According to All India Radio’s 8 a.m. news bulletin, a fierce encounter had broken out between the Indian Army’s Rashtriya Rifles and LeT terrorists following a search and cordon operation around Nagrota. The search operation had been launched on the basis of intelligence that five recently arrived Pakistani terrorists were being given shelter in a village, Shakarpur.

But Babar was not waiting for the provisions truck to arrive, like the other hotel guests. Instead, he was waiting for Abu Saqlain. It was 14 March. There were just eleven days to go for LeT’s attack on the Naigaon complex of the BVP.

Losing no time, Abu-Muzammil had on 13 March itself, the day the attack was conceived, sent Babar with Rehmat Shah, one of the attackers who had led the attack on IIS&T and had survived to tell the tale, to Jammu by flight.

Meanwhile, at Himalayan Paradise, Babar had booked two more rooms, telling the hotel’s manager that he was part of a ‘baraat’ party for a 15 March wedding in the city. Al-Wali had used a satellite phone to call up LeT’s Kashmir-based divisional commander, Abu Saqlain, who looked after Poonch and Rajouri, to deliver three fidayeen. One fidayeen, Rehmat, was there already with Babar for the Naigoan operation.

Al-Wali had directed Saqlain to give a cache of arms, ammunition and explosives – fifteen AK-47s, 35 kilos of the deadly military-grade explosive RDX and thirty grenades – concealed inside a medium-sized goods transport vehicle to Babar in Jammu.

‘No problem, I will provide fidayeen and the materials by tomorrow in Jammu. I will draw from a stockpile that we created two years ago, inside a mountain cave deep inside a Poonch forest,’ Saqlain had told Abu-Muzammil.

Since 1990, when LeT cadres began infiltrating into Jammu and Kashmir, the Lashkar had been creating several clandestine stores of weapons like AK-47s, explosives like RDX and grenades for use in their operations. Such stores optimized efficiency and provided weapons and explosives instantly for an operation. Otherwise, men and weapons were sent to India from Pakistan and Bangladesh via Kashmir, Nepal or Sri Lanka, which took time and involved a lot of risk.

At 3.45 p.m., Saqlain finally called Babar to inform him that he had arrived along with four fidayeen and asked for the keys to the rooms that Babar had booked for them.

As Babar began mumbling his thanks to Saqlain, the latter laughed and said, ‘I am happy to be of any help to you, brother. You must be up to something truly big!’

Babar was unsure if Saqlain was taunting him about his last two failures, but then realized that in the secrecy-obsessed LeT, the left hand did not know what the right hand was up to.

‘Thank you, commander sahib,’ he said warmly.

Saqlain and the four fidayeen – Sakib, Saquib, Rehmat and Faroukh, from Gujranwala in western Punjab – had arrived in Jammu in a dark green Eicher van.