing about revenge, long-lost memories of his father talking about the cause resurfacing. Ultimately, grand visions of Sikh independence had taken a back seat to survival, although it had lingered in the back of Kamal’s brain. What Kamal had actually learned in prison was how to be a criminal.

Released from prison but now tainted by his arrest, he’d been unable to find a job using his computer networking skills, with every one of his former corporate contacts afraid of being associated with him. The fester in the back of his brain slowly started moving to the forefront, and he began to explore the cause his mother had jettisoned but his father had embraced. Just to survive, he’d worked in the seedy underbelly of Indian society, utilizing the black market for everything from crypto scams to call centers fleecing Americans.

And that was how he’d met Mr.Chin.

Manjit slowed the motor of the rubber skiff, bringing Kamal out of his thoughts. He turned, seeing him looking at a GPS. Manjit said, “The dock should be right in front of us.”

Kamal said, “And? Keep going.”

“We need to work this slowly, in case Mr.Chin’s information is wrong.”

“If his information is wrong, it won’t matter. The RAW will be behind us right now, waiting to scoop us up. But he hasn’t been wrong yet.”

Manjit kept the engine low, saying, “Then why is Sidak in jail? There weren’t supposed to be any RAW personnel at the target site.”

The RAW was the vaunted Research and Analysis Wing of the government of India—the Indian version of the CIA or MI6, but unlike those organizations, the RAW answered only to the prime minister. Different from intelligence services in other democracies, the RAW was a force unto its own, with little oversight. It was the RAW that had arrested Kamal originally, and had also detained Sidak.

Kamal couldn’t argue with Manjit’s logic. The RAWhadbeen there and rolled up Sidak, when Mr.Chin said it would be safe.

Kamal considered, then said, “Continue at this pace.” He hissed to the front, saying, “Agam, get out the night scope. Scan the dock.”

Chapter2

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