Books: Bunker 13

by Aniruddha Bahal. This book starts out intense, rapidly becomes bizarre, eventually goes over the top, and just when you think it can't get any more twisted, does a double back flip, reverses course and becomes completely insane. Don't get me wrong, it's a great story and it takes you along on this wild roller coaster. The cover gives you a good idea of what's in store. The picture is slightly out of focus, like it might be one of those 3-D images you need the red and blue glasses to see correctly. I even tried some. They didn't help.

The story follows a journalist. It starts with him signing up for paratrooper training so he can do an "in depth" story for his magazine, a promotional piece for the military. He obviously has ulterior motives, though we are not quite sure what they are. As the plot thickens, it turns out he was previously involved in the military and has acquired some of their nastier skills, kind of like an Indian James Bond. If there is anything wrong with the story, it is the way author brings in previous training any time he needs the character to do something extraordinary.

The story goes all over India but is primarily about the LIC (Low Intensity Conflict) in Kashmir along the LoC (Line of Control) between Pakistan and India. Kashmir is kind of like Western Colorado. Lots of mountains, and the principal city, Srinagar, is at an altitude of one mile. It has a population of pert near a million.

The story is also about gun running and drug smuggling on a large scale, tons of weapons, tons of heroin and tens of millions of dollars.

There was one element in the story that I didn't quite buy. It is similar to my complaint about "Vantage Point": the ability of an Islamic terrorist organization to plant a mole deep inside their enemy. This is something we used to worry about with the Soviets. Theory was that the Soviets were training people to act like Americans and then come and live in America and pretend to be Americans, until they were called upon to do something for mother Russia. Seems a little hard to believe that terrorists would have the patience to develop a deep cover sleeper. They seem to be more of the instant gratification persuasion. But hey, everyone likes a good conspiracy theory, don't they?


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Update January 2011. The area shown on the map is about 135 miles wide.

Updated (July 10, 2010) note about the picture: it used to link to the website where I found it, but then they dropped that page, so they picture disappeared from the post. I dug through my archives and found a copy, but who should get the credit for it? I did a quick search on Google, but nobody else seems to have as good a copy. Amazon has one, but it has some of their blurbing in the picture as well. So, no credit for the photo.

Update October 2016 replaced missing picture.