The Meadow (55 page)

If India was deliberately dragging its feet on this case, squeezing the kidnapping for maximum propaganda value, someone on the Indian side would have to take the blame if the crisis ended with blood being spilled. The Squad had no intention of being hung out to dry, and branded as incompetent. They needed to do something that did not happen too often in Kashmir: solve the crime. ‘We had become attached to the case, and felt for the hostages,’ said a Squad officer. ‘We feared too for our careers.’ They searched for new sources to help them peer into remote Sukhnoi, but unable to replace Agent A, by the end of August they had only gained a partial view, snatches gleaned from brief conversations with itinerant residents coming and going to and from the village.

The little that did emerge, recorded in the Crime Branch file, showed that while all official efforts in Srinagar centred on pushing Jehangir into providing proof-of-life information, the kidnap party
sat tight in the Warwan. The Turk remained as commander, quarrelling with his deputy Qari Zarar. Sikander, via his safe houses east of Anantnag and in Pahalgam, was the Movement’s linchpin, handling all communications with Pakistan. The four captives remained prisoners in their wooden ‘guesthouse’ in Sukhnoi.

However, as soon as IG Rajinder Tikoo’s hard-won secret cash deal had been blown into the open on 18 September, convincing Tikoo that ‘someone in the Indian establishment wanted this rescue operation to fail’ and leading him to quit his negotiator role, everything changed. ‘Al Faran packed up and fled,’ said a villager from Gomry, the settlement two down from Sukhnoi. ‘They were gone by the third week of September,’ a teacher from the same village confirmed, having travelled to Sukhnoi to visit sick relatives. ‘The guesthouse was empty for the first time since late July, although in Sukhnoi villagers remained scarred by what had happened. They feared al Faran could return any time, and were on tenterhooks. They wrestled with the guilt, sickened by what they had been forced to collaborate in. No one would go near the guesthouse. But what else could they have done?’ Another local from nearby Brayan saw the gunmen making their way down the valley with Don, Keith, Paul and Dirk. Heavily bearded and ‘wearing Khan dress and plastic shoes’, these days the hostages and the militants all looked alike as they trudged off south. After eleven stationary weeks, much of them under close observation, they disappeared, throwing the Squad into a panic as they searched for their trail.

Crime Branch agents were sent over Mardan Top and down to Inshan to comb through the scattered lower villages of the Warwan, tramping worn paths that criss-crossed the valley bottom. Given its physical remoteness and its deep connections to the militancy, the Warwan remained a treacherous place. The Squad stayed in the background while their emissaries sat down at smoky firesides, conducting polite conversations that began with tea and discussions about the harshness of life, but then moved on to more probing questions about any militants who had recently passed through with foreigners. Gently, villagers began volunteering information, delighted to be free of al
Faran, and revealing how, despite being terrified of the gunmen and the security forces, they had secreted many things away over the past two and a half months.

Hans Christian Ostrø’s writings had been discovered by someone in the Warwan and smuggled out of the valley, and villagers confirmed that all of the hostages had kept themselves busy by writing on anything they could get hold of: scraps of paper, bits of bandage, food packaging and strips of bark. In 1994, Kim Housego had done the same. ‘Villagers or herders were passing through all the time, on their way up or down the valley,’ he recalled. ‘We did not know where they were going, but we felt they were our only chance of getting a message to the outside world.’ To increase the chances of this happening, as many notes as possible were left lying around. ‘You cannot imagine what you are capable of until you face a situation like this yourself,’ Kim said. ‘We contemplated writing on the rocks, and on our rubbish, on anything we could utilise.’

This time around, the hostages also appeared to have discarded or hidden their missives whenever and wherever they could. Almost whenever the villagers passed Sukhnoi’s improvised volleyball court, or walked along the meandering silt tracks beside the river, they had found scraps of the hostages’ writings, paper fragments ground into the mud by passing hooves and plastic sandals. When they trotted on their ponies between the protective stone walls of the bridlepaths, they had discovered pieces of paper jutting out of the dark grey rock or peeking out of the cairns left by European climbers who had mapped the region in the early twentieth century. They had pulled yet more from the fields as they turned the soil with their bullock-drawn ploughs. Many things had also been concealed in Sukhnoi village itself, forced into gaps between the large foundation stones around the mosque, between the rocks beside the riverbank that the villagers used as their night-time toilet, and into the split wooden poles that propped up their houses. Any of this material would have encouraged the partners and families waiting for news, but they got to see none of it. ‘Much later, I heard stories that Don had been writing, writing, writing,’ recalled Jane Schelly. ‘But we never saw anything. Not a single sheet.’

Like the residents of Zargibal, who had been too scared to report Ostrø’s abduction immediately, the people of the Warwan feared being found with incriminating papers by either the kidnappers or the Indian security forces. So they had handed most of what they picked up to literate schoolteachers or pharmacists, who then copied their contents, as best they could, into dog-eared exercise books that they stashed with their animals, or beneath the floorboards of their homes. The originals were burned. Unfortunately, some of these copy books had also been deliberately destroyed shortly before the al Faran party departed the area, the hostages’ thoughts and fears lost forever, as villagers were panicked by al Faran gunmen trawling through the Warwan looking for supplies for their next mission.

Now, with the valley theirs again, the villagers retrieved what remained to paint a picture of an increasingly isolated and frustrated party of men who could not understand why no one came to rescue them.

‘We have been kidnapped,’ one shopkeeper read from some spidery notes. He said he had paraphrased the original document, a sheet of paper found wrapped around a ball of mud, getting down what he took to be its meaning, but not the exact words. He had not used English in many years. ‘We are being kept in a wooden hut, a four-hour walk north from here,’ the notes continued. ‘We do not know the name of the place. We are in extreme danger. We need your help. Take this message to the authorities.’ There were five signatures beneath a map with a dotted line tracing a route from Pahalgam over the tops of mountains and passes labelled ‘Sheshnag’ and ‘Sonasar’, and down into a valley spelled ‘Varvan’. The shopkeeper had noted the unusual spelling, a transcription of the strong accent of Sukhnoi people, who pronounce the ‘w’s in Warwan as ‘v’s.

This note appeared to have been written soon after the hostage party reached the Warwan Valley in the second week of July, when the hostages had a fresh mental picture of their route. If, like Kim Housego, they had listened to reports about their abduction on the radios carried by al Faran, they would already have had an inkling that search efforts were unfolding. For much of Kim’s time in captivity, the
kidnap party had been glued to their radio sets, he said, listening avidly to news reports about the kidnapping on Indian state radio, Pakistani channels and the BBC World Service. Kim recalled the delight of one particular night when he heard his father’s name mentioned several times in a BBC Urdu broadcast. He also remembered how the kidnappers had become electrified whenever they heard any of the Movement’s leaders back in Pakistan referred to on air. ‘All the group [would] raise their hands in salute,’ then shout the commander’s name followed by the word ‘
Zindabad
’, or ‘Long live’. Isolated as they were, everyone felt desperate for reassurance. The Squad wondered how the hostages would have felt if they had overheard the reports of the first press conference given by Jane, Julie, Cath and Anne at the Welcome Hotel on 13 July. The detectives themselves had been moved as they listened to Julie’s voice, trembling across the airwaves: ‘In the name of God, let our loved ones go. We miss them terribly.’

On other scraps of paper, four of the hostages had written brief descriptions of themselves, according to records kept by a schoolteacher.

Don: ‘I am a US citizen. I am married to Jane. I am 42 years old. I’m still pretty fit. I was surprised how well I managed the walk over the top from Pahalgam. Spectacular views despite doing it under duress. Now we are resting beside the river. The most frustrating thing is not having language in common. And the microbes. Some of us have been hit by dysentery. We cannot drink the glacier water as its high mineral load gives everyone a raging thirst. The pure water stream behind the village is fine but almost dry. There is very little food. We have organised a rota to forage for wild herbs. The gunmen never leave our sides. They are all devout. They do not seem like killers. Some of them act like kids.’

Kim Housego had picked up Hindi during his school days in New Delhi, and also had a few words of Urdu. Hans Christian Ostrø was the only one of the 1995 hostages who could speak a word of either language, leaving the others powerless to communicate with their captors. Hans Christian wrote of himself: ‘I am from Oslo, Norway. I
am 27. The villagers call this place Sukh-nis. They speak differently to everyone else I have met. It was a long and difficult walk but if I could get away I would be able to find the way back to Pahalgam. We have drawn maps, using charcoal we stole from the fire. This was our first task. The people who took us are frightened. They do not know how to look after us. Schub, he is good. But the Kommando [sic], he is not a good man. Sometimes he looks like he wants to kill me. We have started a volleyball team. I am also trying to get villagers to learn
kathakali
, but the gunmen have told them not to speak to us and so we have to dance in silence. These are superstitious, stupid men. This place is at the end of the world.’ As always, Ostrø had been looking for any way to communicate with and reach out to the strangers around him, unafraid of being somewhere alien and new.

Keith: ‘My name is Keith Mangan. I am from Middlesbrough, UK and married to Julie. I am 33. We have started to secretly write whenever we can. We have to do what we can to get the message out. We feel exhausted, ground down. Hans Christian got a pencil from the villagers. We are using charcoal from the fire. I miss you very much, Julie. And my family, please send them my love if you read this note. We talk about what happened, how it happened, why it happened. The main problem is the sickness, which is very wearing. We are vomiting and have diarrhoea. We need medicine. But we are still alive.’

Paul: ‘HELP. My name is Paul Wells. I am 24 and from Blackburn, England. I was trekking with my girlfriend, Catherine. I hope she is well. This valley is the most beautiful place that I have seen. There’s no light pollution and there are beautiful hawks in the sky but my camera has been stolen. Wild animals are in the forests, but we do not see them. The villagers and our guards are very different from us. Whoever reads this should let the authorities know. We need HELP. We are waiting.’

There was no word from Dirk. The Squad wondered if he might have written something in German that the villagers, unable to understand it, had discarded.

With what they had, the Squad were able to judge that the hostages had probably learned from the radio that the Indian government was
negotiating for their release. Their hopes would have been raised if they had heard the reports broadcast on 17 July quoting a senior Kashmiri police officer as saying: ‘Serious discussions are going on and we are not rigid. We may release four or five militants – but not the twenty-one they are demanding.’ If the hostages had heard and believed this, they would have concluded that al Faran had an intermediary elsewhere, far away from the Warwan. John Childs had thought as much on the first day of captivity, as he watched the kidnappers waiting to receive orders from Sikander on their VHF set.

In a long document found near Mungli village, a hard day’s walk from Sukhnoi, the hostages and several members of al Faran were cast as characters in a story based around their predicament. All that had survived of this, the villagers recalled, was the title page, a cast list and a summary of the plot. This must have been written under the influence of Hans Christian Ostrø. Many villagers in the valley recalled the blond hostage who ‘danced and sang and shouted’ all day long, refusing to be quiet. Even in captivity, Ostrø’s theatrical spirit was irrepressible.

A bundle of papers was recovered from various hiding places around Mungli too. They suggested that the hostages had spent a week or more there, possibly while the kidnappers were waiting for some delivery coming up from Anantnag, or negotiating for food supplies. Again, the originals were destroyed after the village note-takers had made an attempt at recording some of what they read:

A Dream Book – in which each hostage had recorded his nightly visions and invited the others to interpret them.

Medicine list – updated according to the ever-changing needs of the hostages.

Score Cards – used for games such as volleyball, cricket and football (separate cards for hostages, guards and villagers), as well as notes about rudimentary games played inside when the weather was bad, using river pebbles as counters.

Rules and Opinions – set by the hostages for themselves, to make living at close quarters possible, including a complaints page where any hostage could write down something that was irritating him, for later discussion.

An Atlas of the Mountains – an attempt to map the hostages’ location and possible escape routes.