The Meadow

by Adrian Levy

  A single paragraph on a scrap of paper curled inside a Limca soft-drink bottle was found on the path leading out of Warwan towards Mardan Top, at the summit of which was the camp of the Rashtriya Rifles, whose Victor Force patrolled Anantnag district. ‘It has been so long since any of us has moved that we are unfit,’ one unidentified hostage had written, according to the man who found it. ‘Our muscles are weak but they say we need to go faster since the villagers can smell snow. It feels like we’re running out of time. Extra guides have been recruited and the nomads are leaving. It will end soon, the guards have said. We should be pleased to be moving, leaving here at last, but they have told us the same many times before. We do not know what is their plan or where we are going.’

  They were quitting Sukhnoi. While Don, Keith, Paul and Dirk should have been jubilant to be getting out of the desolate Warwan, in fact they seemed dazed. They were being led away from a place they had become familiar with, hurried along a goat path into the unknown.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Goldfish Bowl

  In the outside world, all the partners and families of the missing men heard from the mountains was a flood of rumours. Trying to distract herself in Middlesbrough, Mavis Mangan returned to her job as a school dinner lady, but Charlie, who was retired and in bad health, rattled around at home on an endless cycle of DIY jobs, lamenting that his son wasn’t there to help him. In Blackburn, Dianne Wells, who was recovering from a serious illness – by chance, she had entered hospital on the day Paul was abducted – was housebound too, filling scrapbooks with newspaper cuttings ‘to show my son when he comes home’. Bob, Paul’s father, had returned to work at Debenhams department store, but worried constantly about his wife’s state of mind and that of Cath, alone in New Delhi. A few weeks into the crisis he had talked to the Foreign Office about going out to India to support her. ‘She was under too much pressure. But the message from the civil servants was clear: I’d just be getting in the way.’ Julie’s mum, Anita, felt similarly helpless: ‘We are just waiting, knowing we cannot do anything.’

  In New Delhi, Jane, Julie, Cath and Anne were coming to terms with life in what one of them had christened ‘the goldfish bowl’ – their shared apartment at the British High Commission – as well as their unsolicited roles as ‘hostages’ wives’. Formerly strangers, they had lived in each other’s laps for three months, and had become close friends who relied greatly on each other. Jane and Julie were inseparable, while Julie and Cath had developed a close bond that dated from their first meeting, all that time ago on the Srinagar-bound bus. Only Dirk’s girlfriend Anne, with her limited English and detached manner, remained slightly apart.

  In this charged environment, emotions seesawed wildly. ‘You sometimes can’t help but stew,’ said Jane. The early mornings were her own private danger zone, when she woke from chilling dreams, like the one in which she received Don’s severed foot in the post. To counter these morbid thoughts, she would rise at dawn and go for a run around the compound that smelled of night queen and baked earth, striding through her fears, returning to shower before the others woke. ‘It helps me to focus on what concrete, positive steps I can take,’ she told them. When everyone had got up they would sip muddy instant coffee, the best they could muster in a nation raised on tea.

  It was only a matter of time before the Indian negotiators broke through, Jane would say almost daily. The women had to remain strong, as afterwards their partners would need as much love as they could give. Julie would ask how long they should wait there, knowing no one wanted to answer that question. But privately they had all thought it, and eventually someone broke the taboo and said it: ‘We can’t stay forever.’ After a fraught discussion at the end of July, they had made a pact: they would leave India when they believed they could no longer contribute. But for now they all felt as if they were the investigation’s much-needed conscience.

  Morning briefings with High Commission and Embassy staff became their anchor. Usually it would be British First Secretary Philip Barton, Tim Buchs of the US Embassy or the Norwegians’ Tore Hattrem who would come over, bringing the latest report from the Scotland Yard and FBI experts holed up in Srinagar, along with statements from the Indian Home, Defence and External Affairs ministries and the G4’s own meagre findings. The women searched for patterns in the conflicting reports from the various Indian agencies, worrying that they had no access to anyone working behind the scenes. ‘You think that by being closer to it you can get more information,’ Jane said. ‘But that’s not necessarily true.’ The diplomats assured them that if they were back home, things would be the same. In Britain, the relatives of crime victims were handled by a family liaison officer, and were not allowed access to an operation, although they did receive privileged briefings – something that never happened here. Privately, Jane was beginning to doubt the Indian efforts: ‘I think that each [agency] has their piece of the puzzle, and if we ever put all the pieces of that puzzle on the table at the same time, we just might come close to seeing a complete picture. Instead, it seems as though every group protects their own bit of information, not sharing it with anyone else.’

  To stop herself and the others from dwelling on negativities, Jane dragged everyone out on trips organised by Embassy staff: to the Red Fort and the Gandhi Museum, the crumbling fifteenth-century tombs and gardens of the Lodi dynasty. Even then, Don was constantly on her mind, and she picked up little knick-knacks for him, including a Bhima mask from the Crafts Museum, although she was unaware of its connection to Hans Christian Ostrø. The outings sat uneasily with them all, Julie especially. On 3 August she had gone on an exhausting day trip to the Taj Mahal, on the very day she should have been there with Keith, celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary. She returned to be greeted by al Faran’s photographs of Don and Keith lying apparently bloodied and unconscious. ‘How could I have thought it was acceptable to go sight-seeing when Keith’s life hung so precariously,’ she cried to Anette Ostrø. After Hans Christian’s death ten days later, Julie had almost stopped going out altogether, frightened of missing an important development and wary of the press pack that turned up everywhere, like a cloud of mosquitoes.

  Increasingly, Julie found reasons to do nothing. During the day she was exhausted, and at night she was kept awake by visions. In one recurring scene she struggled to arrange Keith’s funeral, putting on a brave face and making it to the church, only for him to walk in alive, halfway through the service. At other times he would come back to her injured and bleeding. Corrosive thoughts kept her on edge. Was she doing enough? Had she written him off? Would he still love her when he returned? When Julie started carrying around a cellophane-wrapped Indian magazine that contained a photograph of the beheaded Hans Christian Ostrø, which she told the others she wanted to show to Keith as proof of his lucky escape, Jane became worried. With Anne’s help she contacted a psychiatrist at the German Embassy and arranged for Julie to receive counselling. But nothing, not the doctor or the sleeping tablets, could stop Julie’s head from spinning back to the Meadow, where among the wild forget-me-nots all their lives had been transformed. ‘One minute Julie senses Keith is free, the next that he is dead,’ her mother Anita said. ‘We are up and down all the time.’

  The recording of Don Hutchings speaking directly to Rajinder Tikoo on 28 and 30 August had revived the hopes of all of the women. After listening to them repeatedly, they had issued a joint statement: ‘We are grateful … for this humanitarian gesture. It has greatly relieved and comforted us.’ But they were warned by their diplomatic liaisons to be realistic. ‘We have been told that things could get tough and that there is only a 50–50 chance of them getting out alive,’ Jane wrote in her journal following a debriefing after the second tape recording had been played to them. The rest of the families quietly wondered why the other hostages had not been able to talk. Keith’s mother Mavis told the Gazette: ‘I would have been a lot happier if it had been Keith on the radio, but at least it’s a step in the right directi
on.’

  Then, in early September, things began to slide once more. It began with the first newspaper leak, a source claiming to be close to the secret talks revealing that al Faran had reduced the number of prisoners it wanted to be released from twenty-one to fifteen. The kidnappers reacted badly to this indiscretion, threatening to kill the hostages one by one, starting with Don Hutchings. Jane was told this news at a morning briefing: ‘I was busy writing, taking notes as always, and as I was writing, I heard them say that Don had been singled out.’ Al Faran had said that they would kill him at eight o’clock that night if the government did not modify its position. ‘I could tell that all eyes were on me,’ Jane continued. ‘Then I realised my leg … had begun shaking uncontrollably, a violent shaking that made it almost impossible for me to write.’ She’d had this experience before, while rock climbing, and pressed her foot down hard on the floor. ‘All the while I was looking at my notepad, clenching my pen so very tightly … unable to look up. I’m sure everyone thought I was crazy, but I just couldn’t look up and make eye contact with anybody.’ The other women asked what they should do, on Jane’s behalf. They did what they always did, and issued a modest statement: ‘We appeal directly to al Faran to release safely the ones we hold so dear. Indeed we ask all parties involved to do their utmost to achieve this result quickly.’

  Back in the US, it was Labor Day weekend. All Jane and Don’s friends were having a get-together at their home in Northwood. But all she could think about was the deadline. Eight p.m. came and went. Al Faran remained silent, as did the Indian government, leaving everyone to assume it had just been another cruel but idle threat – everybody apart from Tikoo being oblivious to how he was struggling to reach a cash deal with al Faran. ‘It was a rough weekend,’ said Jane. ‘I can’t remember how we knew after that point that Don was still alive, but that was the assumption. At least there was no message to find a body at any given location.’

  Then there was a second leak in an Indian newspaper. Coming from another source that claimed to be close to the secret talks, this one stated that al Faran’s demands had been further reduced to just four prisoners. The kidnappers were prompted to issue more threats, this time against all of the hostages. The women waited and agonised and listened to the news. Once again nothing came of it, although an Indian government spokesman did emerge this time to reiterate New Delhi’s position that no release was acceptable.

  After a third leak, the talks purportedly collapsed altogether. After a fourth, they were back on. The fifth leak was the strangest, the women thought, another source telling an Indian national newspaper that the kidnappers had abandoned their demands for the release of any prisoners altogether, and now wanted cash, Tikoo having secured a two-and-a-half-crore-rupee deal with the kidnappers. Jane noted in her journal how al Faran had responded. Taking money, they said in a message delivered to the Press Enclave in Srinagar that denied the rumour was true, was ‘an obnoxious image’ that ‘repulsed’ them. Within hours, a story had reached New Delhi that al Faran had broken off talks ‘for the last time’. Jane recalled: ‘It all happened very, very quickly, from the time the [cash] thing was proposed, to the time it was leaked, to the time when it was just out of the question. We all wondered [about the cash deal]. Was this a serious opportunity, one that we would regret missing?’ They just did not know.

  Kept away from the negotiating process, the women could not understand whether these leaks were misinformation or an accurate reflection of the talks process. Jane couldn’t help but agree with a devastating assessment in India Today, the country’s premier news magazine, that concluded: ‘The Indian government limps along from day to day as if in a collective daze, even as the al Faran issues threats that are as ominous as they are sinister.’ Jane wished they had contact with government negotiator Rajinder Tikoo, who was himself the subject of a leak claiming he had walked away from the talks for reasons that were not clear. Jane was frustrated and frightened: ‘I wish when we had had contact with the group that I had gone in on my own. I wish I had been the one negotiating, because who’s going to work harder to get my husband out than me?’

  Up in Srinagar, the foreign experts played the leaks down. Roy Ramm characterised it as ‘Low-level flunkies on Saklani’s team selling off juicy pieces of gossip for a few rupees. He thinks, “Bloody hell, I’ve never had one of these [snippets] before, with whom shall I share this?”’ But after the story that al Faran would settle for a ransom broke on 18 September, Ramm began to wonder. The talks appeared to be finished. Unable to understand why, and not having sufficient inside knowledge to anticipate what would happen next, Scotland Yard and the FBI too were perplexed by Tikoo, who came to bid them ‘a genuine farewell’ without telling them why he was going. Ramm struggled to remain positive. However, what he did notice as he stared at his map of recent sightings of the hostage party was that whatever had happened in the secret talks had had a dramatic impact on events in the mountains. A rash of coloured pins correlated to brand-new sightings. For the first time in many weeks, the hostages were on the move.

  News of the first sighting came via the Guardian, whose reporter had made a dangerous journey to Inshan, a village in the southern reaches of the Warwan Valley. There a family of herders claimed to have been approached by a gang of Pakistani and Afghani militants looking for help to get out of the valley, who said they were guarding ‘valuable hostages’. The herders tried to strike a deal, eager to elicit information that they might trade for cash or influence: ‘We won’t just show you the way, we will help you fight also.’ The militants became twitchy, and clammed up. As they parted, the herders shouted a warning: ‘We have about twenty days maximum before we have to leave this place to migrate for the winter.’

  The first heavy snow was falling in the heights, night temperatures were plummeting, and the herders knew that the lush alluvial plain where Hans Christian had danced kathakali and Don had played volleyball were about to be covered in a blanket of ice. For the next six months the Warwan would be cut off from the world, and anyone who could get out would soon be on the move. Ramm and co. deduced that the kidnappers would have to move too, which made sense of these new sightings. It also made al Faran vulnerable.

  A few days later, the hostage party had been spotted on a path leading over bleak Mardan Top, the 3,800-metre icy pass leading out of the Warwan Valley. It was a dangerous exit route, as there were countless accounts of nomads dying there from frostbite or exposure. After the ascent to this pass, the route cut through the mountains and across an ankle-breaking field of scree. Eventually it led into one of three parallel basins that ran south-west from the Warwan to Anantnag.

  Soon, another sighting arrived. It came from nomads who placed the party at Kuzuz Nar, in a valley parallel to Mardan. If this information was correct, they had made it over the pass, but according to a report received by the British High Commission they had been badly affected by the ice climb, with a herder claiming that ‘two of the hostages and one of the kidnappers [were] now seeking treatment for snow blindness’. The punishing winter had begun in the Pir Panjal, part of the north-western complex of the great Himalayas that rise behind it. In the New Delhi goldfish bowl the women dwelled on what all this meant. But softening the distressing images of men dazzled and burned by the first heavy snowfall was an apparent destination that had a winning logic to it: the south Kashmiri town of Anantnag. All of the sightings seemed to suggest that the kidnappers were zigzagging in the general direction of Sikander’s realm.

  In 1994 the endgame had been played out in Anantnag, with Kim Housego and David Mackie released into the care of photographer Mushtaq Ali at the poplar nursery on the road to Pahalgam. Everyone prayed that winter was now forcing Sikander’s hand, and that the kidnappers were pushing towards another Anantnag handover. But the Indian Home Ministry disagreed. A spokesman advised caution, warning that the dense hills above Anantnag were a militant heartland, populated by partisan villagers who would give al Faran food and shelter
. Most settlements east of the town had been transformed into fortified militant compounds, while subterranean arms caches, tunnels and hideouts riddled outlying forests. Winkling out the kidnappers from this region would be even more precarious than from the Warwan Valley, the Indians suggested. This depressing response, clashing with what local sources were saying and with what Roy Ramm sensed, cast the women into a new depression.

  But as the days passed, the sightings continued, many of them extremely detailed. One described an ‘al Faran person sitting on bridge’ having an unguarded conversation with another militant about plans to move the hostages to ‘underground structures’ near Hapatnar. Another name, more research for Ramm and co., whose movements were restricted to the government compound in Srinagar. Unable to visit the Anantnag district for themselves, they had to be creative. No A–Z of Kashmir existed, and villages sometimes had more than one name: ancient Sanskrit, medieval Hindu, bastardised modern Kashmiri or Urdu equivalents. Often there were multiple spellings too. The foreign team had to use what local contacts they could muster – a driver, a baker, the shopkeeper who sold them cigarettes. Eventually they found Hapatnar on a map in a remote valley to the north of Kuzuz Nar.

  For a couple of days there was nothing. Then a handful of militants were spotted at Brah, a village on the path linking Kuzuz Nar to Hapatnar. According to Ramm’s map, this was very close to where Hans Christian Ostrø’s body had been found. Two Westerners were also seen there, under the guard of militants. On 26 September they were sighted again, outside Brah in an ‘underground bunker’ to the east of Anantnag. The foreign negotiators issued a warning. Although al Faran seemed to be moving towards Anantnag, as it had done in 1994, India should act soon, or the kidnappers could feasibly keep the hostages hidden for months to come, with the snow covering their tracks.