Rajat Vardhan
1
The banquet hall of the Trident Hyderabad buzzed with soft conversations and clinking glasses as some of India’s top defense scientists gathered to celebrate an internal milestone — Phase 2 clearance of Project Vajra. Among the crowd, Dr. Ranjan Mehta, lead propulsion scientist, raised his glass without much enthusiasm. His eyes drifted often toward the large digital clock above the dais, almost as though he were waiting for something. It was just past 9:30 p.m. when he excused himself from a conversation, stepped outside for some fresh air, and collapsed near the rose garden, clutching his chest. At first, onlookers thought he had tripped — there were no cries, no flailing, no dramatic fall. Just a quiet folding of limbs, like a machine losing power. By the time the hotel’s medical staff reached him, he was gone. The doctors called it a heart attack. The seventh such death in two months would’ve raised alarms. But this was the eighth. And still, no one had connected the dots — except one.
Across the country, in a dimly lit sub-basement office at the Intelligence Bureau in Delhi, Sameer Haksar stared at a pattern on his screen. A cool-headed analyst known for spotting signal anomalies and behavior sequences, Sameer had been casually observing the deaths for a few weeks, each flagged by the National Defense Health Monitoring Unit due to their affiliations with high-security projects. What caught his attention was not the deaths themselves — all seemed natural: cardiac arrest, anaphylaxis, stroke — but something more obscure buried within their mobile metadata. All eight scientists, from different labs, cities, and backgrounds, had received a call exactly 48 hours before their respective deaths. A call from an 8-digit number. That alone was bizarre — Indian telecom standards did not allow 8-digit mobile numbers. Stranger still, the call lasted exactly 00:00:01 seconds every time. And there was no voice — only static, followed by an inaudible tone. It could’ve been dismissed as a spam bot or a glitch, but Sameer had seen something like this before. A long time ago. During the first few years of his IB training, in a classified session on ghost networks and call-routing warfare.
By the next morning, the news of Dr. Mehta’s death had made a small appearance in an inside column of the Deccan Herald, with no mention of the larger implications. The DRDL maintained it was a tragic loss but unrelated to the project. However, ACP Revathi Naidu of the Hyderabad Cyber Crime Cell wasn’t entirely convinced. A week ago, she’d flagged a strange mobile ping near one of the DRDL scientist’s homes — a temporary signal that didn’t route through any telecom tower. She’d raised it with the telecom regulatory authority, who passed it up to the NTRO, who ignored it. Now, another death. Revathi didn’t believe in coincidences, and despite being told to stay within jurisdictional limits, she started digging deeper. She had no idea that her path would soon cross with Sameer’s — and that together, they would uncover something that would shake the very architecture of India’s defense communications.
At the IB, Sameer printed out the voice log from the most recent incident. As he amplified the static in the audio clip, he caught something — a brief, almost imperceptible pause between the tone and the end of the call. Running it through an old decryption program developed for foreign signal bursts, he watched as it spat out a set of numbers and letters. Coordinates. Roughly pointing somewhere along the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh. A place known in older military maps as Post 84 — a listening post abandoned after the Kargil War, thought to be decommissioned. The name triggered something deep in Sameer’s memory. A rumor. A ghost story told among rookies at IB: of a man who disappeared into the mountains, who spoke only in signal codes, and who claimed he could hear voices in the static. A legend they used to call — Veer Kaul.
2
Sameer Haksar stood at the edge of the IB’s Signal Analysis Lab, watching rows of live data streams flicker across black screens like digital rivers. The faint hum of cooling systems and the low chatter of analysts formed a strange kind of rhythm — one that he had grown accustomed to over the years. Despite his growing unease, his face remained impassive, eyes sharp behind rimless glasses. The coordinates extracted from the ghost call had pulled him into something much older than he liked to admit. Post 84. A name buried in India’s forgotten battle maps, but in the intelligence world, it was still spoken with restraint. There had been whispers during his training days — not in official lectures, but in smoke breaks, coffee lines, and late-night rotations. A ghost relay station. An experimental black-site communications hub set up during the Kargil War. Rumor had it the systems there had developed glitches — not mechanical, but almost… sentient. Signals that didn’t end. Messages that were never sent but were somehow received. And the one man who had supposedly understood it all had vanished into silence — Veer Kaul.
Sameer was never one for legends. He lived by patterns, not mythology. But even he couldn’t deny what he was seeing. Eight scientists — all part of Project Vajra — all dead within weeks, all after receiving the same one-second call. No pattern of voice. No registered number. No carrier path. But the same static tone, buried coordinates, and timing. A message, or a trigger? He requested access to Cold Layer Archives — a rarely visited basement vault housing physical files from declassified or unsolved operations. Inside, under layers of dust and redacted pages, he found Operation Suraksha-84. The file was thin. Too thin. One photo clipped inside showed a young officer with deep-set eyes and a half-smile: Veer Kaul, listed as RAW – Signal Intercept Division, status: Missing in Action, 1999. The last entry in the file was chilling — a voice log, distorted and barely audible: “He who listens too long, starts hearing the dead.” Sameer pocketed the photo and left. He now knew that the roots of the present case lay somewhere in a war that never truly ended.
Meanwhile in Hyderabad, ACP Revathi Naidu was fighting her own frustrations. The DRDL director was polite but firm — the deaths were being handled internally; police interference was not required. But Revathi had obtained access to one of the deceased scientist’s devices through an anonymous tip-off. A discarded burner phone found in a drawer at Dr. Mehta’s residence had one odd feature: it had received a single call from a number titled just 84. Revathi dialed it. Nothing. No ringing, no error message. Just a faint tone, followed by the call disconnecting. Her instincts screamed this was no ordinary prank. She ordered a trace and was told the signal never hit any Indian telecom tower. It had bounced off an older military satellite and was routed through something that didn’t exist on any registry. Her team was baffled. But she wasn’t. She reached out to an old mentor at NTRO who had mentioned a name once before — a signal specialist in Delhi with an unhealthy obsession for dead protocols. She called him, and for the first time, Revathi and Sameer spoke.
Their conversation was short but loaded. Sameer didn’t waste time. “What you’re dealing with is not telecom. It’s pre-telecom,” he said. “Think military black channel. Think Post 84.” Revathi responded with the phone’s metadata. Sameer ran it through his terminal and confirmed it — the exact same pattern, right down to the frame length. He paused for a moment, then said, “I’m coming to Hyderabad. But do one thing before I arrive. Ask your mobile signal team to check for pulse waves in a 20-kilometer radius around DRDL. Not signal strength. Pulse waves. You might just find something hiding between the frequencies.” Revathi, not fully understanding but trusting the urgency in his voice, complied. Within minutes, her tech officer called back, shaken — “Ma’am, there’s a heartbeat in the air. Every night. Same time. Same pulse. Like it’s listening to us.”
3
The heat of Hyderabad hit Sameer like a wall as he stepped out of Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, but he barely registered it. His mind was already deep in a maze of frequencies and forgotten call-routing maps. The car sent by ACP Revathi Naidu whisked him away towards the Cyber Crime Cell, where she awaited him with a tangle of half-decoded metadata, pulse signal logs, and a growing list of questions. When they met, there was no formal handshake, no exchange of pleasantries — only a fast-paced transfer of urgency. Revathi briefed him on the burner phone, the faint pulse detected each night near the DRDL complex, and the lack of any physical intrusion into the victims’ homes. Sameer listened intently, then opened his laptop and played the one-second audio clip again. Static. Flat, uneventful to the untrained ear. But to Sameer, it was layered — too perfectly layered. A mix of digital white noise, a subsonic pulse, and something else. Not human speech, but structured — like a machine whispering in a forgotten language.
They drove to the residence of the most recent victim — Dr. Mehta. The house had been sealed off by DRDL security, but Revathi had quietly arranged access through a loophole in jurisdiction. Sameer moved like a man tracing memories rather than evidence. In the study, he found a locked drawer that yielded to a simple tension wrench. Inside were scribbled notes, chemical equations, and an unusual slip of paper with just two elements: a set of prime numbers and the phrase “Signal isn’t transmission. It’s presence.” Sameer’s fingers tightened slightly around the page. It was a phrase Veer Kaul had once written during a signal theory lecture — a phrase Sameer had memorized, but never understood until now. They checked Mehta’s computer. Recently wiped. Forensics had no luck. But Sameer opened the system logs and noticed something odd — an unscheduled process had run for only 8 seconds two days before Mehta’s death. It didn’t match any known software or system behavior. Its log name was just 84.dll.
Sameer copied the file remnant onto his device and began running a layer-by-layer extraction. What emerged wasn’t code — it was a time-sequenced audio burst, masked as a software execution. He played it slowly, fragment by fragment. There was the usual static, but buried within, using a compression method from the early days of Cold War cryptography, was a tone that matched an abandoned communication frequency once used by Indian military intercept units. More specifically — Post 84’s intercept channel. Revathi watched in stunned silence as he slowly drew a connection that no one had seen — someone was using a dead military relay method to ping scientists involved in Project Vajra. And worse — the signals weren’t just pings. They were keys, triggering something. What, neither of them knew yet. “These calls are not warnings,” Sameer said grimly, “They’re executions. The system isn’t failing — it’s functioning exactly as designed.”
They returned to the DRDL perimeter at night to map the source of the pulse wave. Armed with a portable wide-spectrum scanner, Sameer walked slowly along the high-security fence. At 11:58 PM, the scanner beeped. A soft, rhythmic pulse filled his headphones — slow, deliberate, and chillingly familiar. It wasn’t just a signal; it was a listening node — something was actively scanning back. Revathi looked at him, unsettled. “Are we being watched?” she asked. Sameer nodded slowly. “Not watched. Mirrored. Something out there is echoing our own data back to us — like a shadow system. It’s feeding on us. And it’s been alive long before this project even began.” At that moment, a cold gust swept across the compound, and both of them instinctively turned toward the hills in the distance, where a red light blinked once in the darkness — then vanished.
4
The next morning brought no clarity, only heavier silence. Sameer and Revathi sat across a cluttered table at the Hyderabad Police Cyber Lab, staring at the decoded remnants of the 84.dll file. Most of it was fragmented beyond reconstruction, but one segment contained a string of characters — not binary, not hexadecimal, but Sanskrit transliterations using Vedic numerals. Revathi, puzzled, leaned back and asked, “Why would missile scientists encrypt their files with ancient Sanskrit codes?” Sameer replied quietly, “Because that’s how Project Vajra was built. Not just with engineering… but with fear.” Project Vajra wasn’t simply a missile development initiative — it was India’s first attempt at integrating decentralized, autonomous launch controls into a hypersonic delivery system. A way to ensure that if command was lost in wartime, the system could still respond. But for that, Vajra needed a silent, invisible command relay — something off-grid. Something like what Veer Kaul had once experimented with during Kargil: signal resonance through terrain-based frequency bounce. A system that didn’t require satellites or towers — just terrain, sound, and memory.
Revathi accessed a DRDL whitepaper from 2004 using her police credentials, classified but left poorly protected. In it, there was a mention of a prototype relay system called NidraNet — a passive resonance mesh, built to stay dormant and only wake upon receiving a specific frequency tone. Sameer’s eyes widened. “That’s what the calls are,” he said. “Not just killing scientists… they’re awakening the system.” But there was a problem. NidraNet was never officially built. Funding was pulled. Records stopped. It had disappeared into what Sameer knew was the Defense Ministry’s version of a digital black hole. And yet, eight scientists involved in Vajra were dead, and now someone had revived a communication relic thought to be long gone. Worse, someone had mapped the tone to exact coordinates — an execution schedule. One of the remaining victims was Dr. Nalini Bose, head of avionics, still alive. If the pattern held, she had less than 36 hours left. They tried to contact her, but her phone was unreachable. Revathi sent a team to her apartment, only to find it empty. No forced entry, no disturbance. Just an open laptop with one line on the screen: “84 listens. 84 remembers.”
They regrouped in Sameer’s hotel room. Sameer spread out a printout of India’s LAC-border signal grid across the bed. Revathi watched as he marked out locations of all eight scientists’ last known movements. Then he connected the dots. What emerged was chilling — a perfect signal loop forming a spiral, pointing directly at a location in eastern Ladakh. Sameer tapped the center with his pen. “Post 84,” he whispered. Revathi sat back, unnerved. “We’re not just dealing with assassinations,” she said. “We’re dealing with resurrection.” Sameer looked up. “Veer Kaul’s original project wasn’t just about intercepting enemy signals. It was about creating a ghost network — one that outlives its operators.” And now, someone — or something — had reactivated it. Whether it was Kaul himself, or someone using his methods, didn’t matter. What mattered was that the system had begun to self-trigger. And if Project Vajra’s command mesh was truly linked to NidraNet, India might be sitting on an autonomous weapons protocol without anyone left to stop it.
The next few hours were a blur. Sameer called in a favor from an old contact in Military Intelligence to access archived war-era surveillance data. Through grainy drone footage and outdated infrared sweeps, they found one constant — a faint heat signature blinking every night in the same Ladakhi gorge where Post 84 had once operated. It shouldn’t have been active. That region was officially abandoned after Kargil. No outposts, no stations, nothing. Yet there it was — a heartbeat in the snow, pulsing in time with the nightly static burst they detected in Hyderabad. Sameer packed his laptop. “We leave for Leh tonight,” he said. Revathi hesitated. “You really think we’ll find Veer Kaul there?” Sameer looked her dead in the eye. “If we don’t… we’ll find something older. And maybe more dangerous.”
5
The biting cold of Leh hit them like a knife. Thin air, rough winds, and an endless horizon of rock and snow made every breath feel earned. Sameer and Revathi, accompanied by a local army liaison, drove in a rugged military-grade SUV past rows of silent radar stations and forgotten bunkers. At 13,000 feet above sea level, the terrain felt alien — like the earth had decided to stop pretending to be hospitable. Awaiting them at the Signal Corps base was Colonel Aarti Singh, a stoic figure in olive green who carried the war in her eyes. Once a rising star in military intelligence during the Doklam standoff, she had since been reassigned to Ladakh’s quieter watchposts — too sharp for command, too silent for politics. Sameer introduced himself and got straight to the point. “We’re looking for Post 84.” Aarti’s expression froze for a moment. Then she motioned them to follow. “It’s not on any active map. But it exists. Not many go near it anymore. Some say the mountains there don’t echo back. Like sound disappears.”
They trekked out two hours later — a small team of four, including Lieutenant Tashi Namgyal, a young, bright-eyed engineer born and raised in Nubra Valley. As their convoy rumbled over frozen rivers and black ice trails, the silence grew heavier. Sameer scanned a frequency monitor while Revathi tried not to slip on the frost-covered rocks. Eventually, they reached a gorge flanked by jagged cliffs. At the end of it stood a rusted metal structure, half-buried under snow and gravel — the lost station. Post 84. Aarti approached first, unholstering her pistol by instinct. “The Army shut it down in 2001 after a short circuit caused a transmitter to burn out,” she said. “But the logs never stopped. It kept recording echoes. Like it was listening to something we couldn’t hear.” Inside, the air was stale but intact. They entered through a narrow metal door, descending into a cold concrete bunker, where dust-covered consoles and corroded wires greeted them like forgotten ghosts. But one machine still blinked — faint green pulses, slow and steady, like a heartbeat trapped in time.
Sameer approached the terminal. Despite the damage, it was still operational, running on a basic DOS-like interface. He typed a command prompt, and the screen scrolled with an endless string of logs — all labeled “INBOUND.” They weren’t voice recordings, but time-coded pulses — each precisely 48 hours before each scientist’s death. The final log, however, was different. It had a blinking red line: “EXECUTION KEY PENDING.” The file was labeled: 84-9.nal.bo. Sameer’s stomach dropped. “That’s Dr. Nalini Bose,” he whispered. She wasn’t dead yet — but the system had marked her. The signal had already been sent. They tried tracing the relay path, but the system was too old, patched into terrain-based reflections and atmospheric skips. “It’s not connected to the internet,” Revathi said, stunned. “It’s connected to the land.” Tashi, scanning nearby wiring, found a live power source running from an ancient turbine system down the cliff — still humming. “It’s not transmitting,” he said, “It’s… waiting.”
That night, they stayed in the bunker. Sameer couldn’t sleep. The silence felt unnatural. At 12:01 AM, the pulse came again — short, clean, mechanical. But this time, it wasn’t just a tone. The terminal flickered, and then — a voice. Distorted, robotic, but human underneath. “Eight keys turned. Ninth to fall. Listener remains.” Revathi stepped back. Aarti went for her radio, but it hissed with dead air. Sameer stared at the screen. The voice had left behind a signature — a waveform embedded in the tone. A signal fingerprint. It matched an archived voiceprint from a file long thought obsolete. Veer Kaul. “He’s alive,” Sameer said, his voice barely a whisper. “Or someone wants us to believe he is.” And outside the bunker, in the frozen gorge, a single red dot blinked again — watching. Listening. Waiting.
6
Sameer arrived in Hyderabad’s Defence Electronics Research Laboratory under the radar, thanks to a favour from Major Anita Mehra, who had discreet access to internal military documentation. Posing as a systems analyst, he maneuvered into the satellite communications wing, the last known operational zone for Dr. Dhiraj Kaul — the sixth scientist who had died from a “brain aneurysm” while on a walk. Sameer scanned through Kaul’s access logs, noting that he’d worked extensively on Project KAVACH — a sub-system designed to prevent signal jamming of India’s missile guidance systems. The server logs were clean — too clean. No edits, no diagnostic errors, not even software test iterations for two days before Kaul’s death. It was as if the system had been wiped in surgical precision.
Back in his hotel room, Sameer studied the GPS trail of the 8-digit number. He used signal triangulation data from an independent telecom surveillance array — buried in an old case study from a military hacking contest — to trace one transmission bounce. The trail was unnatural: it looped through an offshore route, bounced off a server in Gilgit-Baltistan, and then dropped off the grid, suggesting use of a stealth signal routing protocol. This wasn’t just some inside sabotage; it was external, high-level cyber warfare designed to appear as internal accidents. The line between national infrastructure and private access was thinner than he imagined. He made a note: Someone wants India’s missile system blind — not destroyed, but deafened.
He visited the home of Dr. Kavita Rao, the neuroscientist who had overseen neural stress analysis for missile launch operators. Her death had been ruled an accidental fall, yet her files too had disappeared from her secured lab system. Sameer met her widower, who whispered between tears that Kavita had been paranoid in her final days, convinced that her phone had been tapped and her biometric locks duplicated. Sameer’s skin prickled. There were no records of tampering, and yet… so much was missing. She had told her husband that “the war they lost in ’99 is still being fought — just without bullets.” That cryptic sentence lodged in Sameer’s head like shrapnel.
Back at his desk, he compiled a timeline. The deaths were spaced in intervals, each two days apart, always after that ghost call. Eight scientists — eight signals — one message. But what was the pattern? Why these eight? His eyes caught something at the bottom of a scanned confidential memo from 2016, stamped “LADAKH: OP-84 CLASSIFIED.” A mission name? Or a code? When he searched deeper into internal records, nothing came up. No hits on “OP-84,” not even redacted ones. That level of erasure only occurred in missions with international ramifications. Sameer realised this was no longer just about missile sabotage — it was about a ghost operation buried by time, being exhumed by invisible enemies. The answer, it seemed, wasn’t in Hyderabad anymore — it lay beneath the cold silence of Ladakh’s rocky terrain.
7
Sameer stepped out into the biting chill of Leh’s morning air, the mountains looming like silent sentinels around him. He had arrived under the radar, with no IB entourage, using a forged ID under the name “Rahul Dutta,” supposedly a geology researcher. His contact in Ladakh, an ex-Army signal operator named Norbu Tashi, waited for him with a dusty jeep. Norbu, a quiet man with sharp eyes and a limp from the 1999 Kargil conflict, didn’t talk much but knew the terrain like the back of his hand. As they drove through the rocky landscape towards a now-decommissioned military listening post code-named “Echo Point,” Sameer scanned the ridgelines, half-expecting a drone or sniper to emerge. The silence wasn’t comforting—it was too deliberate, too sterile.
The listening post sat carved into the side of a forgotten mountain slope, its antennas rusted and dish arrays dismantled, but Norbu assured him that the underground command room was still functional — maintained unofficially by a few loyal veterans who believed the government had abandoned it too soon. Inside, the air was musty but electric, still faintly alive with static. Sameer connected his encrypted laptop to the facility’s mainframe. He had pulled a private satellite ping from the day before the first scientist’s death — a triangulated signal anomaly traced faintly to Ladakh. Using spectral analysis, he filtered out environmental noise and found a pattern: an untraceable 8-digit signal routing through a shortwave spectrum, bouncing off weather satellites, and somehow disguising itself as a local mobile transmission. It wasn’t magic — just cold, calculated military-level rerouting.
Norbu stared at the screen and muttered, “That’s not Indian protocol. Looks PLA — Chinese.” Sameer’s heart raced. He accessed a secondary archive — a set of encrypted transmissions from 1999, stored by accident during the Kargil skirmish. They were supposed to have been deleted, but Norbu had kept a copy. Among them was a report about a captured Chinese operative caught planting communication devices near the Line of Actual Control. That operative had disappeared before interrogation. But one message remained in the records: a codename — “Operation 84.” Until now, no one knew what it meant. Suddenly, Sameer understood. It wasn’t just about murder. It was a long-dormant plan — 84 targeted calls over time, disabling India’s scientific edge without ever firing a bullet.
A sudden static burst on the console caught Sameer off guard. A faint signal was coming through — not from the outside, but from inside Echo Point. Someone was transmitting now. Norbu bolted upright, grabbing an old field radio. “We’re compromised,” he hissed. The ground vibrated faintly. A detonation — somewhere above. Sameer backed up his data to a portable drive and yanked it free just as the power died. Smoke began to seep through the vents. Norbu led him through a hidden tunnel used during the war — they emerged a kilometer downhill, shaken but intact. Looking back, the entrance to Echo Point had collapsed. Whoever was behind the calls knew Sameer had found the source — and was willing to bury it. But now, the ghosts of Kargil whispered a warning through the mountains. This was bigger than he imagined. And the next target… wasn’t a scientist. It was someone much higher.
8
The biting wind of Ladakh whipped across the barren terrain as Sameer stepped off the army transport jeep near the fenced perimeter of Listening Post 6BR. Nestled between jagged mountains, the post was an innocuous cluster of concrete buildings camouflaged in snow-tone grays, hidden from both satellites and suspicion. Lieutenant Colonel Arvind Rathore greeted him with a firm nod and led him through a biometric checkpoint into the operations hub. Inside, multiple screens tracked global frequencies, encrypted transmissions, and thermal satellite feeds. “You won’t find this place on any map,” Rathore muttered, as they walked past the hum of machines and the steady hum of wariness. Sameer had read about such ‘ghost posts’ — built during Kargil, maintained in shadows — but this one felt like it still breathed history.
Rathore pulled up a secure digital archive. “Two months ago, we intercepted signal anomalies between Telengana and a known Chinese relay balloon over Gilgit,” he explained. “The signal was layered — voice, data, and something we haven’t decoded yet. But the voice data pinged civilian towers around Hyderabad at night.” Sameer’s eyes narrowed. “Could this be how the scientists got the call?” Rathore nodded. “We traced the phantom number you found — 86241397 — not to a telecom tower, but to a microwave burst that matched the same anomaly.” It wasn’t just hacking anymore; this was cross-border tech warfare using India’s own sky. Rathore pointed to a blurred waveform. “Whatever they said on that line — it triggered something.” Sameer knew then: the number wasn’t a number. It was a key.
Later that evening, Sameer was taken to an underground vault beneath the listening post. Rows of archived communication tapes sat labeled by year. Rathore handed him a dusty reel marked May 1999 – Kargil. “You might want to hear this,” he said, cryptically. As the reel spun and static gave way to faint voices, Sameer heard something chilling — a voice reading out names. Familiar names. Seven of the eight scientists. And one more — yet to die. “This isn’t possible,” Sameer gasped. “These people weren’t even in the project back then.” Rathore grimaced. “That’s what we thought. But what if the plan began then? A long game. Decades of silence. A sleeper code.” It hit Sameer — this wasn’t just retaliation; this was a delayed strike. Someone had stored names like data, waiting for a future to arrive.
That night, as Sameer stood on the helipad under a moonless sky, he realized how deep this conspiracy ran. Not just missiles, not just secrets — time itself had been weaponized. A dead voice from 1999 had reached across decades to execute precision assassinations in 2025. He looked toward the Chinese border, just 60 km away, wondering how much more had already been heard — or said — by ears hiding in thin air. Operation 84 wasn’t just a series of deaths. It was a code buried in war, resurrected through frequency, and executed with surgical silence. And the last name on the tape — it wasn’t his. But it belonged to someone still alive.
9
The cold silence of the Ladakh night was broken only by the crackle of encrypted radio. Sameer Haksar stood in the control room of the clandestine military outpost near Rezang La, watching as the intercepted transmissions decoded on-screen in real-time. The surveillance equipment here wasn’t standard military issue — these were retrofitted Chinese signal routers disguised in Indian casing. “GhostNet’s backdoor,” murmured Colonel Rathore, pointing to the strange protocol signatures. The listening post wasn’t just intercepting communications; it was being used to reroute phantom calls — including the ones made to the dead scientists. The team had uncovered the hub of the operation, but the true operator was still hidden behind layers of proxy channels, military-grade obfuscation, and geographic firewalls.
Sameer stepped away from the screen and reviewed the trace patterns. “They aren’t just sending signals,” he said. “They’re injecting behavioral triggers.” Before each scientist died, the unknown caller played an audio packet — embedded with specific sonic patterns. The theory was speculative, but if correct, the audio acted as a neuro-trigger in previously implanted subliminal programs — something planted months or years ago, perhaps during innocuous government workshops or trainings. Dr. Shrivastava, Sameer’s old professor in neurocybernetics, confirmed the feasibility. The missile project wasn’t the target — the scientists themselves were. Human assets with deep subconscious vulnerabilities, turned into self-destruction devices at the flip of a call.
Meanwhile, in a buried section of the outpost, codebreaker Naina Iqbal uncovered an outgoing log — one signal had just been sent out moments before they arrived. It wasn’t directed toward Hyderabad but to a satellite node somewhere near the Line of Actual Control. Sameer cross-referenced the frequency with archived data from the Kargil conflict — it matched a rogue Chinese signal triangulated back in 1999. “It’s not just cyber warfare anymore,” Sameer whispered. “It’s legacy warfare. Buried operations resurfacing two decades later.” The implications were staggering. The missile scientists were targets because of what they had inside their memories — residual exposure to Cold War-era espionage tech repurposed for modern neural warfare.
As they prepped the final trace operation — code-named Firewall — Sameer’s phone buzzed. A restricted number: eight digits. Everyone froze. “Do not answer,” barked Rathore, but Sameer did. A sound emerged: not a voice, but an ambient low-frequency hum, like the inside of a power station. Naina recorded it instantly, running a real-time waveform analysis. Sameer held the phone away, eyes twitching slightly. “It’s like it’s trying to… tune something,” he said, voice distant. Rathore ended the call by crushing the device under his boot. “We’ve found their channel,” he growled, “now we bring it down.” Operation Firewall was greenlit: they would transmit a disruptor frequency on the same channel — a sonic firewall meant to corrupt the transmission system, trace its final origin, and burn the network. The real threat wasn’t the weapon they were building — it was the invisible war being fought with forgotten ghosts, dormant implants, and weaponized memory.
10
The biting cold of Ladakh clawed into Sameer Haksar’s bones as he descended into the steel-walled bunker beneath the now-abandoned military listening post, disguised cleverly as a defunct meteorological station near the Siachen Glacier. The place was operational, alright — just cloaked deep in bureaucracy and secrecy. Colonel Raghav Joshi, who had finally declassified “Operation Glacier Veil,” walked him past old monitors, some still flickering with encrypted data streams. “This isn’t just a listening post,” Joshi said grimly, “it was a ghost relay. During the Kargil conflict, we built this as a one-way uplink to monitor Chinese intercepts— but it evolved. And someone’s hijacked it.” Sameer’s heart sank as he saw the evidence: a map showing relay paths that led from this post to Hyderabad. Someone had used this post to mirror call routes, bounce ghost numbers, and trigger subtle assassinations through tampered pacemakers, manipulated allergens, and thermal overrides — all hidden in plain sight.
The deeper they went, the more disturbing it became. The bunker’s logs revealed data packets rerouted through Chinese satellites and re-entering Indian telecom infrastructure through spoofed access points. The same 8-digit number — 83002941 — had appeared in untraceable call metadata, its origin wiped with military-grade encryption. Joshi handed Sameer a decrypted file: “OPERATION 84.” Sameer’s throat dried. Operation 84 wasn’t about protecting a missile project — it was originally conceived during the Kargil War as a rogue fallback plan to sabotage Indian tech in the event of internal compromise. But someone had reactivated it. And someone from inside the Defense Research Wing had fed its coordinates to the enemy. The chilling part? Sameer recognized a name in the original clearance list — Vikram Dhawan, the now-deceased Deputy Chief of DRDO. All deaths, all ghost calls, tied back to one forgotten cold-war code.
Outside, the frozen wind howled as Colonel Joshi handed Sameer a secure SAT-phone. “The man who revived Operation 84 is still active,” Joshi said. “We believe he’s using an alias: Major S. Dutta. We think he’s embedded inside either the Northern Command or Eastern Naval Intelligence.” Sameer’s mind raced. It wasn’t over. In fact, the ten scientist deaths were just the first phase — a distraction. Operation 84’s second phase aimed to sabotage the test launch of Agni-VI, India’s most ambitious MIRV-capable missile, which was scheduled in less than 36 hours from Wheeler Island. If the core algorithm or propulsion module had been tampered with, the missile could misfire — or worse, crash into Indian territory during test. Time was running out, and Sameer knew the enemy had played long and deep. But he had the edge now: truth, and the rogue’s true identity.
As he prepared to leave Ladakh, Sameer received a chilling message via secure drop: “Some silences kill slower than bullets. See you on the launchpad. – S.D.” Back in Hyderabad, agencies scrambled to secure all systems, but the deeper threat wasn’t digital — it was psychological. A mole still lived within the very nerve centers of India’s defense. The final scene unfolded at Wheeler Island under heavy security, as Sameer watched the launch with a heart pounding louder than the countdown. Seconds before ignition, a manual override was triggered. The operation was aborted. On surveillance footage, one figure had walked near the command trailer — a man in military uniform, never seen entering. The footage glitched. And just like that, he vanished. Operation 84 was halted, but the war in the shadows had only just begun.
End
