Ismail asked Solanki to steer the MV Kuber till it reached a point just four nautical miles off Mumbai. It was then 4 p.m. on 26 November. Beyond the turquoise sea waters, the drone of the fishing boat’s engine and the smell of dead fish in the air, the outline of a skyscraper began taking shape amid the haze. As the trawler cruised towards the shore, the cherry-coloured dome by the skyscraper could be seen too by Kasab, the stocky young man leaning on the deck’s metal railings.

The sun escaped from the clouds, sprinkling gold dust over the skyscraper and the bud-shaped dome. The wind howled, the waves splashed against the boat, but the sight hushed the otherwise boisterous Kasab into silence. A group of seagulls flying by the boat squawked.

Kasab let out a shout. ‘Bombay! We have reached Bombay! I can see the Taj Mahal Hotel and the adjoining tower too!’

Ismail picked up his AK-47, pointed it towards Mumbai’s shoreline and let out a burst of fire.

The seven Lashkar attack controllers, who sat in a specially equipped command centre in Karachi, asked the team to wait till dark before going ashore. The fidayeen transferred to an inflatable dinghy with an outboard motor and set off for the Mumbai shore at 7.15 p.m. They reached Mumbai’s Budhwar Park beach at 8.30 p.m.

‘Ask the navy and the coast guard to be on the lookout for a boat or a motor launch having a satellite phone,’ Shekhar instructed a senior Mumbai police officer involved in the 26/11 fightback.

‘The interception of the terror instructions being given by top Lashkar bosses and one “Major General” from Karachi to their ten fidayeen in Mumbai helped the CTC and Indian security forces eventually neutralize the LeT’s terror attack on Mumbai.

‘The tapping was a watershed event. It laid bare before the entire world the Pakistani state’s deep, direct participation in sponsoring terror in India through its tools like the LeT like never before,’ Shekhar told a senior bureaucrat in the Prime Minister’s Office a day after NSG commandos had killed eight of the ten Lashkar terrorists who had set sail from Karachi on 22 November. As part of India’s fightback during the 26/11 attack, a team of NSG commandos was flown in on a chopper from a naval base and dropped atop Nariman House in south Mumbai, which housed a Jewish institution, amid heavy gunfire. It was the first airborne operation the NSG conducted in an urban, densely populated theatre. Two LeT terrorists, Babar Imran alias Abu Aakasha and Nasir alias Abu Umar, were killed in the operation at Nariman House.

In 2012, Kasab was hanged after a court that conducted his trial found him guilty of crimes, including multiple murders during the 26/11 attacks that killed 167 and injured over 1,200.