Exclusive Excerpt from The Vajra Doctrine by Rajarshi Sharma

The secure STQC Type-VII comms phone shrieked—a sound more primal than digital. Heads turned. Time slowed. The buzz cut across the ops room like a scimitar. Majithia turned, exhaling once. He picked up the receiver with a steady hand. “Majithia here.” The voice on the line was familiar. Steel wrapped in silk. “Tusker, it’s Devraj. We have the green light. Strike is a go.” For a fraction of a heartbeat, everything stopped. Majithia’s jaw locked.

The war-room monitors blinked. Somewhere outside, a Rafale roared to life, afterburners snarling like a beast uncaged. He responded quietly, firmly. “Understood, Sir. Tigersharks are already on stand-by. Fuelled, armed, mission-plan loaded. We’ll have them airborne per timeline. Launch window plus four minutes.” But then… Devraj’s tone shifted. “Tusker, I want you up there, too.” Majithia’s eyes narrowed. That was unexpected.

“Sir?” Majithia’s voice carried the weight of decades behind throttles and yokes—a voice tempered in monsoon squalls, mountain crosswinds, and the quiet dread of GPS-blackout zones. But now, it held something rare. Not doubt. Not hesitation. Just recalibration. A quiet shift in gears. On the other end, Air Marshal Devraj Singh didn’t even glance up from the mission tablet. His voice, when it came, was all edge and iron. “You’re taking command of AWACS-PHALCON.” A pause. Not a request. A direct insertion into the battlefield.

“I need your ECM team airborne. Full-spectrum sweep—jamming, intercept suppression, active deception. I want that corridor silent and invisible. The Tigersharks get in and out clean, or they don’t get out at all. That’s on you.” Majithia didn’t flinch. His mind was already running—crew manifest, electronic warfare loadout, comms latency windows. Then he spoke, steady and assured. “Understood. I’ll be wheels-up in thirty. Mission crew’s already in final prep. My EWO’s the sharpest we’ve got. We’ll keep the corridor clean.” For a second, silence. Then Devraj’s voice came through, harder now, wrapped in urgency and absolute trust.

“Make it twenty, Tusker. I want you up before the Tigersharks clear vector Alpha. This op doesn’t breathe without you.” No debate. No committee. Just one seasoned warrior handing the reins to another. Majithia blinked once. A pause. Thought sharpening like a blade. He’d expected to coordinate from the Mission Command Centre—monitoring telemetry, refining escort vectors, managing contingencies. That was the plan. But war had no patience for plans. This was a call to the front. Not with guns—but with signals.

An invisible battlefield of shifting frequencies, radar pings, transponder ghosts, and digital feints. A place where one mistimed jamming burst could get an entire strike package lit up and splashed across contested airspace. Majithia didn’t argue. Because the IL-76 wasn’t just another aircraft to him. It was his bird. He’d flown the hulking Soviet-era airframe through everything—from high-altitude relief ops over Siachen to low-visibility landings during midnight extractions in Arunachal.

He knew every tremor in her airframe, every grumble of her engines before they stabilized at cruise. She wasn’t pretty. But she was reliable, loyal, and could take more punishment than most fighters. And now she had evolved into something far more dangerous. PHALCON.A nerve-center in the sky. Bristling with Israeli radar arrays, Indian fusion systems, and an Electronic Warfare suite that could rewrite enemy battlespace like a surgeon slicing neural wires.

Majithia was no longer hauling troops or cargo. He was about to command a flying command ship—one that could turn the tide of a war without firing a single shot. He exhaled. The responsibility was immense. One corrupted spoof signal, one failed deception burst, and the Tigersharks could fly straight into a kill box. But this was what he was trained for.

He closed his eyes, just for a moment.

A memory flashed—his first solo flight in the IL-76, the way the bird trembled as she lifted off, like a war elephant shrugging off the bonds of earth. And now... she was an apex predator in a new jungle .“Copy that. Sir ” Click. The line went dead. Majithia placed the receiver down slowly, deliberately. A stillness settled over him. Majithia grabbed his flight gloves, pulling them on in practiced movements, like a swordsman donning armour. His mind was already in the sky—thinking in PRFs (Pulse Repetition Frequencies), burn-through ranges, and cross-polarization deception sweeps. This was no longer a mission. It was countermeasure warfare. A game of shadows.

What you’ve just read is not merely a scene; it is a statement. Rajarshi Sharma’s writing reminds us that the most decisive chapters of a nation’s history are often written without witnesses. In a time obsessed with visibility, The Vajra Doctrine dares to argue that silence may be the most formidable doctrine of all.

This exclusive excerpt is only an entry point. The book itself unfolds deeper questions about modern warfare, political accountability, and the invisible men and women who operate at the edge of certainty—so that others may live within it. Get your copy here: The Vajra Doctrine

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