The Meadow (60 page)

In six years of war, Kashmiris, inured to bloodshed, had never known terror like this. The Squad worried that there was nothing they could offer the renegade leadership of Anantnag to get them to work for them. They were the creation of the army and the intelligence agencies, a pragmatic and dangerous arrangement that made life on the ground easier for the embattled Indian security forces. If the backers of these renegades discovered that their hard-won contacts, oiled with bottles of whisky and stacks of rupees, were being utilised unsanctioned by Kashmiri Muslim police officers, the payback was potentially lethal. Twice in the past five years the police had been disarmed by the Indian security services when they had faced each other down over disagreements.

The Squad had already suspected they had been set up to fail in this inquiry. Now, probing the renegades, they felt even more vulnerable. For several days they watched, and discovered that suitcases of government cash were being delivered to the Civil Lines area of Anantnag, where most officials lived. From there the bags of cash were sent into the hills above town.

The detectives followed the money, and discovered its destination was an inconsequential village an hour south-east of town, close to historic Mughal Achhabal. When they arrived in Shelipora, they found the small grid of mud-walled buildings surrounded by living willow fencing and orchards was now striated with freshly dug trenches and bunkers crowned with razor wire. The houses were draped in camouflage netting and fortified with jute sandbags, their windows and balconies taped against blast damage and screened off with tall sheets of corrugated metal to repel volleys of incoming
rocket-propelled grenades, as small clusters of militants from HM made regular, but so far futile, attempts to smash their way in.

Shelipora was a bristling fortress. Indian armoured vehicles came and went, with masked gunmen from various government paramilitary agencies riding shotgun, sporting bulletproof vests and cradling automatic weapons. Here, tooled up and dug in, they discovered, was the headquarters of the most powerful pro-government militiaman in the entire district, a man who oversaw everything from the perimeter of Anantnag town to Mardan Top. His name was Azad Nabi, but out in the field he was known by his call-sign: Alpha.

Born Ghulam Nabi Mir, Alpha had once been a ‘Constable Driver’ with the 7th Battalion of Kashmir’s Armed Police, another wing of state security deployed to tame the valley. In 1989 he had deserted and crossed the Line of Control to train as a militant, enlisting with HM and returning to fight the Indian security forces with vigour. Soon he became an HM district commander, before defecting to a breakaway faction called the Muslim Warriors, eventually becoming its chief. This second defection meant he had to fight for survival on two fronts, against India and his erstwhile comrades in HM, who were furious at his disloyalty.

The intelligence services had reached out to Alpha in 1994, offering him sanctuary from HM and arms with which to fight his former brothers. This triggered one of the most ambitious intelligence operations in the valley, the defection of Alpha’s entire band of 450 warriors, who surrendered en masse at a secret ceremony on a parade ground, watched by Kashmir’s Inspector General of Police, Paramdeep Singh Gill. Alpha’s renegades had then been sent to north Kashmir to harass HM. They were credited with two hundred kills there before being redirected to Anantnag, picking Shelipora as their base. Here they had linked up with the Tiger and the Clerk to become India’s premier attack dogs in south Kashmir, raping, killing and boozing, running all of the renegade networks in the countryside. Collaborating closely with the police Special Task Force, the RR and Indian intelligence, they specialised in operations that the state could deny, also
developing a round-the-clock interrogation programme to keep the general population cowed that was renowned for its brutality and indiscrimination. Alpha was the fountainhead for everything that happened in the countryside, and his proximity to the authorities was visible for all to see. He rode around Shelipora in a bulletproof police STF Gypsy, and was protected by STF bodyguards. He boasted that he ‘earned more than a cabinet minister in New Delhi’, and his fighters received regular wage packets from the state: three thousand rupees (£60) per month for a rank-and-file
mujahid
, four thousand (£80) for a company commander and six thousand (£120) for a battalion commander.

The Squad had reached the top of the renegade tree. They decided on a dangerous tack. In a highly sensitive operation, they attempted to infiltrate Alpha’s Shelipora fortress and his district’s renegade network, turning those on the bottom rungs into informers and placing their own people, former militants who had the right pedigree, inside Alpha’s units. These sources wriggled, eavesdropped and recruited people who Kashmiris call
nabuds
, a slang term derived from the local word for ‘sugary’, meaning someone who could be enticed to give up little snippets of information when sweetened by cash: the poverty-stricken or put-upon, the greedy or ambitious.

Gliding like honey through hamlets and small market towns, these
nabuds
courted others, creating a network within the renegade hierarchy that generated reams of intelligence, none of which Ramm and co. would ever see, but that took the police Crime Branch inquiry to another level. As they had hoped, they began receiving countless reports about al Faran, generated by Alpha’s spies in the countryside, who saw everything. By the end of October the Squad were aware of sightings of the kidnappers in Hapatnar and remote Brah, in Asharjipora village and Anantnag itself. A report was dispatched, along these lines: al Faran is now completely exposed. The hostages are alive. The kidnappers are hot-footing it around, out on a limb. ‘They are exhausted, desperate for a deal, and they will break soon.’

No direction came back from the security forces. But the Squad sensed that if only they could develop their intelligence faster,
reducing the lag between receiving the name of a village and raiding it, they could bring this kidnapping to a positive conclusion, and quickly. Whenever they converged on a hideout al Faran was ahead of them, sometimes fleeing only moments before they arrived. In one case half-filled teacups had been left beside a fire that was still glowing, flat breads warming on the stones, and a packet of cigarettes just cracked open, the foil half pulled off.

However, by early November, despite numerous close calls, the Squad had got no nearer. The detectives were also stewing over one undeniable fact: whether it was Alpha’s warriors or the Clerk’s new Brotherhood in Vailoo or the Tiger’s thugs in Lovloo, the progovernment forces ran everything and saw everything. The countryside India publicly claimed to have lost control of had in fact been brutally battened down. This raised one serious question. The Squad sent a report up the line, something like this: If we own the countryside, and wherever al Faran treads it can be seen, how do Sikander’s boys continue to evade the renegades and remain at large?

There was something profoundly troubling about the landscape above Anantnag.

EIGHTEEN

Chor-Chor Mausere Bhai
(All Thieves are Cousins)

In the last week of October, Jane, Julie, Cath and Anne took a vote. As far as they could see, nothing was happening. Al Faran was silent, the Indian authorities too. The women all needed to leave India. Julie and Cath missed their families and friends, and Jane was desperate to get back to some kind of regular life. The autumn term was under way, and she could not keep the elementary school where she worked hanging on indefinitely. Don’s work also needed to be sorted out. And they had all had enough of sitting around, made to feel useless and pretending to be tourists.

Their collective decision to go was not just based on what they were missing, but also on a growing belief that they could achieve much more outside India. In Britain, the USA and Germany they could lobby their governments to intensify the pressure on the Indians, with Jane planning to use her brother-in-law Don Snyder’s political connections in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. All of them agreed that too much time was passing. ‘Can it be possible that one time so long ago I was writing Day 25, Day 53, Day 67 … How many more will I have to write?’ Jane pondered in her journal. She and the others wrote a parting statement: ‘It has been 114 days … for all that time we have waited anxiously for news of their well-being, prayed for their safe return to us. We have now decided to return to our homes to seek the support of our families and to discuss with them … what is happening in India.’

Before they left New Delhi, they were all called in by their embassies. The search would continue, they were told, but such was its
sensitivity that it could be derailed by any ill-judged comment, even from the other side of the world. They should all refrain from talking to the press. Jane agreed. Her greatest worry was that by leaving India they would be cut out of the diplomatic communication loop. One of the best things about being in the Chanakyapuri compound was that she felt she knew what the embassies knew, and not long after they knew it. The US Embassy promised to provide her with a dedicated State Department liaison officer who would call her regularly, daily if necessary. The British High Commission agreed to arrange something similar for Julie and Cath. The Indian Home Ministry reassured the women that they were making the right choice by leaving. Officials confided to them that, for reasons that were not explained, the ‘threat to the hostages’ lives had receded’. What did that mean? None of them could decide.

Before they knew it they were saying goodbye at the airport, trying not to feel as if they were quitting, although that was all they could think about. They boarded their flights unsure of when they might be back, or if they would ever see each other again.

On 26 October, as New Delhi disappeared beneath the autumn smog, Jane thought how she and Don should have been making this homeward journey three months back, their rucksacks stuffed with gifts and snapshots, their heads filled with stories to share with friends. Instead, she was returning with an album of harrowing photographs that charted the descent of five smiling figures in newish trekking gear, weathering some bad luck but with a great adventure story to tell, to four, despondent bearded wraiths.

Cath’s suitcase, originally packed for a six-week adventure, now bulged with paperwork. In her hand luggage was a bundle of Paul’s holiday photos: Julie, Keith and Cath laughing as they struck out along the path from Pahalgam in T-shirts and shorts; Julie and Keith chatting beside their tent just moments before their lives were changed forever. Recovering some possessions she and Paul had left behind on the houseboat, Cath had found the postcard Paul had written but never got round to sending: ‘Dear Mum and Dad, It took us 30 hours to get here and I (oops!)
we
are now staying on a houseboat for £3 a
night. I’m sitting on the roof of the houseboat writing this to you … The houseboat owner Bashir is taking us on a trek tomorrow to Kolahoi Glacier with two British people and a Canadian. It should be fun! Love from Paul.’ Now she would have to deliver it to Bob and Dianne Wells personally.

When she was back on British soil Julie held a press conference, wanting to head off the newspaper and TV reporters. Charlie and Mavis stood by nervously as she explained why, in need of a different kind of support, she had left New Delhi. ‘My source of that support is here at home with the community, my friends and my family,’ she said. Mavis, buoyed by Julie’s return, also said a few words. It felt good to be face to face at last.

Then Julie fell to pieces. She couldn’t work, wouldn’t eat, and was consumed by guilt at having abandoned her husband to his fate. She moved in with her mother in Eston, but was kept awake by horrific dreams: Keith falling through the ice, or locked up somewhere beneath the forest floor, or shackled and injured in the snow, or suffering and frightened in some isolated herders’ hut. Kashmir seemed so far away. The local Kashmiri community on Teesside got in touch, offering to help, and a couple of times they got together. But Julie left those meetings feeling as hollow as she had in Srinagar. As far as she could see, they just wanted to use her predicament to highlight their woes: ‘The sheer negativity of those people shocked me.’

Jane’s return was also low-key but fraught. She spent a week ‘crying on the settee’ with her parents in Orefield, Pennsylvania, before facing Spokane. Everyone rallied around, arranging a potluck dinner, filling her in about everything the city was still doing to keep Don’s memory alive. But the home he and she had packed with mementos now filled her with a crushing feeling of loss, whether she was sitting in his study, or gazing out over the back garden, or looking up at the moon and ‘wondering if he could see it too’. There was one gift he had not yet seen: a crystal ball she had bought for his forty-third birthday. If only she’d given it to him before they went to Kashmir, he would have
joked. Not wanting to fester, Jane returned to work, and got on with her life straight away – shopping, gardening, running, teaching, cycling, sleeping.

Then, after forty-nine days of silence, al Faran re-emerged on the other side of the world.

On 9 November a handwritten message was dropped at the coop of smoke-filled offices that made up the Press Enclave in Srinagar. Still without access to the official inquiry, and with nothing to do in Kashmir, many of the Scotland Yard and FBI investigators had returned to New Delhi. But now that there was something to analyse, the Church Lane guesthouse quickly filled up again, even though the contents of this long-awaited al Faran communication were troubling.

One of the hostages had suffered ‘bad injuries’ after a fall, it claimed, while another was ‘ill and being given medical aid’. No names or details of the accident were revealed, in a calculating disclosure that could not be verified. While Roy Ramm and co. remained sceptical, a new eyewitness claimed to have seen Don being carried around ‘on a militant’s back’. Given how many weeks the hostages had been in captivity, and the harshness of the terrain and the climate, this report could not be ruled out either. The investigators were struck by another thought. The last time this kind of card had been played by al Faran – the theatrical images purporting to show the wounded Don and Keith after a firefight – it had presaged a breakthrough in the secret negotiations. While everyone was certain the photographs had been rigged, they accompanied al Faran’s first major concession, a dropping of the prisoner numbers from twenty-one to fifteen. Would this new letter, after so many weeks of silence, also be accompanied by a move, perhaps towards a deal? Hopefully, Ramm and the other negotiators told each other, the Indians were working on something special.