Babar realized he had lost the Eicher van, which was supposed to stay only a few hundred metres behind his Wagon R cab, and decided to take a U-turn to find out what was wrong.

As the cab took the next U-turn, Babar’s eyes wandered down the highway and he saw the Eicher van standing on its head a little distance ahead. Policemen carrying AK-47s and pistols were swarming around it. An ambulance stood near the van. He could see the four fidayeen in the back of the ambulance. They seemed dazed and hurt.

The precious cache of weapons, ammunition and explosives they had brought to Mumbai for the operation was strewn all over the highway. The arms were being collected, piece by piece, and taken to a blue police wagon parked nearby. The sight filled Babar with a sense of doom and acute disappointment. All the planning and effort behind the operation had come to naught, he thought.

The operation was blown. He needed to retreat and retrieve whatever was not lost yet, he thought. He was worried about how Abu-Lakhvi would react to this debacle.

‘Drop me at the Bhilad check post on the Gujarat border. My friends are stuck, one of them has fallen ill there,’ Babar told the cab driver coolly.

After crossing the Bhilad check post, Babar hired another cab for Surat airport, Gujarat’s second busiest after Ahmedabad. The cab took around two hours to reach the Surat airport, which was around 95 kilometres away. Once there, Babar bought a ticket for a noon flight to Delhi. He used fake identity documents in the name of Dipankar Bose as his earlier assumed identity, Shrikant Joshi, had been exposed in the IIS&T attack.

On reaching Delhi, he would catch a Nepal Airlines flight for Kathmandu, his operational base. From there, he would take an Emirates flight to Abu Dhabi, and then switch to another flight to reach Karachi. By taking such a circuitous route, Babar would be doing what he had been trained to do by the LeT – avoiding any links with Pakistan to the extent possible.

Hungry and shaken, Babar bought a coffee and a chicken wrap from an eatery at Surat airport after purchasing the ticket. The disastrous end to the ambitious operation had left him dazed. He knew there would be consequences in Karachi.

More than the loss of the cache, which must be worth at least Rs 2–3 crore, Abu-Lakhvi would feel the loss of the four trained fidayeen. Babar knew the enormous resources and manpower Abu-Lakhvi spent to prepare just one fidayeen.

But for now, he focused on sipping his coffee and tucking into the chicken wrap. It gave him a moment of respite from the crisis.