I've been writing a military thriller about a confrontation between India and China, and would like your opinion and tips on how to improve the vermilisitude or realism of it all.

The scene below describes a feint raid by three squadrons of the PLAAF on North East India, and the manner in which the Indians respond to it. I have a lot of friends who are ex Indian military (including a few fighter pilots) who have given me tips on technical issues, but I'd like an international viewpoint on how it sounds - and whether you have any expert tips on how to make it more believable.

Thanks for any help!

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It was just past five in the evening, Indian Standard Time, when the initial signs of Chinese air activity were picked up by the Indian Air Force’s mobile observation posts along the McMahon Line that represented the border between the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh and Tibet. The Mobile Observation Posts (MOPs) which consisted of two man teams armed with nothing more than night vision binoculars, infrared sensors, an aircraft identification booklet and a VHF radio remained India’s first and most critical line of air defence even in the 21st century, and even as the Indian Air Force (IAF) rapidly attempted to modernize itself.

For the two men who made up MOP Alpha Lima Fifteen, it had been a bleak and uneventful two months of being holed up in a bunker in the side of Peak 5850, and recording the coming and going of civilian aircraft at the Chinese airport at Nyingchi Mainling – located barely 20 kilometres north of the border with India. Their bunker, located a tenacious forty kilometres trek north from the last asphalted road that led from the nearest Indian town of Yingkiong, offered them an unobstructed view of the Yarlung Zanbo river valley in the Chinese side, which with its criss-crossing highways and rapidly developing settlements posed a sharp contrast to the primitive infrastructure uninhabited mountain-scape on the Indian side. On the Chinese side were housing layouts, army barracks and industrial complexes all linked by a network of roads, while on the Indian side were nothing more than a handful of half deserted shanty towns threaded together precariously with a single narrow broken road that winded through the mountain slopes.

So far, the only air activity that MOP Alpha Lima 15 had dutifully recorded and transmitted to the command post had been the solitary Air China A319 flight from Chengdu that landed every morning at six and which took off promptly an hour later. Their command post was the located at a line of radar pickets some 150 km south of their position in the Indian state of Assam. Then there was the occasional Mi-17 or Harbin Z-6 helicopter operated by the PLA’s 2nd Army Aviation Regiment based at Lhasa meandering harmlessly through the peaks far inside Chinese territory, and which nevertheless had to be reported with detailed coordinates, altitudes and bearings.

But today, the thankless and wearisome job had taken an unexpected turn of excitement, when the two men were alerted from their slumber late in the evening by the sounds of several roaring jets in the distance. Stumbling out of their bunker into the biting cold and the fading light, the men checked their tripod mounted Infrared Search and Track Reconnaissance (ISTR) scanner and gasped in amazement before grabbing their VHF radio receiver and alerting the command post. There, marked by several hazy red blips across the dark scope of the German manufactured ISTR scanner were the tell-tale signs of several Chinese fighter jets, approaching their position from the North-West.

“Alpha Lima 15 to Command Echo Five! Message alert red!” The terse message was relayed by VHF radio with the accompanying alert code that would assign it maximum priority. “Counting sixteen bogeys at twenty eight, twelve zero eight dot nine three and ninety-three, thirty four, one-two dot seven four, bearing ten o’clock, altitude 4000m, estimated speed 450 knots! Bogeys appear to be following the river valley towards Lima-Zulu-Yankee airport.”

At an altitude of just over 4000m above mean sea level, the 16 Chinese aircrafts were just below the line of mountain peaks that separated China from India, and would have been undetectable to ground based radars on the Indian side.

The message raised a flurry of activity on the Indian side. More than a hundred kilometres to the south of MOP Alpha Lima 15, radar clusters located at Chabua, Jorhat, Guwahati and Tezpur in the state of Assam increased the output power on their Soviet era ST68U and P-18/P-19 radars and lit up the mountain peaks north of them, creating a line of virtual radar floodlights that stretched from Bhutan in the west to Myanmar in the east. Along the narrow passes and gaps between the line of formidable Himalayan peaks, and especially at the 20km wide Tsangpo Gorge that separated the two realms, short range Indian made INDRA radars lit up the mountainsides and waited for targets to appear.

“Identification! Joker! Joker! Sixteen numbers Joker!” The MOP continued its message, the sounds of the jets evident in the background in spite of the static.

Joker was the vaguely cynical code assigned by the IAF to describe the Chengdu J-7 Air-Guards that formed the bulk and backbone of China’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force. But even as tension built up across the four fully alerted radar pickets across Assam, the radar screens stayed blank, the enemy aircraft staying at extremely low altitudes and well hidden behind the screen of mountain peaks. Meanwhile 500 kilometres away from the MOP bunker, in Shillong, the message about the Chinese military aircraft flying in such vicinity to the Line of Control had just reached the Air Defence Control Centre (ADCC) located there, and the gear wheels of India’s air defences began to move into place.

Shillong, the capital of the Indian state of Meghalaya, just west of Assam, served as the headquarters of the IAF’s Eastern Air Command, and the nucleus of its Air Defence Ground Environment System (ADGES) for the North East of India. As soon as the message was received from the radar pickets, the massive French made cold war era THD1955 radar sitting atop a pyramidal tower adjoining the ADCC building increased its output from the regular 2MW to an astounding 15MW, bringing the whole of Assam, Bhutan, Arunachal Pradesh and large swathes of Chinese Tibet under its powerful glare – but, still, the radar screens stayed blank and devoid of any activity on the Chinese side. All that it received was the peripheral green glare around the scopes that came from the radar beams bouncing off the distant peaks along the international border.

“Jokers climbing!” The voice of the MOP spotter was now on the public address system inside the Control Centre room, as tense radar operators looked up from their banks of computer screens at the large panel displays on the main wall.

“Altitude climbing – 4100m… 4200m… bearing direction south-east-east, altitude 4400m!” The voice went on, like an excited commentator at a soccer match before the damning proclamation hit them. “Sixteen Numbers Joker are in No-Fly-Zone! I repeat! Sixteen numbers Joker are in No-Fly-Zone!”

The spotter then proceeded to read out the coordinates of the enemy aircraft as they streaked up from the valley and soared over the mountain peaks. ‘No-Fly-Zone’ was the term used to describe the 10km buffer airspace on either side of the international border that was supposed to be off-limits to military air activity – as agreed upon in the Sino-Indian treaty signed in 1996.

Almost instantly, all the radar screens across the region registered the Chinese aircrafts and lit them up brightly as they climbed up and above the mountain ranges swooped out towards the border and then turned to fly parallel to it. Somewhere in the control centre, someone flicked open a guard switch and pressed an alarm button that automatically triggered sirens at air bases across Assam. Given the complete surprise with which the Chinese aircraft had breached the No-Fly-Zone, and the speed with which they were travelling, they would have reached the heart of Assam in a matter of mere minutes – which was all the time that the Base Area Defence Zones (BADZ) would have to activate and scramble fighters in the air. At Tezpur and Chabua air bases, pilots hopped into dark blue jumpsuits and then ran across the tarmac towards their waiting Sukhoi-30 MKI aircraft, even as maintenance personnel milled around engaged in a real life enactment of the aircraft scramble drill they had practiced so many times before.

Both air bases were capable of launching fighters and getting the first of them up to cruise altitude in under three minutes.