Four or five men huddled together in a Delhi hotel room. They were going through travel arrangements. Three of them were to leave for Dubai a little later to execute one of the most audacious operations by Indian intelligence agencies. The plan was to smuggle in two sharpshooters into the Grand Hyatt hotel near Dubai airport. The marriage of the daughter of Dawood Ibrahim, India’s most wanted don, with Pakistani cricketer Javed Miandad’s son had been solemnised in Pakistan. A post-wedding feast was being organised at the hotel. Indian intelligence believed Dawood would attend it and saw an opportunity to take him down. The task was outsourced to the Chhota Rajan gang. The calculation was that neither Indian operatives nor Chhota Rajan’s gangsters could have pulled it off on their own; together, they stood a better chance.

The sharpshooters, Farid Tanasha and Vicky Malhotra, had arrived in India and were tested, briefed and trained at several locations. This could not have been an ‘official’ operation, so a retired Intelligence Bureau...