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Almost all of the men here were about his age. Most were even balding, as he had started to in the last few years.
                  “You disagree?” One of the older men said from his seat at the couch.
                  “Not really,” Basu said after consideration. “Just that I expected Makki’s boys to be smarter.”
                  “You are disappointed that they only managed to kill what looks like a few thousand people? And irradiated northern Mumbai?” The old man said with emotion bristling in his voice. Basu ignored the anger in the room. As director of the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW , as India’s premier external intelligence agency was known, his job required objectivity and detachment. His colleagues in the room were struggling with it, though. He decided not to poke that emotion further for now.
                  “So we are pinning this one on Makki then? Why?” Basu asked as he changed gears and put a mental note to later investigate his own thoughts on the matter. “Just because this looks like the result of a similar terrorist attack in 2008? Isn’t that too convenient?”
                  “Well,” one of the other senior people replied, “Muzammil is already talking to the media from his hiding hole outside of Lahore and bragging about it. Like he did last time.”
    The man on couch grunted: “Those bastards are like leeches , taking credit for the kind of shit that others don’t want to take responsibility for!”
                  Basu continued to puff his cigarette as he watched the conversation flow in front of him.
                  “I take it that none of the actual operatives lived to tell the tale?” The man on the couch said again. Basu nodded agreement: “The bastards took down one of our coast-guard aircraft and a patrol vessel that attempted to stop them from reaching Mumbai. The crew of that vessel sacrificed themselves to save the citizens of the city!”
                  “Shot down an aircraft?” The old man interjected.
                  “One of the coast-guard patrol aircraft,” the analyst noted from the papers in front of him. “Let’s see…ah, okay. One of the Dornier-228 type aircraft. Coastal-security had vectored them to the inbound vessel to investigate. The aircraft made contact and ordered the vessel to stop its approach. The crew notified their command that the vessel was highly suspicious and asked a coast-guard ship to be deployed to assist in verification. The crew spent fifteen minutes buzzing the boat and collecting video before they were shot down by an onboard shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile…”
                  “Wait,” the man on the couch said as he leaned forward. “We have the video of the ship firing the missile?”
                  “They were streaming it to coastal-security ops-center at the time. They have the audio and video of it at naval headquarters at the moment,” the analyst noted and then cleared his throat. “Poignant stuff, the last few moments of that audio.”
                  “I bet,” Basu noted neutrally. “Continue.”
                  “Well, the coast-guard ship made it to the vessel while it was still about two-dozen kilometers away from Mumbai harbor. Shots were fired and they disabled the Pakistani boat’s engine, causing it to become dead in the water…”
                  “And then the cornered LET bastards blew up their cargo prematurely.” Basu concluded and extinguished the cigarette in the tray before continuing: “Gentlemen, the use of the surface-to-air missile gives away the game, if you ask me. There is no way that that Makki or Muzammil could have managed these resources without the support of our usual suspects in the Inter-Services-Intelligence. The question is why the escalation to nuclear weapons? Knowing the