The Siege: The Attack on the Taj Mumbai

by Cathy Scott-Clark

  He messaged his friend Anahita at 6.52 a.m.: ‘There’ [sic] heavy firing outside.’ Had she heard anything about a rescue on the news?

  Bhisham felt as if he were sinking. Friends on the outside sensed it too and rallied round. At 7.23 a.m., another friend, Antoine texted: ‘Hang in there, we’re all waiting for you.’

  Three minutes later, Bhisham replied limply: ‘I hope I get out I hope everyone does.’

  At 7.38 a.m. Antoine got back to him: ‘Im sure u will. The police are almost in control.’

  How did he know? The Chambers still vibrated to automatic-weapon fire. Bhisham looked over to his mother, eyes half closed as she prayed. He resented how she twisted the ordinary as proof of the extraordinary, how her goodness made him feel bad. He was irritated by her proselytizing teetotal lifestyle and unwavering vegetarianism, while he could think of nothing better than a glass of ruddy Montepulciano. Their continued presence here, trapped in Chambers, with gunmen firing around them, demonstrated to him that there was no ultimate being. It was all in the roll of the dice. But in her expression he could see the opposite. She thinks that we have all survived so far because of her beliefs, Bhisham told himself.

  Down the hall in the library, Anjali Pollack was also wondering what daylight would bring. Her children would be awake soon and she was not around to get them up. She texted Mike in his bolt-hole as the ack, ack, ack wound up again. How long could this go on for? He replied instantly. He was safe. That was as good a piece of news as she could hope for.

  Slumped against a sofa on the other side of the room, Andreas’s cruise director, Remesh Cheruvoth, had managed to remain conscious, although his shirt and trousers were drenched in blood. His shoulder and back burned, where two bullets had struck. He needed to make a move, if he could, and he wanted to get Andreas Liveras up too, but the boss had dozed off on the couch. A mobile alarm went off. ‘Pah. Pah. Pah.’ A wave of shushing and tutting broke across the room, as terrified guests urged for the noise to be silenced. It was Remesh’s phone. ‘My fault,’ he groaned. He looked about him, seeing testy, resentful faces. He wanted to sit up and scream: ‘I’ve been shot and never made a sound.’ But making a fuss was not his style.

  Naomi, one of the Alysia’s spa girls, gently squeezed his arm. ‘Remesh,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t talk now,’ he replied, wincing. She tugged at his sleeve again. ‘Remesh.’ He did not understand. She crawled over to him. ‘Mr L.,’ she said. He nodded. ‘Mr L. is dead.’ Remesh shook his head. ‘Look,’ he said, pinching Andrea’s leg. But there was no reaction and the flesh felt cold. Remesh ran his hands over his boss’s body, praying that she was wrong. He reeled as he saw a bloody clot on Liveras’s ashen temple. A single bullet had passed through his head. He had been dead for two hours already and Remesh had even not realized.

  Remesh was devastated. They had known one another for almost a decade after first meeting at the Dubai boat show, common love of the sea bringing the calm Keralan and the upstart Cypriot together. He had worked for Mr Liveras for four years, and come to love his irascible boss who gave up every Christmas and Easter to fly down to the Maldives for a special lunch with all of his staff, from the deckhands to the captains. Now, in their greatest hour of need, Remesh felt he had betrayed him. He wriggled his phone free and rang the captain of the Alysia. ‘Mr L. is dead,’ he whispered, crying gently, adding that he and the girls were trapped. Then he called Dion, Liveras’s son, whom he knew well, in London. ‘Mr Dion,’ Remesh urged, barely audible, and now lying down on the floor of Chambers, the only position in which he felt no pain: ‘I am so sorry, but your dad has gone. Mr L. has gone. Please believe me, we tried our best.’ He said nothing about his own injuries as Dion inhaled. ‘Oh God,’ he said, ‘Remesh, are you OK?’ He was floored. ‘We have to update our people, and the family. I’ll get on to it now.’

  Remesh’s head swam with grief. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a small group of guests slipping out into the corridor. What were they thinking? Ack, ack, ack. Those still inside the room could smell the woody notes of splintered panelling, as the same guests hurtled back, diving on to their bellies. Ack, ack, ack. The firing seemed to be coming from all sides with renewed vigour. Rounds were pouring into the corridor outside. Remesh covered his ears, not sure how much longer he could go on, seeing guests pull out their phones as the library came alive with text messages. One woman piped up: ‘Government has launched an operation. NSG is in the city. The Black Cats are coming to the Taj.’ A shiver of excitement went around the room.

  Remesh fell back, allowing his mind to drift to Calicut, his home town, the city of spices on the Malabar Coast in Kerala, where his wife and six-year-old son were waiting for news. In the panic of last night, he had not even called them. ‘Good morning,’ he said, ringing now. ‘I mustn’t be long as I’m stuck in the Taj. But it’s nothing to worry about. Got nicked by some broken glass. Can mend it. Pray for me. Love you all.’

  Out in the harbour, the guests and crew had begun stirring on the Alysia as the sun began to warm the deck. All of them were immediately transfixed by the still-burning Taj. The night had passed but not the danger. For the first time, they could see the extent of the chaos around the grand old hotel: flames coiling and writhing, fire trucks manoeuvring around police cars, camouflaged lorries and khaki jeeps revving. Huge crowds heed and hawed, as firemen plucked guests to safety.

  Nick Edmiston stared in the opposite direction, into the sea mist. He had barely slept: all night the navy had been firing flares, anxious to illuminate the dark waters lest more gunmen were sailing in. Every purple and crimson burst had lit up the Alysia. What if someone shore-side had taken a pot-shot at them, as the largest, most alien thing in the water? Or would they be boarded? A boat filled with enough fuel to go 5,000 miles would make for a handy escape rig. They had spent a desperate night calculating where to hide and working out what could be utilized as a weapon. All they had found was a small space that would have made a tidy priest hole and housed an emergency generator and an axe. Nick wondered who was capable of wielding it.

  Now, staring into the mid-distance, watching small fishing vessels emerge from the horizon, returning with their catch, he had different concerns. They would have left last night without knowing what had happened and were returning to a city that did not exist any more. There could also be gunmen among them for all he knew. Everything looked hostile.

  The Estonian captain came over, drawing Nick aside. ‘Sir, I have terrible news,’ he said. ‘Mr Liveras is dead. I’m truly sorry.’ Nick blanched, unable to take it in. They had not heard from Andreas for a while but had simply assumed his phone was flat. ‘Don’t say anything for now,’ Nick said, dry-eyed, his logical head taking over. ‘Let’s get this boat cleared out, and then we can work things out for Andreas.’

  A launch pulled up to relay guests ashore. Nick’s Indian partner, Ratan Kapoor, had pulled some strings and got his wealthy, entrepreneurial father to call Vijay Mallya, the brewery and airline tycoon, a man with considerable maritime resources. Mallya employed a retired commodore as head of his fleet and this man had requested his serving navy colleagues to grant permission for an evacuation to begin. Some of the ‘Ultras’ were ferried for thirty minutes across the bay to Alibag. They, too, had been calling their contacts all night, telling their drivers to set off for an agreed rendezvous out of the city. Their diamante belt buckles and patent shoes, their leather trousers and satin gowns, struck a discordant note in the rude daylight. ‘They don’t want to get snared in Mumbai’s chaos,’ Ratan explained to Nick. All the guests who had the resources to make it happen had been calculating how to shake loose from their burning city.

  Finally the Alysia was calm. With the boat powered down, only the Edmistons and their staff remained aboard. Nick found his son Woody. ‘Andreas is dead,’ he said. His voice sounded confessional. Woody gulped. ‘How the hell . . . ?’ Irrepressible Andreas had led a charmed life. ‘It doesn’t seem possible.’ Woody looked at his buttone
d-up father. Why did he never show any emotion? ‘Don’t you care?’ Woody raged. Nick suddenly let out a roar, his eyes welling up, as all the tensions of the night gushed out.

  Watching the Taj burn in daylight on their television screen, a distraught Chef Urbano Rego prayed for his son. He had heard from Boris, the Shamiana chef, sometime in the twilight hours, when he had called to confirm that Boris had, somehow, escaped the kitchen slaughter. Urbano had been euphoric. His 25-year-old son had only joined the Taj in June.

  The family had received another call at dawn, an unmistakeable voice whispering into the handset. ‘I’m still safe. Don’t worry about me.’ It was Boris once more. The young chef had slipped the gunmen again. ‘I am in the cellar,’ he said. ‘There might be hundreds of us down here.’

  The family gathered on Divar Island, a spit of land in the Mandovi River, in Goa, waited, desperate for the next update. Later, his younger brother Kevin received a call. He listened intently but there was nobody there. Kevin was about to put the phone down when he heard a crackling. He strained and waited. A voice came on the line, thin and vibrating; a ghostly presence: ‘Kevin? Dadda?’

  Only one person used that word. It was Boris. Speechless, Kevin passed the phone to his father. ‘Yes, Baba, I can hear you,’ Urbano said, his face crumpling. ‘Baba, I can hear you. Baba,’ he sang into the phone. But all he could hear now was an abysmal silence.

  In the Taj, Kelly Doyle had finally got herself noticed and was lowered down to the ground by a fire crew as the sky turned salmon pink. After Will had fallen she had contacted his father by text, trying not to lose control. ‘Please keep calm,’ Nigel had pleaded, unable to fully understand her disjointed account of some terrible accident. He would alert the Foreign Office, he said, and come to Mumbai immediately, contemplating the nightmare of having to repatriate Will’s body. He would bring Kelly’s mother too.

  Outside the hotel, with no one to console her, Kelly plunged into a chaotic crowd of people wrapped up in their own private tragedies. She could not make herself understood but somehow she would get help.

  Without money or any idea where Will’s body had been taken, she begged her way across the city, visiting one hospital after another, barefoot and wearing the dress she had worn for a dinner that never happened. The A&E departments felt like warzones and she wandered through them, calling Will’s name, contemplating when she would be brave enough to start lifting shrouds in the mortuaries.

  Eventually she arrived at the Bombay Hospital, where Amit Peshave was still helping out, tending to his colleagues. Roaming around, she was pointed in the direction of a side room, where an unidentified European man lay in a giant plaster cast. Shock had turned him bright yellow, and the parts of his body that were still visible were covered in blood and dirt. Electrodes were connected to his chest and a plastic pouch fed fluids to his bloodstream, an oxygen cylinder was at his shoulder and he had transparent tubes up his nose and in his arm. She stared at the face and the hairline. ‘Will,’ she suddenly cried. It was definitely Will. His chest heaved as all around him banks of machines beeped and flashed, monitoring his vital signs. Will was alive. ‘Will.’ He seemed not to hear her. Euphoric and confused, she tried to grab a nurse as she struggled to find out what was wrong with him. A morphine drip stuck out of his arm. ‘Will,’ she cried. She studied his face, as his eyelids flickered. He came round and stared up at her, and then at his surroundings, his eyes taking in the mass of wires, tubes and cabling. A machine beside her sounded an alarm as his lids shut fast again.

  ‘He’s crashing,’ Kelly screamed. She could not lose him again. ‘My boyfriend, please help . . .’ A surgeon entered and introduced himself as Samir Dalvie, a spinal injuries specialist. ‘Please be patient,’ he said, pointing to the chaos around them. Will was in shock. He needed emergency surgery on his shattered pelvis but Dalvie was the only consultant who had reached the hospital and he was supervising three operating theatres simultaneously. Kelly nodded, too scared to ask for a prognosis as Will came to again. ‘Kelly,’ he murmured, ‘I love you.’ She smiled weakly. ‘Please,’ he continued, ‘get me the fuck out of here.’

  10

  A Black Cat and a White Flag

  Thursday, 27 November 2008, 8 a.m. – Mantralaya, South Mumbai

  The commandos gathered beneath coconut palms in the gardens of Mantralaya, the state’s administrative complex at Nariman Point, impatient and anxious. Even here, a mile away from the burning Taj, a smoky aroma filled the air. Twelve hours after the ten Pakistani gunmen had motored ashore in their dinghy, India was finally scrambling the National Security Guard (NSG), with the 51 Special Action Group at its core. They were trained in rescuing hostages and breaking sieges, and their anthracite black uniforms, ski masks and dexterity gave them their nickname: the Black Cats.

  Everyone here was on deployment from their army unit, having survived a notorious 780-metre-long obstacle course, christened the Seven/Eight/No by foreign military trainers: a backbreaking succession of crawls, climbs and leaps traversed with a full pack and loaded weapon. Before they could catch their breath, they had to obliterate distant targets and jog through the broiling day and freezing night on route marches that switched altitudes. Dropped into an underground Kill Room that could mirror dozens of South Asian scenarios – markets, tightly packed chawls, hospitals and hotels – they were strobed and deafened by klaxons, while trying to hit only bad-guy targets, delivering a double-tap of two bullets, ensuring that whoever went down was definitely dead.

  The force was tailor-made for the Mumbai operation. So why, the men wondered, as they checked over their kit in the lush gardens where the overnight dew was steaming, had it taken so long to get them here? Brigadier Govind Sisodia, their Deputy Inspector General (Operations), a small, punchy man, with roving eyes that rapidly took in a crisis, had been asking the same question since the previous evening. He had watched the opening salvos of the Mumbai assault on TV at the force’s barracks in Manesar, south-west of Delhi, and informally mobilized the men shortly after 10 p.m. They had been ready to deploy to the technical area of Palam airstrip in under thirty minutes, and yet they had arrived a half-day late for India’s worst terrorist outrage, by which time at least 156 people had died with 240 seriously injured. Jyoti Dutt, the Brigadier’s boss, was furious about the cack-handed mobilization that he blamed on political incompetence and infighting. But there was no time to dwell on it now.

  The Brigadier’s head was already swimming after a puzzling series of early-morning briefings that had left him feeling unsure about the mission in Mumbai. The police had told him that the number of gunmen was said to be ‘anywhere up to twenty’ and the most savage team, locked down inside the Taj, had an unknown quantity of AK-47s, as well as military-grade explosives, grenades and side arms, whereas TV reports had been far more specific, placing the fidayeen numbers at ten. No one had much to say on how distant handlers were directing the gunmen, although the NSG had heard that telephone intercepts were being analysed elsewhere.

  In Dutt’s opinion, the intelligence agencies were being ‘positively evasive’, skipping over the warnings that ran back to 2006 and offering an assessment so broad that it was useless to a force looking to eke out any small advantage in what they were sure would be close-quarters fighting inside byzantine buildings.

  He suspected that the Mumbai authorities were deliberately blurring the picture, obscuring the actual size and capabilities of the invading force, lest they be criticized for failing to engage a small, albeit well-armed and highly motivated fidayeen squad. Brigadier Sisodia knew better than to air such views in public. A tight-lipped, invisible soldier, with thirty-three years’ service under his belt, he kept his own counsel. He had always been this way and his wife and son mostly inferred what he had been up to from the state of his boots. Since July 2007, when he had been selected for the Black Cats, he had become especially guarded.

  He tried to void his mind. The Brigadier’s sole focus was his men. Splitting th
em into three groups that would take on Chabad House, the Trident–Oberoi and the Taj, he told them they would be facing well-trained belligerents, whose aim was to prolong the terror and extract maximum publicity by creating strongholds and executing hostages. There would be no negotiations, the Brigadier warned. ‘It is kill or be killed.’

  The commandos pressed rounds into the clips of their Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, taping the magazines together, tightened their webbing and pulled down their balaclavas. Boarding his vehicle the Brigadier watched the task force, engines gunning, stream out into the bright morning in municipal buses. Behind came the tactical and weapons specialists, the bomb squad with their dogs, field medics, a communications team that would rig mobile control posts to keep them talking, and intelligence officers instructed to mill around in the crowd near the Taj, giving the commandos peripheral vision.

  9.15 a.m. – Apollo Bunder

  ‘Blood, glass, charred wood.’ When Brigadier Sisodia finally marched into the Taj, the scale of the destruction struck him. He wondered at the firepower that had carved up the marble floors and blown the crystal chandeliers into smithereens. It was going to be a long, hard slog, he warned, as he established a Black Cat command post beside the police in the Tower lobby, run by a Special Forces colonel and aided by Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan, a sinewy officer whom Sisodia had ordered to lead the Taj units. A product of the National Defence Academy, the elite joint services training college outside Pune, Major Unnikrishnan, a 31-year-old Black Cat instructor, could have chosen to stay behind in Manesar. But he had volunteered.