The Meadow

by Adrian Levy

  Somewhere nearby, a river was gurgling. He drew himself a mental map. Why hadn’t he gone home after Calcutta? He berated himself yet again, thinking about his daughters, Cathy and Mary. Did they know he was missing yet? Probably not. News travelled slowly in what he saw as the swamp of India. Here he was, in a deadly Himalayan scrape, with his trousers around his ankles. But he had to try to quell the self-pity, and do something. His captors had become more blasé with every mile under their belt. Head up and inhale, he said to himself. Above him the sky was dark and cloudy. Perfect, he thought. An overcast night would make it easier to travel unnoticed. A few minutes later he stood and hauled up his trousers. It was not yet time. Was he prevaricating? No, he had a plan. He had a simple idea that would change the course of the next forty-eight hours. But it was not yet late enough. He stumbled back into the sour-smelling hut.

  Four days earlier, when they had first been marched up the mountainside away from the other campers in the Meadow, all John Childs had dwelled on as the rain poured down his neck was how unbelievably stupid he had been. If he had heeded Dasheer’s advice he would have been back in Pahalgam by the time the gunmen had entered the Meadow. He would have read about the incident in the newspaper as he boarded his plane to New Delhi, and told his work colleagues back in New England about his scrape with death. From the moment he had awoken to find a militant standing in his tent he had come down on himself hard: coming to Kashmir had been ‘the biggest screw-up of my life’.

  The hostage party, with Dasheer tagging along at the leader’s insistence, had climbed for a couple of hours through a pitch-black forest, slippery and prickly, the rough path made treacherous by moss-covered rocks on which their feet skidded, twisting ankles and jarring knees.

  John, who was still feeling the effects of walking at high altitude for seven hours the previous day, struggled to keep up. And all the time there was a gun muzzle knocking the small of his back, reminding him of the consequences of lagging. His rigid mountaineering boots, designed for crampons, scraped another layer of skin from his heels as negative thoughts crowded into his mind. His socks were wet with blood. He had to fight his pessimism, and dig deep to find his fitness, or the route and his fatalism would kill him.

  ‘Stupid, selfish idiot,’ he said under his breath over and over, convinced he was about to die, looping into a self-destructive cycle. Now his daughters, his parents, the people he loved most in the world, would have to deal with his death, telling their friends he had gone off to Kashmir on a selfish adventure. His parents would go to their graves without seeing their son again. Would anyone ever find his body? Would there be a funeral? Then there was his sister Barbara and her children. And his younger brother Richard. All these lives messed up by his reckless decision to go trekking in the most dangerous location in the world.

  The red flags had been obvious from the minute he touched down in Srinagar. Why had he not heeded them? Watching the younger militants racing up the hillside ahead of him, clearly exhilarated by their catch, John felt like hurling himself off the side of the mountain. He was so angry that even after several hours of climbing, he couldn’t bring himself to look the other hostages in the eye. What must that look like to them? Shame? Pride? Bitterness? There was no point worrying about how the others saw him. He seldom cared about the impression he made. By the time they had scaled the ridge, hundreds of metres above the Meadow, all of them were soaked to the skin and depressed.

  They reached a plateau where grass gave way to stones. Numb and cramped, they had finally reached the snowline, and the temperature dropped by many degrees. In the moonlight, John could see an expanse of boulders and pebbles rising above them, glacial detritus that would have been hard to clamber through in daylight, let alone at night. The only trees were charred black as if struck by lightning, or perhaps they had been burned by gujjar herdsmen. Either way, they stuck out of the granite like vandalised telegraph poles, giving the landscape an apocalyptic feel, as if all around had been carpet-bombed. Ahead of them was a sizeable gujjar settlement. Even though it was late, the family who lived in the biggest hut emerged as their dogs began to bark at the party’s approach.

  John wondered if this would be a chance to send a message for help, but his heart sank as an old man walked over to the kidnappers’ leader and embraced him. ‘What the hell? They knew we were coming,’ he said to himself. ‘This has all been pre-planned. Dasheer was right to try to get me away from the Meadow. He knew something too. Everyone in the valley knew a kidnapping was about to happen. Except us.’ The growing feeling that he was the victim of a conspiracy almost crushed him once more. ‘I could feel myself ebbing.’ He looked over to Dasheer, sodden and sorry-looking in his ripped pheran. The guide held John’s gaze for a moment, then cast his eyes downwards as if he understood that John knew too. Just beyond Dasheer was Don, his fellow American and the nearest to him in age, although John had no idea of the names of any of his fellow captives at this stage, having spoken to none of them.

  ‘Keep calm,’ Don murmured under his breath, winking. ‘We’ll find a way out of this.’ John doubted it.

  One of the kidnappers motioned them forwards into the nearest dhoka. They sat around the fire, Keith and Paul shuffling together, John beside Don, the hostages already separating into their national groups, British and American. A couple of rough blankets were thrown in their general direction, and then the militants turned their backs. As he stared into the flames, John could not remember ever feeling so tired: ‘I was as limp as a child.’

  5 July, dark and early. A dozen gunmen were crammed into the hut with them, along with a handful of gujjars. All of them were talking animatedly in languages John did not understand. He and the other sodden hostages sat to one side, in a sad, steaming puddle. There was no commander waiting for them here. The Israeli spy story had just been a line to get them away, a clumsy cover for whatever this really was: pure banditry, or worse.

  Dasheer was given a note and told to return with it to the Meadow. ‘What’s going on?’ John blurted out. What did it say? Dasheer came over and tried to reassure him in English that there was nothing to worry about, that he was going to get help. But there was a flicker of fear in his eyes. Dasheer shoved the note inside his pheran and stumbled out of the hut. John watched him walking away through the rain. Without his guide, he felt strangely bereft. The Kashmiri had been his constant companion over the past four days. He hoped he would hurry straight back to Srinagar and raise the alarm. That was what John would have done, given the opportunity.

  He lay down, grateful at least not to be walking. He tried to listen in to the intense conversation between the old man and the militant leader. At one stage he thought he heard the word ‘hostage’ in English. After what seemed an age, Don called over to the gunmen, breaking the Westerners’ silence. They had been walking for hours, and had missed their evening meal. He mimed eating and drinking. ‘OK, chacha,’ said one of the younger gunmen, calling Don ‘uncle’. John noticed that they spoke to Don as if he was an elder, drawn to his kindly face with its close-cropped beard. Afterwards, Don had whispered to the others: ‘Smile. Keep your faces open. It’s much harder to kill a smiling face.’

  Later, the leader had turned his attention to the hostages. ‘We are Islamic fundamentalists,’ he announced. John could not help but smile. Back home, fundamentalism meant an idea taken too literally, bent out of context. But here it seemed simply to be an expression of commitment. ‘Our guns are for the Indian Army,’ the man continued. ‘With your help we want to release our supreme commanders from Indian prisons. You are our guests. We wish to treat you as such.’ Could they then have something to eat and drink, Don asked again. The leader spoke to one of the other men and nodded before leaving them in the hut.

  ‘Guests.’ ‘Hostages.’ John rolled the words around his mind and recalled the factory workers in Bihar talking of peace-loving ‘Kashmiri separatists’, at which their Hindu colleagues had risen up and damned Kashmiris as Islamic terroris
ts. Sensing John’s anger, Don whispered, ‘Sit tight. We’ll work something out together.’ Indian soldiers were crawling all over the mountains because of the pilgrimage to Amarnath, and Jane and the other women would soon raise the alarm, if they hadn’t already. By tonight, Don reassured him, they’d all be back in Srinagar, telling everyone about their adventure. Keith, the older Englishman, nodded. ‘He was calm and stoic throughout,’ said John. Paul smiled too, although he gave little away. His father Bob said: ‘Paul was probably enjoying himself at the start of it. Kashmir. Islamic terrorists. Paul Wells, the hostage. He was living a real adventure.’ Paul’s only regret, his father guessed, would be that he no longer had his camera, which had been stolen by one of the gunmen. They were now using it to take pictures of each other.

  5 July, daybreak. It was only when John noticed dawn leaching through the gaps in the walls of the hut that he realised he had been asleep. The militants stood, hands raised to their faces, thumbs touching ears and palms facing outward as they intently recited ‘Allahu akbar,’ oblivious to everything, then dropped to their knees and prostrated themselves, transported by prayer. Outside, dogs barked and someone could be heard sweeping the rough ground. Villagers were all around. Did they know hostages were in here? As they lay in the half-light, they were able to take in their shabby surroundings. The stone hut consisted of just one room, with a fire in one corner and bedrolls and blankets piled up in another. From the beamed ceiling hung assorted plastic bags containing dry food. The women of the family were nowhere to be seen.

  A young gujjar boy entered, nervously carrying a tray of steamed rice, tea and lavash bread, and placed it before the hostages. As they tore into it, John could hear a cacophony of voices outside. In the moonlight the night before, he had been able to make out quite a sizeable compound, with several huts protected by a rough perimeter wall. Now he could hear children running about and babies crying. Somewhere a man hawked and spat, and a woman was singing a lullaby. From the direction where the animals were tethered came the sound of tinkling sheep bells. As he munched his way through another tasteless mouthful of starch, John’s mind whirred. During the night he had slept in fits and starts, his mood wavering from despair to anger. This morning he had woken with a new sense of determination. ‘I knew there was only one way out of this. I had never been more focused in my life.’

  Just as the Westerners were draining their tea, several militants rushed in and ordered them to put on their boots. They emerged into the burning sunlight, not knowing what was coming next. The brightness of the sun reflecting off virgin snow was almost blinding. John was disorientated. ‘Where are my sunglasses?’ he mumbled to one of the guards. ‘You stole them. Give them back to me.’ Don rushed over to calm him: ‘Don’t make them angry. It’ll just make life harder for all of us. We need to keep them relaxed and work on a plan.’ He showed John how to rip a piece of cloth and fashion it into two strips that he tied around his head, leaving just a narrow slit to see through. They looked like Tuareg sand people, but this crude invention worked. All the time, Keith and Paul, who remained slightly apart from their American comrades, watched in silence.

  A few minutes later, the kidnappers ordered the hostages to line up with them in formation: the leader and two other gunmen at the front, then Don, the strongest of the hostages, followed by two more gunmen, then Keith, two more gunmen, then Paul, with John, who was still weak and was now limping, as his rigid boots had shredded his heels, followed by the two youngest militants, who were armed only with knives. ‘We would walk like that every day, for twelve hours,’ said John. ‘In a line, straight up the mountains. They kept us moving constantly.’

  Ten minutes after leaving the gujjar compound, the pace quickened as the militants got into their stride. ‘We went over the top and down into the next valley,’ said John. Those gunmen who had stolen sunglasses were wearing them, while the others winced in constant pain as the glaring rays flared up in their faces, burning their retinas. Water coursed through the gravel around their feet, snowmelt was finding its way downhill, and plump white vultures circled above them like unmanned drones.

  Yet more gunmen were waiting for them ahead. ‘This is a sophisticated operation,’ thought John as he tried to keep up, determined to take everything in, to consider all possibilities for escape. He had not mentioned these thoughts to the others. In his heart he knew he would not. John Childs had always been a one-man band: ‘I just was not a team player. I knew from stuff I’d read that turning inwards to find an inner freedom was the one thing that might help me survive captivity. I had to work this out for myself and in my own head. I had to develop a strategy for dealing with the crisis and I had to create an opportunity to escape.’ As time passed, the guards seemed less focused on keeping the marching party in formation, and for a time John deliberately lagged behind to see how long it was before they noticed. ‘But my foot was giving me hell, and I knew I wouldn’t get very far, even if I legged it. The kidnappers were faster than all of us. As the weakest in the party, I would have to do something that gave me a head start.’

  He trudged on. Paul was in front of him, cursing under his breath. Keith, who was also having problems with cramp and blisters, was in the middle. Up front, Don was striding ahead. He seemed to be dealing with the physical exertion the best of all of them, despite being the oldest. John was momentarily envious. Back home in Connecticut, he prided himself on his fitness. He could feel his competitive hackles rising. But then, Don had been in the mountains longer than him, and had had more time to acclimatise to the thin air. ‘No time for excuses,’ John said to himself.

  As the sun dropped behind a ridge, the hostages crossed a picturesque valley, urged on by the kidnappers, who did not want to linger in the icy bottom. ‘Shame I forgot my camera,’ Keith joked. Some of the tired fighters peeled off, to be replaced by others. They passed no other trekkers, only skinny herders with their goats and sheep. ‘One of them stopped us and spoke to us in English,’ said John. ‘He asked why we’d been arrested.’ John froze. Finally he replied, ‘We’ve been kidnapped. We’re being held against our will.’ The man nodded and carried on down the path. A short while later, another herder stopped to greet his brother, who had been commandeered to guide the kidnap party through a dense forest. ‘I knew there was no chance of either of these men raising the alarm,’ John said. ‘Everyone knew, but no one would do anything about it.’ In the remote Kashmir heights, where everyone minded his own business, the hostage-takers were safe.

  Just before dusk, the party stopped at another gujjar settlement, high above the snowline, this one consisting of three tents made watertight with frayed plastic sheeting. As on the previous evening, the family who lived there during the summer months seemed unfazed by the Westerners’ arrival. The militants had created a sophisticated network up here, suggesting that they had been operating in this area for some time. ‘Another thing the tourist people forgot to mention,’ Keith murmured wryly.

  After the leader had gone out, the younger kidnappers talked around the fire with their captives for a few minutes. ‘Don said our odds of survival were better if we formed a bond,’ said John, who asked one of the kidnappers if he knew how to arm-wrestle. ‘He didn’t understand what I was talking about, so I showed him, and of course I let him win.’ Later, with the leader seated back among them, the kidnappers ate and talked among themselves, their guns lined up against the wall in a row, giving John, Don, Keith and Paul a chance to have their first substantial conversation. ‘I said for the first time out aloud that I could not see anything good in this situation,’ said John. ‘Don was with me. He wanted to get out of there just like I did. But he was more patient. For him, it was a matter of the right plan and the right time, whereas I was anytime and anyhow.’ Keith and Paul were both against the idea. ‘They wanted things to pan out naturally. They had a sense of right and wrong, and they felt that if we hung back, the Indians would rescue us.’ It seemed to John that a rift was forming in the group. That nigh
t passed agonisingly slowly for John as he mulled over what to do.

  6 July, daybreak. In the early hours, John began contemplating stealing a gun and making a break for it. ‘The further we got from the Meadow, the more blasé the militants had become,’ he said. On one occasion they had left the hostages alone in a hut with all the guns stacked against a wall. ‘I had never handled a Kalashnikov, but I knew how it worked.’ The previous evening he had gone outside to urinate, and as he came back in he casually picked up one of the weapons, as if he needed to move it to get by, to see how their captors would react. ‘It was much heavier than I thought, but as I suspected, nobody blinked an eye.’ What worried him now was whether he could remember the sequence on the selector switch. ‘Click it in a certain direction and it took off the safety. Click it again and you found the weapon’s mode: single shots or bursts. Click it the wrong way and the whole clip would fall out, clattering on the floor, alerting the gunmen. I just didn’t trust myself that I knew which way to push it. I put back the rifle. I just could not take the risk.’

  As they moved out that morning, climbing higher and higher, John was filled with self-loathing. Another chance had slipped by. Was he too much of a coward to do this? What kind of opportunity was he waiting for? ‘When you watch a movie, the hero always gets out alive,’ he reflected. ‘But when it’s real …’ They trudged on through the snow, heading for an enormous ice ridge that glinted like a razor. Soon they were skidding across it, unable to find any grip. ‘They just pushed us on and on. We slithered. That day was Keith’s turn to get altitude sickness,’ said John, who watched the kidnappers attempt to drive the ponies up a near-vertical ice wall while ignoring Keith’s plight. ‘There were militants pulling and pushing from below. If our situation had not been so dire, it would have been funny. Keith was reeling.’