They were three-man tanks: a driver, a gunner, and a comms man who doubled as a second gunner. He ran toward the nearest of the big tanks. He did not need to wait for the rest of his group to catch up so he could steal one; he could perform all three tasks with ease himself, but he would, however, need a moment to break into the well-secured tank and load its mechanical loaders with explosive shells. Sure enough, by the time he was ready, some of his now spread-out force had caught up with him. He shouted for one of them to man the 12.7mm machine gun on the top of the tank and for the rest to form up behind him, and without further ado he set off.

He wielded the tank more like a car than the multi-ton beast it was, not aiming the tank’s cannon independently but instead veering the entire tank to point at the various pockets of resistance they encountered as they made their way toward the back of the armory. He needed to spread a little confusion, to make the Pakistanis feel like they were under attack by a much larger force. So in between taking out outposts of Pakistani soldiers along their route, he also lobbed shells out over the base to land apparently indiscriminately. He had fifty explosive shells in the tank’s loaders and he disposed of forty-two of them in less than ten minutes, sending fire and fear to fall like rain throughout the base.

Hassim crouched against the side of a building hiding from intense gunfire. His team was pinned by large-caliber fire being laid down from two entrenched machine-gun posts near the armory. He had dispatched two groups to try and flank the gunners but they were well dug in. More than fifty of his men had already fallen and they had only been inside the base for about twenty minutes. He could not keep this up much longer. He was well inside the camp and enemy forces were starting to come at him from every direction.

Hassim heard the tank approaching from behind the posts and shuddered. Dear Allah, the tank must be coming from where Shahim’s force had been. So that had been the source of the explosions. It had been the sound of Shahim and his men dying. Very well, if their leader had faced one of the tanks, he and his followers would follow him. Screaming a battle cry at the top of his lungs, he sprung from his position just as a shell from the tank hammered into the first machine-gun post that had blocked his way. The explosion rocked him back, followed a moment later by another as the tank swung bodily on the other machine-gun team in their path.