Fire (12 page)

While half a million people were being slaughtered, the semi-independent state of Kashmir was trying to decide whether to incorporate itself into India or into Pakistan. Kashmir was primarily Muslim, but it was ruled by a Hindu maharajah, and that inspired an army of Pakistani bandits to cross the border and try to take Srinagar in a lightning raid. They were slowed by their taste for pillage, however, which allowed Indian troops to rush into the area and defend the city. War broke out between India and Pakistan, and the nascent UN was finally forced to divide Kashmir and demilitarize the border. Fighting continued to flare up for the next forty years, and a surge in Pakistani-backed guerrilla activity again brought the two nations to the brink of war in 1990. This time the stakes were higher, though: India had hundreds of thousands of troops in Kashmir, and both nations reportedly had the capacity to deliver nuclear weapons. Diplomats defused that crisis, but American envoys in Delhi still considered Kashmir the world's most likely flash point for a nuclear war.

By the time Jane Schelly and Donald Hutchings showed up in Srinagar, as many as thirty thousand locals had been killed since 1992, and Kashmir had been turned into a virtual police state. The brutal tactics employed by the Indian Army had brought a certain amount of stability to the area—it was alleged, for example, that security forces machine-gunned every member of a household that had any association with the militants—but the war continued to rumble on in the hills. In 1994 two Brits had been kidnapped by militants and held in exchange for twenty or so HUA guerrillas serving time in Indian jails. The Indian government had refused to bargain, and after seventeen days the militants relented and let the hostages go. They even gave their prisoners locally made wall clocks as souvenirs of the adventure.

Schelly spent her first night out of the mountains at the UN post, and the next day she moved to a secure Indian government compound. High-level British, German, and American embassy officials flew up on the afternoon flight from Delhi, and by July 7 a formidable diplomatic machine was in gear. Terrorism experts—unnamed in the press—were flown in from London, Bonn, and Washington, D.C. Negotiation and hostage release specialists were made available to the Indian authorities. Surveillance satellites reportedly tried to locate the militants on the ground, and the Delta Force, a branch of the U.S. Special Forces, was in the area being readied for possible deployment. Indian security forces began working their informants in the separatist movement, and Urdu-speaking agents started trying to maneuver between brutally simple parameters for negotiation: no ransom and no prisoner exchanges. Any concession to the guerrillas' demands, it was feared, would only encourage more kidnappings.

Still, there was some hope that Al Faran could be eased toward compromise. Communication was carried out by notes sent along an impenetrable network of local journalists, militants, and nomadic hill people. Hamstrung, on the one hand, by an Indian government that was not entirely displeased with a situation that made Pakistan look bad and, on the other, by a U.S. policy that forbade concessions to terrorists, negotiators found themselves with almost no wiggle room, as they say. The best they could do was relay messages to Al Faran that pointed out the immeasurable harm the kidnappings had done to the Kashmiri cause; the only way to regain credibility, said the negotiators, was to let the hostages go. To encourage this line of thought, the U.S. government left the negotiating to the Indians—whose country it was, after all—and started pulling strings elsewhere in the Islamic world. They persuaded a Saudi cleric to condemn the kidnappings as un-Islamic, and they tried to massage some of their contacts in Pakistan.

“Al Faran was clearly an HUA-affiliated group, and what we know about HUA is that it's not very hierarchical,” says a U.S. government source who closely followed the incident. “It's not at all clear that Al Faran was even
interested
in communicating with [HUA] headquarters. If we'd had anything suggesting a tightly hierarchical organization, it would have been much easier to negotiate. And they had very poor, unsophisticated decision making. These were
not
people with a Plan B.”

 

B
y the end of the third day, John Childs could barely walk, and the militants seemed to be heading deeper and deeper into the mountains. They were, in fact, just walking in circles, dodging Indian military. To keep himself from sinking into despair, Childs devoted every waking moment to planning his escape. He knew the militants' sole advantage was their incredible mobility; without that, it would be only a matter of time before they were discovered by an army patrol. Which meant that if any of the hostages escaped, the militants wouldn't be able to waste too much time searching; they'd have to look quickly and then get moving again.

“My first objective was to get fifty meters away from them,” Childs says. “And then five hundred meters, and then five kilometers. I knew that every bit increased the area they had to search by the square of the distance. And I knew there was no way this guy Turki was going to scatter his crew all over creation looking for me. He couldn't afford to look for me for more than six hours, so if I could stay away from them for that long, my only problem would be not being seen by the nomads.”

That meant hiding during the day and traveling at night, which strongly favored an escape after dark. That was fortunate, because Childs had one iron-clad reason for getting up over and over again during the night: Dysentery was still raging through his insides. The militants always posted a sentry after dark, but the hostages weren't tied up when they slept, so the sight of Childs getting up to relieve himself was by now routine.

In contrast with Childs, the other hostages seemed to be doing fairly well. The two Brits, Wells, twenty-four, and Mangan, thirty-four, were depressed but physically strong, and Hutchings was fully in his element. When Mangan came down with altitude sickness, Hutchings had him pressure-breathing and rest-stepping as he walked; when the group got lost in a whiteout, he took charge and told them which way to go. At one point Wells muttered how he would like to grab one of the hand grenades and blow all the militants away, but Hutchings was always personable and helpful. “It's a lot tougher to kill a smiling face,” he said. Hutchings had years of psychological training; if anyone could manipulate the situation, he could.

It wasn't until the fourth day, as they were crossing yet another valley, that the militants made their first mistake: They visited a familiar place. It wasn't much, but it was all Childs had.

“We were in the valley that the pilgrims take to Amarnath Cave,” Childs says. “And Don knew where we were; he'd been there before. He said, ‘Okay, down the valley is Pahalgam, and up the valley is the cave.'”

Childs thought about that for the rest of the day. He wasn't going to be able to keep up with the group for long, and Turki wouldn't hesitate to have him shot. Not only would that free up the group, but it would also send a message to the authorities, who obviously hadn't given in to the militants yet. If he were going to escape, he'd have to do it soon.

“So, are we going to spend the night here?” Childs asked Turki that afternoon, as they were taking a break. He knew the answer, but he wanted to hear what Turki had to say. “No, too much danger,” Turki replied, waving his arm down the valley: Indian military.
They wouldn't dare spend much time searching for someone,
in other words.

That night the militants made camp along the east branch of the Lidder River, sleeping in a cluster of stone huts generally used by pilgrims on their way to Amarnath Cave. Childs, rolled up in a horse blanket, lay on the dirt floor of a hut and considered his possible avenue of escape. The camp was at the mouth of two huge valleys that fed into the valley leading to Pahalgam, and Childs's plan was to escape by climbing
up,
in the opposite direction of what the militants would expect. He'd hide in the snowfields before dawn, stay until dark, and then start down toward Pahalgam. It was a three-day walk, he figured; he had no food, no bedding, and the valley was filled with nomads who might report his location to the militants. It was, at best, a long shot, but it was better than the odds he had now.

Then, exhausted by four days of forced marches, Childs fell asleep.

“There had been other opportunities to escape, but of course you never know if it's the right time,” says Childs. “It's not a movie, where you know when it's going to end. You keep asking yourself, ‘Is this the best time, or will there be a better time with less risk?' It took a huge effort to focus my thoughts and say,
‘Okay, you've got to do this now. You've got to do it when you're tired and not feeling well.'”

Childs woke up in the middle of the night. It was quiet except for the sound of people snoring and the crash of the river. The dysentery was rolling through his system, so he fumbled in the dark and grabbed his hiking boots—knocking over a metal grate in the process—and crept out of the hut. Ordinarily the sentry would greet him and escort him out of camp. But this time no one stirred—the sentry seemed to be asleep. Childs walked out of camp, relieved himself, and then stole back into bed, wondering what to do.

“You can be passive and not make a decision that may save your life,” he says, “or you can accept death as a possibility. That was the crux of the whole thing.”

Childs lay in bed for an hour, preparing himself, and then he got up again. He decided that if anyone stopped him, he'd just claim he was having another bout of dysentery. He thought about waking up the other hostages, but there didn't seem to be any way to do that quietly; the others also lacked his pretext for getting up. Childs stepped out of the hut and waited for someone to say something; silence. He edged out of the firelight into the darkness beyond the huts; more silence. There was always the possibility that someone was watching him surreptitiously—or even had a gun trained on him—but that was a chance he had to take. He stood motionless for a moment, frozen at the point of no return, and then he started to run.

“I thought I was in their cross hairs the whole time,” he says. “It was like a dream where you run and run and you're not getting anywhere because your feet are bogging down. I kept expecting to hear a ruckus behind me, but I never saw any of them again.”

Childs took off straight up a ridge between the two valleys. He was in his stocking feet, and all he had on was long underwear, Gore-Tex pants, a wool shirt, and a pair of pile pants wrapped around his head. He walked and ran as hard as he could until the ridge got too steep to climb without boots, and then he put them on and kept going. He knew the militants would wake up early for morning prayers, and he had to get as far away as possible before then. He hammered upward for the next three hours, and when dawn came, he crept into a cleft in a rock, drew in a few stones to conceal himself, and settled down to wait. As it got lighter, he noticed that anyone walking along the ridge would stumble right into him, so he violated his rule against traveling during the day and continued higher up. He was in the snow zone now, really rugged country; the next hiding spot he found seemed perfect, until it became apparent that he was resting on solid ice. He wound up moving to a small patch of moss on a hillside. There were glaciers and peaks all around him, and he was sure no one would follow him up that high; he was at least at twelve thousand feet.

By midmorning a drizzling sleet had started to fall, and Childs endured that for a few hours—resting on the moss, dozing from time to time—before starting out for Pahalgam. He was almost down at the bottom of one of the side canyons when he heard a helicopter. The sound of the rotors faded in and out, then seemed to head straight toward him. Since he hadn't heard any aircraft in five days, his first thought was that there must have been a negotiated release of the hostages and now he was stranded in the high mountains with no food and no way to call for help.

“I stood there kind of dumbfounded,” he says, “and I started waving my pants around over my head. The pilot circled, and I could see there was a soldier in there; he had his gun pointed at me. I was a mess by that point. I hadn't bathed in five days and had mud smeared all over me and looked like a wild man of the mountains. The pilot landed on one skid, I ran up, and [a soldier] said, ‘Are you German?' I said, ‘No, I'm American. I just escaped from the militants.' He said, ‘It's a miracle from God,' and hauled me on board.”

 

T
he militants, as Childs had thought, had searched down valley when they realized he was gone. They didn't find him, but they stumbled across two other trekkers, Dirk Hasert of Germany and Hans Christian Ostro of Norway. They were subsequently reported missing and were, in fact, the people the helicopter crew had been searching for. Rebel sources in Srinagar say that Ostro was belligerent toward the militants from the start, telling them that what they were doing was cowardly and un-Islamic; they also claim he was armed with a knife and had tried to use it. That is impossible to verify, but suffice it to say that Ostro succeeded in sticking out in the group.

Childs was brought back to Srinagar in triumph and immediately debriefed in the presence of British and American embassy officials. It was the first of endless debriefings over the next several days. “I spent more time in captivity by the State Department than by the militants,” he said later. Childs was then taken to a secure guest house, where he was introduced to Jane Schelly. For Schelly, the chance to talk to someone who'd seen her husband only hours earlier was a relief beyond words.