For many Pakistanis last night's extraordinary developments were inescapable and pre-ordained: the revenge of generals who were forced to make a humiliating retreat from a border war with India last July.
But Pakistan's generals have been nursing a grudge against their political masters for as long as a year when the prime minister, Mr Nawaz Sharif, first took on one of their own.
Mr Sharif won that confrontation, forcing the then army chief, Gen. Jehangir Karamat, into early retirement in October last year. But as yesterday's events make clear the military were not prepared to countenance the sacrifice of another of their generals so soon, and Gen. Musharraf, unlike his predecessor, was not the sort to walk away from a showdown.
Within minutes of the announcement of the retirement - read sacking - of the present army chief, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, soldiers were vaulting over the fence of Pakistan television, and a coup was under way.
In Pakistan, where no civilian government has completed its term since the end of martial law in 1985, it was a moment many had been dreading. For weeks, the atmosphere of extreme suspicion between Mr Sharif and Gen. Musharraf has been an all-consuming topic of conversation, and there were signs of intrigue on both sides.
But Mr Sharif had been shoring up his defences in the meantime. According to intelligence sources in Pakistan, he requested Gen. Musharraf's resignation on at least four occasions since last July. Each time, Gen. Musharraf refused.
The immediate trigger for the showdown lay in the disputed territory of Kashmir, and Mr Sharif's attempts to disown this summer's conflict following the movement by Pakistani-based forces across the Indian side of the Line of Control. Those efforts were bound to infuriate Gen. Musharraf, who feared he alone would have to shoulder the blame for a military adventure that went badly wrong.
When the Kargil conflict erupted last May, it seemed an act of military brilliance. In the dead of winter, when temperatures plunge to 50 below zero, Pakistani-based forces, including Islamic militants as well as regular troops, had crossed the mountains and made themselves comfortable in bunkers abandoned by their enemy to the elements.
When the spring thaw arrived, and a slumbering Indian army slowly realised the extent of the infiltration, Pakistani gunners had their artillery and rockets trained on the town of Kargil, and on India's sole road route through the region. The plan had another distinct advantage: it would stop in its tracks a peace process launched last February by Mr Sharif and his Indian counterpart, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
During a weekend summit in Lahore, when Mr Vajpayee rode a golden bus across the border, both men seemed genuinely to desire peace. Such a notion was deeply threatening to Pakistan's military establishment.
And so the generals hatched a plan for war. The conflict caused international consternation about the prospects of a full-scale war between the world's two newest nuclear powers.
To the generals' dismay, Washington and much of the world came to support India's contention that the forces return to Pakistani-held territory. For Mr Sharif, faced with a $32 billion dollar foreign debt and a veiled threat from the International Monetary Fund to hold up the loans which have seen his economy remain precariously afloat, there was little alternative.
On July 12th, he appeared on national television to declare he was no more willing to play "this game of blood and fire" that had consumed both India and Pakistan since independence in 1947.
In the weeks since his speech, Mr Sharif has sought to distance himself from the war. Mr Sharif's allies began to put about the story that he had been duped by his generals, who had deliberately concealed the extent of their ambitions at Kargil. In July, Gen. Musharraf took the extraordinary step of telling a BBC crew: "Everybody was on board."
During one of the pair's stormy meetings last month, Gen. Musharraf went even further, saying that if Mr Sharif was uninformed about Kargil he had only himself to blame. The army chief claimed he had given detailed briefings of his war plans to the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence, Lieut. Gen. Ziauddin. Gen. Ziauddin is one of Mr Sharif's most trusted allies, and as fate would have it the man who was chosen as Gen. Musharraf's successor.
In July, Mr Sharif tried to deflect attention from his Kargil climb-down by announcing a billion-dollar plan to build 500,000 homes for the poor. Meanwhile, the electricity board last month cut off the power supply to the finance ministry for non-payment of bills.
That economic debacle is just part of the inheritance Mr Sharif has left for his country's generals. But as they may discover in the weeks ahead, it may be his own way of exacting revenge.