Operation Tigerhunt ǀ A gripping international spy thriller ǀ Soon to be adapted on screen

By Siddhartha Thorat

Memories are like wars. They never die.
Sundari is beautiful, hot-headed and extremely handy with any weapon. But her real power is her knowledge of the smuggling routes that weave through the jungles of Sri Lanka.
RAW agent Avinash puts together a crack team of Indian Special forces and a bunch of smugglers to rescue Indian spies trapped between two deadly enemies in those treacherous jungles.
As Sundari guides the commandos through the treacherous LTTE-infested jungles, she runs into a face from her past – her arch enemy. Blood and gun fire mix to bring back a piece of her past that she thought had been lost forever.
Will the team be able to save the trapped men from this war-zone?
Join Sundari in an action-packed chase from the jungles of Sri Lanka to the streets of Colombo as she battles the ghosts of her past and the challenges of the present in this explosive thriller - OPERATION TIGERHUNT.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Srishti Publishers
• Release date: May 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9789390441976

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Siddhartha Thorat

Srishti

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Srishti Publishers & Distributors in 2023

Content Copyright © Siddhartha Thorat, 2023

Idea Copyright © Srishti Publishers & Distributors, 2023

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This is a work of fiction. The characters, places, organisations and events described in this book are either a work of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to people, living or dead, places, events, communities or organisations is purely coincidental.

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publishers.

Printed and bound in India

Prologue

Jaffna – LTTE controlled Sri Lanka

31st May, 1995

2100 hrs

In a bedroom on the first floor of a small house, a father was reading a bedtime story to his children. The sweltering nights and the power cuts were a deadly combination. Young Sita, a precocious ten-year-old with intelligent eyes and an inquisitive mind lay on her bed. Her young brother, Nachiketa, was already asleep on his bed. Their father was sitting between the two beds, reading aloud to them. Even though the story was almost finished, Sita was not ready to sleep.

She said enthusiastically, Please don’t stop, Appa! Go on, she said chirpily.

Indulgently, her father, Chandar Shekhar Narsimha, an architect and the head librarian of the great Jaffna library, pulled out a bracelet. It was an old artefact, made of fluorescent minerals and rocks, with an ancient engraving embedded on its surface. And with it he offered a bribe to Sita.

Sundari, this can be yours, only if you agree to sleep, he called her by her pet name.

Sita’s eyes sparkled. She reached out and in one swift movement, snatched the dangling bracelet and kissed her father. She was smitten by its beauty.

Now sleep, said Chandar Shekhar and tucked her in. He planted a peck on her forehead before leaving the room.

My dearest Sundari, he repeated lovingly and got up from the chair. Sundari means ‘beautiful’ in Tamil. He looked at her lovingly as Sita closed her eyes with the bracelet adorning her wrist.

Sita’s peaceful sleep however was short-lived. It was broken by a series of loud, urgent knocks at the door. Sundari woke up to find herself alone. Her brother was not lying next to her and the only thing on the bed was her own weak shadow in the glow of the night lamp. The knocking was incessant until she heard the door unlatching below, followed by loud voices.

Her curiosity got the better of her as she jumped off the bed and went to the window. As she looked out, she could make out the milky white domes of the Jaffna Public Library reflected brilliantly in the moonlight. She then looked below and saw her father hurrying away with two men. She recognised them as her father’s colleagues. With a small child’s intuition, she suddenly felt worried, and she called out to her mother. There was no answer.

Suddenly, there was a brilliant flash in the sky, and a fireball seemed to head towards earth with what seemed like glacial speed. She watched mesmerised as it landed behind the library building. There was a huge burst of light followed by a loud thunderclap and then a shockwave.

Little Sita was thrown off her feet as the entire house shuddered. At that moment, her mother Kaushambi rushed in and grabbed Sita by her waist. Sita was crying loudly as she covered her ears with her hands in reaction to the loud blast. She was terrified and in tears as Kaushambi ran with her. She was crying too. They rushed down the stairs as a mortar shell came screeching through the window, straight into the room.

Rushing downstairs, Kaushambi grabbed her son, who was cowering under a table. She, along with the two children, rushed out into the street. The house collapsed behind them in an explosion of dust and debris. All the three were thrown forward into the street. Kaushambi glanced back in horror and then as if jolted back to the situation, grabbed her kids and ran as fast as her legs could carry her into the street.

There was complete confusion and bedlam in the streets. People were running helter-skelter and there was the constant din of gunfire punctuated with the whoosh and pounding of exploding shells. The houses along the street were on fire and there were men dressed in military fatigues shooting and firing indiscriminately.

They rushed towards the library, but to their horror, soldiers were setting it alight. Kaushambi pulled her children away, but Sita’s eyes were fixated on something. Just a little far away, in front of the library, stood a party of soldiers led by an officious looking man, apparently in command. He had an impetuous look on his face and was holding a pistol in one hand and a swagger stick in another. There were some people being held at gunpoint. They were on their knees, and some were crying. One of them was her father.

Appa! mumbled the little girl. As the horrified trio looked imploringly at the scene, a gunshot punctuated the bedlam and one of the prisoners fell to the ground. Kaushambi was petrified. She bent towards Sita and placed Nachiketa’s hand in hers, Don’t let go of your brother! Do you hear me?she hissed. Sundari nodded, terrified.

Kaushambi looked around frantically and saw one of her neighbours, Ananda Coomarswamay. He was hiding behind a wrecked car, a horrified look on his ashen face. She left both her children with him and rushed towards her husband. Ananda led the children towards the woods behind their neighbourhood. Sita, as she was being dragged, kept looking behind her shoulders, her eyes following her mother as she moved towards the soldiers and her beloved Appa. Nachiketa started crying for his mother, but not Sita. She was in shock, registering the death and destruction around her, stumbling and recovering as the kind Ananda struggled to pull them away from the site of the massacre. As they approached the tree line, she looked over her shoulder again. She saw what no child should see. She witnessed the horrifying sight of soldiers firing at Kaushambi, as she begged them to let her husband go. In the next moment, her father, who was grappling with the soldier who shot his wife, fell lifelessly to the ground. In an instant, she realised her parents were dead. Sita closed her eyes in terror and began to scream.

1

The Pirates

Puttalam, Sri Lanka

14th January, 2009

The steady put-put of a diesel engine punctuated the silent night as the fishing boat cut through the lagoon waters near the Puttalam coast. The beautiful forests and the virgin beaches reflecting the starlight added to the haunting beauty of the star-kissed coast.

The innocent-looking fishing vessel was anything but. A close inspection of stacked cartons piled up on the starboard side would have given away the real objective of the voyage. The cartons had been carefully covered in plastic and dirty tarpaulin to avoid wandering or suspicious eyes. The boat had waded through the backwaters along a narrow channel, hemmed in by trees from both sides, creating an illusion of a long unending tunnel. The smell of rotting tree roots and jungle flowers came together to produce a heady feeling for anyone who passed through. An ex-soldier and a smuggler, Biju was in his early fifties. He was strongly built and had enormous hands of a working man. His hair had been bleached white by the sun and the salt.

The solitude was suddenly broken by the eerie sound of a musical instrument. The helmsman in the wheelhouse recognised the sound as the boat approached a ramshackle jetty. He saw an old woman playing a nadaswaram, a flute-like instrument, in the light of a kerosene lamp. The scene looked serene and out of place, all at the same time. Biju knocked loudly on the side of the wheelhouse, alerting the crew of one. A young woman dressed in old military fatigues and canvas jungle boots responded to the signal. She had a lithe but hard body, and an imperious face. Her hair was tied back in a tight ponytail. She shrugged off the canvas boots in two quick moves. Then she slipped off the boat silently, with the grace of a large feline, without even causing a ripple on the surface. She had a rather mean looking knife clenched between her teeth.

The tempo of the music suddenly flared up. As expected, the helmsman Biju Samath noticed the movement in the underbrush on both sides of the channel just beyond the wharf. He braced for action. Two grappling hooks shot out of the undergrowth and snarled the boat. The ropes then started to pull the boat towards the coast. They had either been thrown by hand or fired from a weapon. A new sound, that of a motor vehicle engine – possibly attached to a winch – filled the air, its crude whining sound clashing rudely with the melody of the nadaswaram. The woman on the jetty continued to play her instrument. He raised his hands and walked out of the wheelhouse to the deck. Wooden planks