A Force One jawan at the inaugural in Mumbai on Tuesday. (AP)

Mumbai, Nov. 24: About this time last year, India’s most notorious undertrial was already sharking down undetected en route to the most audacious terror raid this country has seen.

Overnight, Ajmal Kasab and his fidayeen crew would hijack a fishing trawler in the Gulf of Cambay, kill its skipper and sneak onshore a busy beach head with enough arsenal to unleash three days of spectacular mayhem.

About this time last year, thanks to remarkable employment of stealth by the terrorists and even more remarkable lapses by those that should have ripped their trail, nobody knew what was coming.

The chilling thing is, a year on, we may be quite as lost on what could come yet. For all the things that we know about 26/11, and for all the demonstrable things done in its wake, the story remains about what we do not yet know and what we have not yet done.

And none of that begins or ends with Kavita Karkare’s outspoken frustration that the killer of husband Hemant and half a dozen other policemen is yet to be marched to the gallows. Give that to the due process of law — it’s long, and as criminal lawyers would tell you, it is possible, quite legally, to drag it even longer.

Though he lies nailed by guilt, few believe Kasab’s hanging is anywhere near happening; the irony is Kasab himself appears “quite done” with his trial and wants a quick closure — that’s the sense he often gives his Arthur Road Jail minders, breaking into rants he does not want to die each day.

But Kasab has outrun his utilities to the task at hand, a revealed part of a still unravelling plot, his short career in jihad uncovered, his finite future fairly foretold. What continues to bedevil the quest of what happened — and what could — is that the police still don’t know enough. There are many pieces of the whodunit still missing.

And that they realised when the last one fortuitously fell into place, courtesy the FBI — David Coleman Headley. He ran rings around Mumbai, checking in and out of each of the places where fire was to flash on 26/11, perhaps pinning them down neatly on a map and handing it to the raiding party, and nobody here knew.

Nobody here knew about Tahawwur Rana or his now revealed pre-terror tourism itinerary. As one top Mumbai policeman archly remarked: “How much is there still that we don’t know? And where are we to look? Committees have probed the attack and submitted their reports, and nobody had so much as a hint there existed the likes of Coleman and Rana. Do we have Colemans and Ranas prospecting Mumbai for future plans today? Could well be.”

Another policeman, another question. If Coleman and Rana did the reconnaissance for 26/11, what was the role of Fahim Ansari and Sabauddin Ahmed, both allegedly caught with handmade maps of the terror trail and both currently in custody? Are their counsels going to be able to argue in court that following the unveiling of Coleman and Rana, Fahim and Sabauddin rightfully beg innocence? “What we know about 26/11 is getting more and more looped,” the policeman said. “That does not necessarily mean we know more.”

A bit, now, about what we’ve done.

Perhaps what happened this morning in Mumbai is more than merely a sidelight into the ham-handed efforts at securing the metropolis against nasty surprises.

Three jawans of Force One, the state’s fancied answer to the NSG, collapsed of exhaustion at the unit’s opening day parade in a Goregaon police facility. The attendance, which included chief minister Ashok Chavan, deputy chief minister Chhagan Bhujbal and home minister R.R. Patil, was left less than impressed by the inaugural, and more than just a little embarrassed.

But to those who have followed the raising of Force One, a much vaunted and much advertised 256-man unit picked from the state police and handed cutting-edge weaponry, such loss of face was coming. They reckon it is fortunate the chink appeared at a showpiece event, not in action. For nearly a year now — all the time that it has been in existence — Force One has not had headquarters or home.

Months of pleading and haggling with the bureaucracy landed them a barren, and hugely encroached upon, 60 acres near Goregaon recently. There is no infrastructure yet, and very little money to set it in place when the plot is freed of squatters.

Meantime, Force One has been forced to shack up with reserve police units at an old barracks. “It’s a shame,” said one officer. “You have all the publicity in the media making us out to be some US Marines-like crack troops, and here we do not even have access to our own quarters, much less training facilities.”

The eve of Force One’s inaugural was similarly stained by setback.

Promised state-of-the-art sea support, Force One found the government had returned half a dozen patrol boats ordered from a Goa undertaking on the grounds that they didn’t have enough fuel capacity — only 500 litres, good for no more than five hours’ vigil.

Kasab and his men were better fitted out as they cut through the Arabian Sea to their bloody mission about this time last year.