The Meadow (50 page)

It was Tikoo’s turn to take control: ‘Call me tomorrow,’ he said. He was certain, for the first time, that they could strike a pact. ‘Look after the tourists. Good night,’ he added.

Until he had it in the bag, this had to be kept from everyone, even Saklani. But over the next few days Jehangir wriggled some more, piling on the pressure cruelly and precisely, dithering over amounts and methods, going back to prisoners and amnesties, making new threats to kill, singling out Don as the first to die. Tikoo asked what sum would end the affair quickly. Jehangir conjured an astronomical number. ‘Impossible,’ Tikoo replied. On 17 September Jehangir called back. He had a revised figure. He sounded deflated but serious: ‘One
crore
[ten million] rupees.’

Tikoo almost laughed out loud. ‘After all this time, al Faran was asking for only £250,000. This was an amount so small we could handle it ourselves. I mean, any one of us could sign out these funds and end it all right here and right now.’

‘We’re there,’ Tikoo said to himself as Jehangir clicked off the line. ‘We’re at the end. Everything’s going to be all right. And we’ve paid a tiny price for four lives, one that New Delhi can live with.’ He drained a celebratory glass of Bagpiper whisky and soda, thinking of the long-deserved break from Srinagar he would now be able to take with his wife. Perhaps they could head for the States, or Canada? He fancied San Diego. He did a little jig. ‘Imagine the price to the valley if this had gone to hell,’ he reflected, ‘and the hostages had been skewered in paradise. We would never recover.’ He could not bear to think about it. But the valley was saved, as were the foreigners in the mountains. The jubilant Tikoo called his driver and rode round to the Security Advisor. ‘It’s a deal!’ he gabbled. ‘We’ve done it! Hoorah, hoorah, hoorah! I have it on the table! The hostages are ours for one
crore
rupees.’ Saklani raised his eyebrows, and repeated the sum, incredulous. He then shot Tikoo a look of delight. ‘There is no time to go over it now,’ he said as he called his car to take him to the Governor.

Left alone, Tikoo recalled the Saturday night back in July when General Saklani had first handed him the phone. He exhaled, his whole body shaking. ‘I had been on tenterhooks for seventy-two days,’ he said.

On 18 September Tikoo was woken in the early hours by his phone trilling away in the darkness. ‘Go away. It’s too early,’ he murmured into his pillow. ‘Far too early.’ The ringing continued. Something must be wrong. ‘Damn it,’ Tikoo thought, praying that it wasn’t the slippery Jehangir calling to cancel the arrangement. He continued to ignore the ringing, and eventually it stopped. But half an hour later it started again. By then Tikoo was up anyway. After a lifetime in service, his body clock militated against lie-ins. He grabbed the receiver, to find it was a colleague from New Delhi. ‘He told me, “There’s a story on the front page of the
Hindustan Times
. I guess you won’t have seen it yet.” And I said, “Yes, OK, come on. Tell me.” And he said, “It says the kidnappers have abandoned their demands for prisoners.”
I said, “Yes. OK. Good. That’s old news and gossip.” He said, “And it says the government has secretly agreed to pay a ransom of one
crore
rupees.” I said, “Holy shit. Oh the gods,” and slung the receiver across the room.’ Tikoo felt sick. He raged and spat. He might have cried. ‘It’s blown! The whole bloody shebang’s broken!’ he shouted at the top of his lungs. He had been humiliated, and Jehangir exposed as a paid mercenary.

He sat down before calling his driver and telling him to take him to Church Lane. ‘Who the hell is behind these leaks?’ he shouted as he stormed into General Saklani’s office without a thought for the usual courtesies. Saklani appeared ashen. ‘It was not the Security Advisor – the job was too dear to him. I could see it in his eyes. These leaks had come from some other place. It was disastrous. It should not have been done. Once the
Hindustan Times
hit the valley at 2 p.m., the whole game would be over.’

Tikoo spoke up: ‘Once this thing is out … I have nothing left to talk about.’ He could barely string a sentence together. ‘It is a full stop. I have just become irrelevant. Once this secret deal is everywhere, humiliating them, they will never trust me again. And, you know, I have wasted my time, too.’

Saklani went to tell the Governor what had happened while Tikoo left for home. By the next morning, the IG’s mind was made up. It would not be a formal resignation, since protocol denied this, as did his ambition. ‘Look, one of my uncles is dying,’ he told Saklani. ‘I have to go to Ahmedabad on compassionate leave. I will be away five, six days, so can you kindly ask someone to take over for me?’

Later that day, Tikoo took a seat on a flight out of Srinagar. ‘The end is now foretold,’ he thought. Before leaving, he had called on the foreign negotiators to say farewell. ‘I apologised to the Brits, etc., and told them, “I am leaving this assignment, and I want you to know I am sorry.”’ But he could not reveal what had just happened. Only a small group of Indian officials had known about the cash deal – he could count their names on the fingers of one hand. All around him was evidence of a profound betrayal that reached to the summit of government, although so many pieces of the picture were missing that he could not fathom what or who lay behind it, or why anyone would
have chosen this course, rather than victory, with the hostages triumphantly freed.

Rajinder Tikoo had become attached to the cause of the families, and could not shake the image of the hostages being snatched from their former lives into a new world of terror and uncertainty. ‘The problem for them all,’ he recalled, ‘was that they were just ordinary people.’ He stared out of the plane window and down at the Pir Panjal, that was now muffled by deep, fresh snow.

FIFTEEN

The Squad

Somewhere behind the high walls and barbed wire of the Jammu and Kashmir Police’s Crime Branch, the old cream-and-ruby-red building set back from the snarling traffic of Srinagar’s Jehangir Chowk, lay a bulging secret file, held together with a leather binder and tied with a length of string. It began with three First Information Reports or crime logs: the initial kidnapping report raised by Jane, Cath and Julie on 5 July at Pahalgam police station; followed by another, concerning Dirk Hasert and signed by his girlfriend Anne Hennig at Chandanwari police post on 8 July; and a third, date-stamped ‘P/S Pahalgam, July 11’, which was when a Duty Inspector had finally got round to recording the abduction of Hans Christian Ostrø in Zargibal, from where the villagers had taken their time in clambering down the mountain to report the crime.

However, beneath these meagre offerings – the Urdu-scrawled snapshots of a moment in time – lay a mountain of paperwork, the sum total of what Rajinder Tikoo’s Crime Branch inquiry team had been doing over the seventy-two days that he had been absent from the office, following his first telephone conversation with Jehangir. Here lay a legion of typed affidavits, each one endorsed with a sheet of court-fee-stamp paper, and interrogation reports, sealed as a true record of who had said what to whom by the thumbprints of the broken, illiterate confessors. Interspersed between these official police documents, written in English and Urdu, were page after page of handwritten observations, rough transcripts of unofficial ‘interviews’ and pencil-sketched maps of outlying hamlets, villages, mountain
routes, arms caches and suspected militant boltholes. There were typed case notes too, and small, cigarette-card-sized photos of straggle-headed militants (alive and dead), intelligence tips and informers’ reports, some jotted on torn newspaper pages and others on the backs of cigarette packets. In sum, this enormous Crime Branch file, and all of its ancillary evidence folders and boxes, was bursting with the snippets and double-talk that industrious policemen gather during a major operation.

The FIRs were practically all that the families of the hostages and the Western negotiators like Roy Ramm had laid eyes on. But for the Indian and Kashmiri top brass – police, army and intelligence – the entire file was theoretically available, although the choicest bits had been distilled into Daily Situation Reports. The DSR was like a core sample pulled from a giant oak, a summary of everything significant. A shorter version of it would have been included in the Daily Summary, dispatched to anyone with clearance and an interest in the case.

Here, seen only by a select circle of high-ranking Indian readers, was every last detail of a thorough investigation that no one in the West even knew existed. The unedited bundles and boxes were packed with revelations, just one of which would have rejuvenated the anaemic FBI and Scotland Yard investigations.

The Kashmiri police donkeywork had begun on 5 July, just hours after the first kidnappings, when IG Tikoo, then still based in his pipe-smoke-scented Crime Branch office with its wooden veranda, had called in one of his superintendents, SP (Crime) Mohammad Amin Shah, a garrulous veteran investigator. Regardless of what other security agencies were planning to do to tackle the unfurling crisis, Tikoo had ordered Shah to form a dedicated Crime Branch team. ‘We couldn’t leave the police response down to the deputy superintendents out in the field,’ Tikoo recalled, referring to men like DSP Kifayat Haider, stationed in Bijbehara, for whom he had little respect. ‘This was a complex and difficult matter whose consequences were potentially enormous, threatening to blight the whole of Kashmir as a valley of kidnappers and killers, and it demanded investigation and coordination, directed from the centre.’

Savvy and well turned-out, SP Shah knew what kind of detective to put on this case. He called in another superintendent, Mushtaq Mohammad Sadiq, who ranked below him, but was among the most experienced field officers in the department. A master of the unconventional, who was happiest working off-diary on covert investigations, Sadiq was small, moustachioed, grey-faced, and appeared to be all forearms. He was also young, clever and invisible. While many in the Jammu and Kashmir Police spent as much time courting the press as pursuing their cases, getting themselves written up heroically and riding around town in bullet-pocked Gypsies or gleaming Ambassadors, SP Sadiq always remained in the shadows, valuing his anonymity, which was key for a man who was about to rub up against the Movement.

Sadiq had got to understand the value of preserving his anonymity when he served in the counter-insurgency unit, listening in to the militants’ chatter, hearing the gunmen identifying individual cops and intelligence agents as targets, drawing up detailed kill lists, locating their stations and homes before laying ambushes. Although SP Sadiq was well known on the insurgents’ grapevine, given the number of operations he had run and his tally of kills, and his reputation for savage interrogation and ruthlessness while undercover, they had a name only. Pinning a likeness on him proved impossible. ‘Sadiq: he’s that thickset one like a pony-
wallah
.’ ‘No, that’s Ghulam Nabi from intel,’ ran one exchange he overheard. Or, ‘That Sadiq has long, long wild hair like a
pir
.’ ‘No, it’s razored, like Haider’s.’ And finally he had eavesdropped this: ‘Can anyone describe this Sadiq? We’re beginning to believe the bastard doesn’t exist.’

A Kashmiri Muslim from downtown Srinagar, Sadiq understood the street. He had thrived in the most challenging postings, such as Anantnag, the volatile south Kashmir town that militants had poured into over recent years. There he had melted into the crowds of fired-up Kashmiri youth and Pakistani-backed militias, finding and managing high-value sources so as to feed a steady stream of valuable intelligence back to police lines. But he was under no illusions as to where his real loyalties lay. As well as the ISI-trained Kashmiri and
Pakistani gunmen who took potshots at him, he also hated the Indian chauvinists in the security forces and elsewhere, Hindu hawks who flew in to hoist the saffron, white and green union flag, rah-rah-rahing about ‘Kashmir being Indian’ before retreating to their heavily fortified camps to watch the valley burn.

Sadiq saw himself as a Kashmir-born Indian – in that order. The alternative, to be a son of Kashmir who rejected India and who chose to fight, was a fool’s choice, he believed. To his mind, the fight for
azadi
had become corrupted over the past six years. ‘
Azadi
’ was a fine-sounding catchcry for Kashmiri politicians, but most of them used it to enrich themselves, accepting money from Pakistan while ignoring the plight of their impoverished constituents, opening themselves up to accusations from New Delhi that they were treasonous and corrupt. The young men who actually enlisted with militant outfits were similarly foolish, in Sadiq’s opinion, doomed to be little more than cannon fodder, dying in their thousands, their sacrifice going unremarked, while the real aspiration of the Kashmiri people – to be left alone to govern themselves – was crushed between the jostling tectonic plates of New Delhi and Islamabad.

When he got the first call about the hostages on 5 July, Sadiq made few demands: ten men of his choosing, freed from all other duties, who would exchange their uniforms for skullcaps and woollen Kashmiri
pherans
, and would not set foot in a police station unless their lives depended on it. They would be referred to in the file simply as ‘the Squad’.

The Crime Branch file showed that the Squad hit Pahalgam hard on 6 and 7 July, brushing aside DSP Haider. Without stopping to introduce themselves or to explain why they were there, Sadiq’s plain-clothed officers had scoured the trekking town for information, targeting local hoteliers and drivers, guides and pony-
wallahs
, many of whom regarded the militants as heroes, but whose livelihoods were now in jeopardy. If the kidnapping crisis could not be defused, the Squad warned them, the Indian security forces would relentlessly turn them over, splintering their businesses and smashing their homes.
And if they did not assist the investigation, this formerly charmed gateway to the mountains might appear to have broken its bond with its foreign guests, and be shunned by them for years to come. They need look no further than Aru, which in the year since the 1994 abductions of Kim Housego and David Mackie had been transformed into a ghost town.