The Vortex

A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation

Scott Carney, Jason Miklian

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780062985439
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

LONGLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE

AN AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION NOTABLE BOOK IN NONFICTION

"[A] tremendous new book." — The Boston Globe

"Carney and Miklian write vividly in the fashion of a cinematic disaster flick." — The Washington Post

The deadliest storm in modern history ripped Pakistan in two and led the world to the brink of nuclear war when American and Soviet forces converged in the Bay of Bengal

In November 1970, a storm set a collision course with the most densely populated coastline on Earth. Over the course of just a few hours, the Great Bhola Cyclone would kill 500, 000 people and begin a chain reaction of turmoil, genocide, and war. The Vortex is the dramatic story of how that storm sparked a country to revolution.

Bhola made landfall during a fragile time, when Pakistan was on the brink of a historic election. The fallout ignited a conflagration of political intrigue, corruption, violence, idealism, and bravery that played out in the lives of tens of millions of Bangladeshis. Authors Scott Carney and Jason Miklian take us deep into the story of the cyclone and its aftermath, told through the eyes of the men and women who lived through it, including the infamous president of Pakistan, General Yahya Khan, and his close friend Richard Nixon; American expats Jon and Candy Rhode; soccer star-turned-soldier Hafiz Uddin Ahmad; and a young Bengali revolutionary, Mohammed Hai.

Thrillingly paced and written with incredible detail, The Vortex is not just a story about the painful birth of a new nation but also a universal tale of resilience and liberation in the face of climate emergency that affects every single person on the planet.

Act I

The Vortex

1

Hafiz Uddin Ahmad

DACCA, EAST PAKISTAN

FALL 1968

Two years before landfall

Thirty thousand fans erupted into cheers the moment that the football hit Hafiz Uddin Ahmad’s chest. The ball dropped down to his feet with a featherlight touch. Hafiz raced forward with his precious cargo, commanding both the match and the crowd as he sprinted across the halfway line.

This was Hafiz’s home turf: Dacca, the Bengali capital of East Pakistan. Clad in the green-and-white uniform of the Pakistan National Team, his back bore a big number 10 in stark white. He chose the number in honor of the Brazilian football superstar Pelé, who wore that same lucky number half a world away. Hafiz welcomed the comparison between himself and the greatest football player of all time. After all, to millions of East Pakistanis, Pelé was no Hafiz.

Today, Hafiz and his teammates—Pakistan’s most talented players—hosted the mighty Soviet Union, one of the world’s best teams. Hafiz dribbled around a Soviet midfielder and passed the center circle, paying the opposing player little mind. He kept his eye on the keeper’s hands, fifty yards ahead. Hafiz had that rare sixth sense for knowing what opposing players were going to do a split second before even they did. He focused on the little details that everyone else missed. A keeper might twitch a finger and give away which side of the net they thought Hafiz might aim for. Pakistan was down 0–1, they needed an equalizer, and this was their best chance yet.

A burly defender squared off against Hafiz’s charge. Without breaking stride, he flicked a sharp cross into the box to his teammate, a striker from Islamabad, while he sprinted toward the goal. The ball arced high and true, over three Soviet midfielders and defenders. Then a strange thing happened. The moment the ball struck his teammate’s chest, the crowd fell silent. If the Soviet players had a chance to catch their breath, they would have wondered what it meant.

In truth, Pakistan was a country divided, both geographically and culturally. A simple glance at the map showed how strange it was. Half the country lay to India’s west. West Pakistan was the center of political and economic power and home to the capital city of Islamabad. The citizens of West Pakistan spoke mostly Urdu and Punjabi. The other wing, to India’s east, had a much larger population but not nearly as much power. Here, in East Pakistan, people spoke Bengali.

West Pakistan and East Pakistan had been locked in a kind of cold war within the Cold War for the last twenty years. Tensions were so high that that no one in Dacca dared to cheer for a West Pakistan player, even one who played for the home team. A few goals from Hafiz’s Punjabi teammates weren’t going to get the fans to forget that West Pakistan treated East Pakistan like a colonial province.

Hafiz and the striker from Islamabad crisscrossed the ball on Dacca’s only perfectly manicured patch of grass. The mood in the stadium alternated between somber moments of silence when the Punjabi had control to thunderous cheers every time Hafiz cradled the ball.

Hafiz didn’t care for politics. He relied on his Punjabi teammates and considered them friends. Though sometimes he wondered if he only ran so hard because he wanted to hear the crowd cheer his name.

Seeing his opening, Hafiz dashed toward the goal, as the Punjabi player maneuvered the ball to take advantage of a gap in the defense. Three Soviets pressed down on the Punjabi, but he somehow threaded a miraculous pass through the defenders to Hafiz.

Now Hafiz was living every striker’s dream scenario: one on one with the keeper, twenty yards out. Hafiz sprinted forward, eyes lasered in, not on the ball or the net but on the keeper’s fidgeting fingers. Left or right?

Almost too easy, he thought.

Hafiz planted his left foot into the ground and fired with his right, just a fraction of a second ahead of two defenders sliding in for the tackle.

The Soviet keeper’s gloved hands lunged to the right for a split second, as if by instinct. By the time he realized that the ball was sailing directly over him, he was too flat-footed to deflect it. The keeper’s outstretched fingertips flickered in vain at the gently spinning ball, which snuck just under the crossbar and into the net.

“Goal!” an announcer shouted over the stadium’s speakers. “Gooooaaaalll!”

Hafiz sprinted toward the Punjabi forward. They embraced, raising their hands together as the rest of the national team mobbed the strikers. Already high on their hometown star’s performance, the crowd lost it. The Bengalis saluted their champion with full-throated roars. They started chanting Joi Bangla—Bengali words that translate to “Victory to Bengal”—in his honor.

Hafiz soaked in the adulation. As he looked out at the cheering throng, his very soul felt full. To them, he was a national hero. But that wasn’t the only reason that Hafiz felt a particular sort of wistful exhilaration today. The crowd had no idea that he’d decided that this was the last professional match he’d ever play.

The teams went into the locker room tied at the half. No one expected a small developing nation to have a chance against a global superpower, but the entire Pakistani team tingled with nervous energy. There was an earthquake of an upset in the making. This could be the greatest moment of their careers.

Yet the Punjabi players on the team couldn’t shake the sense that something seemed off.

“Why don’t they cheer us, Hafiz?” one Punjabi striker whispered into Hafiz’s ear while their coach gave his half-time pep talk.

That was the question. Hafiz could answer, but he didn’t have a spare hour to do so. Instead, he looked around at the ratty wooden benches that he and his teammates sat on and thought of the gleaming locker rooms in the Islamabad stadium. East Pakistan couldn’t even afford to give players their own lockers.

Hafiz wasn’t about to launch into a generational history lesson about how West Pakistan had suppressed Bengalis at every possible turn. How could he capture all of the inequality, the violence, the injustice in a few whispered words? So he waved his teammate off. He preferred to let his feet do the talking.

Besides, why did they have to talk politics? Couldn’t they just stick to football?

A sudden commotion outside the locker room interrupted the coach’s flash strategy session. The players heard something crash and someone yell, “Stop!”

Hafiz jumped up and peeked around the corner, bumping headlong into a group of Bengali student activists who had just pushed past security. They demanded the coach show himself.

East Pakistan’s biggest political party, the Awami League, liked to insert itself into just about every aspect of life in Hafiz’s half of the country. Apparently they wanted to talk game strategy, too.

One student stepped forward, wearing a starched white embroidered kurta that appeared far too dignified for his irate manner. He presented the coach with their sole demand: The National Team must field only Bengali players in the second half. “If you don’t, we’ll riot.”

It wasn’t an idle threat. They’d employed similar tactics before.

The coach explained that acquiescing to their demand would mean that they’d have to leave their two best defenders on the bench. They had a chance at a major upset here. Couldn’t the students just let the team do its best to win?

The student countered that if the coach refused and the stands turned bloody, the team would have to forfeit to the Soviets anyway.

The coach looked at the floor and shook his head.

Hafiz glanced across the locker room at two Punjabi defenders in their grass-stained jerseys. Despite their different home regions, the three were friends, and the team needed their talent badly. Fighting to a tie, this far, had been lucky. It would take all the team’s best players on the field to stand a chance.

Hafiz didn’t want to end his career like this. Maybe a little star power would sway the protesters to give up their demands, just this once.

He took a few steps toward the students, but just as he was about to open his mouth, his mind conjured an image of something even more powerful than his desire to win: his father’s disapproving face. The corresponding jolt of shame stopped him in his tracks faster than even the most imposing Soviet defender.

Back on Hafiz’s home island of Bhola—East Pakistan’s biggest island, which hosted a million people in a space about the size of Rhode Island—his father, Dr. Azhar Uddin Ahmad, loomed large. Not only was he the island’s most respected doctor but he was also their elected Awami League representative. As a member of Pakistan’s parliament, he fought incessantly to reduce discrimination against Bengalis, insisting on equal treatment from the government. These students had the same mission at heart, even if they went about it in a way that was inconvenient to Hafiz. He could never disrespect his father by challenging them over a game, even one as important as this one. Hafiz slunk back to the bench without a word. The coach gave in.

In truth, Hafiz’s father was the reason he was retiring from football. While the Bengalis loved Hafiz on the field, he knew he could never truly fill his father’s shoes by staying on the pitch. He needed to leave the game behind and, as his father put it, “do something in service to the country.” In fact, according to his father, he should have done this years ago.

The problem was that Hafiz avoided politics like the plague, so being a politician like his dad was out of the question. His only other real option was to pursue a desk job in the government’s bureaucratic elite. Maybe he would receive an ambassadorship one day if he worked hard enough. So Hafiz spent his time between rigorous team training sessions getting his bachelor’s and then master’s degree in political science at the prestigious Dacca University. And now he’d reached the educational end of the line. In a few weeks, he was due to sit for the country’s annual civil service exam, a test that would determine his career and the rest of his life.

Although he’d tried to study hard so that he could live up to his father’s expectations, he hated the exam-prep books. Every time he reached for one of those dry four-hundred-page tomes, filled with finely printed protocols, arcane regulations, and legal theories, his hand always seemed to drift toward the pulp detective novels set in Calcutta on the shelf below instead. It was useless. But it was his path.

When Hafiz jogged back out after halftime, it was not the roar of the crowd echoing in his head but rather his father’s scolding voice: “Football is not a career. You can’t do this forever. Someday you are going to have to be serious.” He took his place on the field, trying to ignore the sullen stares of his benched Punjabi teammates.

In the second half, the Soviets sliced through the Pakistanis with ease, scoring four unanswered goals. Pakistan’s best defenders watched helplessly from the sidelines.

We weren’t supposed to win anyway, Hafiz told himself as he passed through the midfield handshakes after the 5–1 loss. It was little consolation. If the Awami League hadn’t gotten involved maybe the Pelé of Pakistan would have gone out on top.

Despite the loss, Hafiz’s fans roared in appreciation when he took center circle for a quick wave. Tears fell down his cheeks as he soaked it all in. Barring a miracle, his boyhood dream of living in the sporting spotlight, traveling the world, and maybe even running his own football club would die when he took off his jersey.

Hafiz left the field and trudged into the locker room. Inside the cramped chamber, an army major who was the head of the Pakistani Football Federation greeted each player with a handshake and a pat on the back, consoling everyone on their hard-fought battle.

“Hafiz!” he said as his eyes landed on his intended target. “Have you thought about my offer?”

“Not here!” Hafiz whispered. The absolute last thing he wanted his football comrades to think was that he was abandoning them for this guy. The major had nagged Hafiz for two years now and wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was time to set him straight once and for all. “Madhur Café, in an hour.”

The major understood. He always appreciated Hafiz’s dedication to discretion and patted a few more backs on his way out.

Hafiz changed into street clothes and gathered his belongings one by one. Only someone who’d lived through the feeling of those last moments in a locker room before leaving it behind forever would truly understand.

Hafiz waited for the crowd to thin, then ducked out of the stadium and headed to where he’d parked his light blue Vespa. He was proud of the small Italian scooter. It was an expensive luxury in a country where most people still had trouble scratching enough money together for their daily meal. Zooming through Dacca’s lackadaisical streets gave him an odd sense of p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Maps
• Dedication
• Contents
• Authors’ Note
• Prologue: Blackout
• Act I: The Vortex
• Act II: Operation Searchlight
• Act III: The Reckoning
• Afterword: The Gathering Storm
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Sources
• Selected Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• About the Authors
• Photo Section
• Also by Scott Carney and Jason Miklian
• Copyright
• About the Publisher