NIGHT OF THE KRAIT , livre ebook

The krait was patient. Like any good hunter it would wait invisible until its prey came within striking distance. Then it would strike, biting repeatedly, injecting its venom into its victim's bloodstream
Terrorists from the Free Kashmir Front hijack a coach on the Shatabdi Express with forty people, just outside Madras. A nephew of the defence minister is among the passengers. Within the first five minutes they have killed a railway guard and caused the authorities to panic. The Special Operations Force, a team of crack commandos from the Army, is called in to deal with the crisis. Heading the operation is Lieutenant Colonel Rajan Menon-Raja-who is soon convinced that these are not ordinary terrorists. They have the backing of a highly intelligent but crooked head. He dubs the ruthless genius the Krait.
Raja leads his men in a brilliant rescue operation in Madras, but he knows this is only the opening gambit in a sinister plan devised by the terrorist mastermind; the Krait will strike again. And he realizes with dismay that the enemy might be one of them
First published in 1996, Shashi Warrier's Night of the Krait remains one of the most popular thrillers of modern times.
Cover design and illustration by Nitesh Mohanty
PENGUIN BOOKS
NIGHT OF THE KRAIT
Shashi Warrier turned to writing after careers in consulting, journalism and computing. He is the author of several books: Hangman's Journal , Sniper , The Orphan , The Homecoming , Sally and the Warlocks and Other Stories and The Marblewood Forest . He is a member of the adjunct faculty of BITS, Pilani, from where he completed his master's in economics in 1981.
In between bursts of writing and lecturing, he likes to listen to music, mostly Hindustani, and to ride motorcycles.
He lives in Mangalore with his wife, Prita, and their two dachshunds.
N IGHT OF THE K RAIT
Shashi Warrier

PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Penguin Books India 1996
This edition published by Penguin Books India 2008
Copyright Shashi Warrier 1996, 2008
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-01-4306-437-4
This digital edition published in 2011. e-ISBN 978-81-8475-177-2
This eBook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser and without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above-mentioned publisher of this eBook.
This one is for my parents, without whose unflinching and generous support I would still have been hacking code in a software house.
Contents
Copyright
Acknowledgements
chapter one
chapter two
chapter three
chapter four
chapter five
chapter six
chapter seven
chapter eight
chapter nine
chapter ten
chapter eleven
chapter twelve
chapter thirteen
chapter fourteen
chapter fifteen
chapter sixteen
chapter seventeen
chapter eighteen
Acknowledgements
I did not know writing a book could be such a painful business. Many people helped make it bearable. These include Suresh, Chitra and Aditya; Dr Indira Balachandran and the late Dr V.V. Sivarajan; Yasmin; Biju; Jayapriya and Harish Vasudevan; Rehmat and Nikhil; Dinesh and Satish; David Davidar and Ravi Singh; and last but not least, Leon.
chapter one
In the gathering dark the krait awoke and lay still, its forked tongue flickering, waiting for the earth to cool before setting out on its nightly hunt. This was a common krait, found all over South Asia. It was blue-black, with faint white bands running across its body, about an inch apart: in the dark, when it went hunting, it was almost invisible.
We got them out for the New Year, against all odds, thanks to luck, surprise, and a thunderstorm
On that first Saturday after Christmas, I arrived at the office faintly feverish, ears abuzz, wearied from lack of sleep, just as a watery sun poked its top past the grey clouds on the horizon. I'd been on my feet forty-eight straight hours, being chased by armed men along the ravines, trailing and ambushing them in my turn, and generally causing silent havoc in the course of a war games exercise. In the crimson dawn, in the quiet detachment of my office, the black worm of depression stretched and fattened as I surveyed the bare glass-topped desk and the grey telephone and the ugly straight-backed chairs in my room, and above them the rectangle of cleaner white where I'd removed-much to the dismay of many fellow-officers-the portrait of the Prime Minister.
A wave of overwhelming fatigue turned my knees to water but I walked unsteadily over to the barred window behind the desk to look at the deep green lawn across the gravel drive below. The office itself was a long, low nondescript government building, yellow and characterless on the outside, off-white and sparklingly austere inside, flanked on both sides by car parks. A long, dark corridor led to offices on either side. Mine was near the end farthest from the entrance, the one at the end belonging to my chief. Outside my window, the drive turned sharply away past the lawn, leading arrow-straight to the barricaded gate 200 metres away, where men from companies Alpha and Delta, both on regular duty, filed in behind their JCOs (junior commissioned officers), thoroughly warmed up after an eight-kilometre jog across the rock-ridged hillocks outside the camp.
I felt ancient and used-up, thirty-six going on seventy-seven. The weariness just wouldn't go away: eternal vigilance took its pound of flesh, in my case a marriage on the verge of break-up and years of sleepless nights. For the past year I'd been second-in-command of the Special Operations Force (SOF) headquartered in Delhi, and for two years before that a battalion second-in-command at Siachen, where, crowded into posts seven kilometres apart, we watched warily the crack mountain soldiers of the Pakistani Army as they feinted and skirmished, keeping us on our toes for the war that never came but with the threat always hanging ominously over the blustery grey-white hillocks that bordered the glacier.
A draught brushed icily past my shoulder as the door behind opened once again. Framed in the doorway in the red-tinged sunlight coming in through the windows, his maroon beret slightly askew and sleeves rolled up despite the chill, square shouldered and with the faint beginnings of a paunch, stood my immediate superior and commander of the SOF, Colonel Ismail Qureishi.
Ismail was one of the finest field commanders I'd ever come across. He was an oddity, a faintly worried, immensely intellectual, aristocratic man for whom you found yourself doing things you wouldn't believe you'd do for anyone. On the field he was flamboyant. During the early training sessions, when the men were being pushed to their limits and beyond, Ismail always came along, doing his bit with the younger men on the field. He was, despite his forty-odd years, a remarkable athlete and a fine shot who put himself through a twenty-five-kilometre obstacle course at a pace most men found hard to equal.
Behind the aristocratic gentleness lay a will of iron and a steel-trap mind. No one ever complained of anything being held up for administrative reasons. Ismail was in his element leading this crack unit. He was one of the most decorated soldiers in the Army, and he hadn't got those medals being soft. He drove his men mercilessly when he considered it necessary. But more than anything else the man had quality, and a charisma, a presence you felt the moment he entered a room.
Senior officers, themselves senior commanders, spoke softly around him. But to the juniors-the JCOs, the NCOs and the other ranks-he was like God come down to earth. Distant yet admired, even loved. As his deputy I came in for some inevitable comparisons with him and almost always came off second best.
For all his apparent success and the pleasure he took in his work, there was a sadness to him I'd never been able to fathom. At one level he was the most secretive man I knew. No one ever got a glimpse of his life outside his work. A confirmed bachelor, he never spoke of his family. I'd never met any of his brothers-he'd mentioned once, casually, that he had some-or his parents.
Despite the differences, we understood each other well. In his eyes I saw the same shadows he saw in mine. Between the two of us, in the privacy of m