Counter Terrorist (ePub)

The reluctant terrorist who beat them at their own game. The irony lay in the matter of them first having turned him into a mujahidin. Life had handed him a raw deal right from his infancy. From witnessing traumatising brutalities at close quarters to being compelled to convert to Islam for getting a Muslim girl pregnant, Avinash Roy, was about to face the greatest disaster in his young life. As a quality control officer, he had come to attend a seminar at India's youngest oil refinery. He was out on an early morning jog in the adjoining woods unaware of the dangers that lurked within. He was taken hostage by India's most dreaded terrorists, the ULFA at gunpoint. After an aborted daring effort to escape from his captors when he was almost shot, Roy decided to change tack to stay alive. Pitch forked into living as a fugitive with his captors who wanted him alive for a ransom from his employers, destiny shaped him into being one of them when the ransom failed to materialize. In his bid to stay alive in such hostile surroundings, he becomes Abid Rehan by joining up with an Islamist terror group after his original captors are eliminated. He was pushed into Bangladesh and subsequently to Nepal, Afghanistan and Pakistan with different Islamist terror groups as a mujahidin, all owing allegiance to the Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Arising out of his superior skills and many attributes, he is picked up by the most notorious criminal in the Indian subcontinent, Zulfiquar Khan, to be his personal bodyguard. He becomes privy to a most diabolical plot to assassinate the President of the United States by the Lashkar-e-Toiba a Pakistan funded and mentored Al Qaeda offshoot. Despite being aware of this plot, which was hatched by the ISI, the premier spy agency of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, he felt powerless to prevent it. The ISI would be using the sleeper cells of India's most notorious mobster Zulfiquar Khan, now a fugitive holed up in Pakistan's port city Karachi to carry out the hit job on the US President when he landed in India. The only way he could prevent this if at all it was possible to do so was to escape his Pakistani captors and return to India to activate the government before it was too late as an emissary of Zulfiquar Khan. On his attempt to get his Indian visa, he meets an old school friend Arjun at the Indian High Commission who was an undercover agent of the Research and Analysis Wing, the main external intelligence wing of India, whose help he seeks to convey the message of the looming catastrophe. They are faced with a dilemma. Who to trust in the government with the explosive information of the imminent disaster that was primed to happen on India's Republic Day parade in New Delhi where the US President is the chief guest. The plan for them was too daring and almost like a suicide mission, which required the utmost discretion. It was impossible to guess who in the government machinery could be trusted with the information without a betrayal and consequential repercussions. Nor was it possible for the two of them acting unassisted by the state machinery to pull off the rescue mission, as New Delhi would become an impregnable fortress that was impossible to breach to get close enough to the U.S. President in order to save him and his accompanying family. The assassination of President Taylor would lead to a full scale invasion of a nuclear armed Pakistan by an India backed by the USA and Israel with China, North Korea and most Muslim countries coming to the rescue of Pakistan in a global conflagration. Avinash and Arjun must summon all their stealth and astuteness to save themselves, the U.S. President and the nuclear war that was almost inevitable. Will they succeed against such odds? Added to this problem, Avinash discovers that the Lashkar had seen through the cover that he had nurtured earlier. They would now hunt down his wife and child in revenge who were all by themselves in another part of the country.