Authors: Adrian Levy
The Meadow (24 page)
Dirk and Anne were on holiday. They were not reading newspapers. They had asked officials for their views, and had heard nothing about the kidnapping of Don, Keith, Paul and John. On 6 July, the day news of the events in Kashmir was broadcast around the world, Dirk and Anne left Srinagar at dawn, taking the bus to Pahalgam, just missing the breaking story. Pony-
wallahs
and guides crowded around them when they arrived in the trekking town around noon. Instead of telling them to turn back, men who were desperate for business vied with each other to describe the wonderful sights the German couple would see camping beyond the ridgelines. No one mentioned Jane, Julie and Cath’s dramatic arrival in Pahalgam the previous day.
Dirk and Anne started out the next day, following in the footsteps of Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings along the Amarnath route. Up in the mountains it was ‘incredibly quiet and peaceful’, Anne recalled. But at the mountain village of Chandanwari they were slightly disconcerted to see droves of Indian soldiers. ‘It was certainly irritating that so many military people were around, but who could take notice of that in such a magnificent landscape?’ Anne said. Coming from a country that had been divided, the couple had lived with uniforms their entire lives, and they were advised that these troops were preparing for a Hindu pilgrimage whose route needed securing. The soldiers themselves did not stop to talk, but just waved at the foreigners, ushering them on and up, higher into the mountains. ‘There was no reason to worry,’ said Anne. ‘There seemed to be everything to live for.’ So they pressed on, camping on the night of 7 July just outside Chandanwari, going to bed early since they had dawn plans. As they lay in each other’s arms they talked about Pissu Top, the high-altitude pass they hoped to cross the following day. And of Zargibal, a small
hamlet of stone houses and a mountain stream where it was said one could pitch a tent and get a near-perfect view of the seven peaks of Sheshnag. How glad he was that they had made it this far, Anne remembered Dirk whispering to her, just before they fell into a deep sleep.
8 July, just after midnight. Was he the only one awake, John Childs wondered. As he lay huddled under a couple of thin horse blankets next to his fellow captives, it was difficult to say. Just like every other night they had endured, the hostages were hemmed in on all sides by clumps of wheezing, scratching and snoring insurgents, more than a dozen men and boys in total. Their Kalashnikovs were stacked against the walls, while they kept their pistols and knives jammed into their waistbands or close at hand throughout the night. The situation was as close to a nightmare as John could imagine, cooped up at uncomfortably close quarters in a pungent, smoke-filled
gujjar
hut somewhere in the Kashmiri mountains, who knew how many miles from safety, with no sign of rescue. For the past four days and nights his every move, his every bodily need, had been controlled by these rough strangers, who he had begun to hate with a passion. ‘I came from America, the land of the free,’ he said. ‘And now I had to ask some idiot kid with a rifle for permission to urinate, to speak, even to wash my hands before eating. I was stunned by the loss of freedom. This is what struck me most. The thing that pained me.’ But having got over his self-pity, John was determined to get out.
After four days in their company, he was still not sure who his captors represented, or what they wanted. They appeared to be some kind of
mujahideen
, like the turbanned gunmen he’d read of fighting in Afghanistan. Two of them claimed to be veterans, without saying which conflict they had fought in, or on what side. Some of the younger ones had let the odd fact slip during unguarded moments.
One said he came from Gilgit, which John knew was somewhere in the Pakistani mountains. Another said he was from ‘the tribal areas’, which probably placed him on the Pakistan–Afghanistan border. Other than that, there had been little talking. The leader had seen to it that his men kept their distance and said little. ‘Shut up, keep quiet!’ he had barked every time he caught the hostages exchanging whispers, gesturing with his pistol.
One thing was clear. These men had known no life other than the mountains or the battlefield: washing only to pray, defecating wherever, charging up mountains in plastic sandals, spending the evenings obsessively cleaning their weapons. ‘Some of the younger ones were just teenagers,’ said John. They made a few attempts to ask about cricket, bands, life in Britain and the US. John had decided right at the start to smile through it, and not to be the one who caused trouble. ‘I didn’t want that responsibility, I didn’t want to anger my captors. I just wanted out of this. I left the bolshiness to Paul.’
But on the inside, John was fighting himself. ‘All I kept thinking was how stupid I’d been, too proud to accept I’d made a mistake in going to Srinagar, too arrogant to turn around when it was staring me in the face that this was
not
an appropriate holiday destination. Now I was stuck, and as far as I was concerned, no one was coming to rescue us.’ He could not block out the thought that less than a week earlier he’d been in a suit and tie in Calcutta, pondering a break in the Himalayas. Now he was trapped, and distrustful of everyone – including, if he was honest, the other hostages. How could he rely on men he did not know?
John focused on the kidnappers, trying to work out the pecking order and their rituals, noticing how reverentially they acted around the leader. ‘He was sinister-looking, with a long, narrow face, a hawkish nose and an expression that gave nothing away. Unlike some of the others, who got excitable or panicked, the leader was cool, and spoke near-perfect English. Fair-skinned, with a long beard and hair, he had a stillness about him that, enhanced by his aquiline profile and robes, gave him the aura of an educated aesthete. He seemed to have come from privilege, but to have been brought down by war to something
more basic.’ John felt that this man had chosen his path, and that he was capable of anything. Many years later John would say that every time he saw a picture of Osama bin Laden he was reminded of al Faran’s leader.
Now he lay studying the primitive eaves of the shelter, roughly hewn from red pine, sawn and hacked into lengths which it must have taken many men and animals to haul to this spot. He had had enough of the last four arduous days, walking and climbing endlessly, with nothing more to greet them at the end of another twelve hours than a smoky hut and a clump of rice. Back home, running for miles, trekking into the mountains or taking a bike ride through the woods, setting up an impromptu campsite, were all voluntary experiences. But a route march at gunpoint through these high mountains, up flanks and over icy ridges with vertiginous sheer drops on either side, was punishing.
The hut they were currently housed in, which they had reached at dusk the previous evening, was split by a wooden partition into two dank rooms, devoid of furniture, each of them barely six feet square, the walls and ceiling scorched black by wood smoke. Its miserable male occupants had spent the early evening guarding the rough corrugated-tin gate of the compound, before coming inside to squat on a patchwork of rugs thrown over the impacted earth, from where they watched the hostages with fascination. The women and children remained out of sight in the second room, boiling up tea on a wood fire, rinsing metal bowls and talking in soft whispers.
The wind breached the nicks in the rough stone-and-earth wall, fanning the embers in the firepit. Earlier, two women who could have been mother and daughter had been forced to make dinner for all of them, eking out a meal for everyone from their meagre rations: ash-flecked rice,
lavash
and some kind of vegetable that resembled spinach and that had got the locals very excited when the leader had produced it. Spotting a small bowl of home-made butter in one corner, the younger gunmen had fallen on it, dipping their bread into it, gobbling it all up then taking it in turns to run a forefinger around the bowl. John had felt sick as he ate, hiding pieces of bread in his socks and
padded trekking jacket before pushing the rest away. Sitting by the fire, watching the militants through the haze, he had thought, ‘I have to get out of here.’
He studied the sleeping hostages. He and Don had bonded a little. Two Americans
in extremis
. But the British pair, Keith and Paul, were different to him in outlook, experience and nature, almost as foreign as the kidnappers. They believed, naïvely, in the generosity of others, and in the importance of acting collectively. No doubt they would try to form some kind of escape committee if they had the chance, whereas he had calculated that he would have to capitalise on whatever chances arose, because they would be infrequent. ‘The Indians will save us,’ they had said. John had shaken his head in disbelief. They had been abandoned to their fate the minute they had been kidnapped. ‘There would be no rescue. In my mind we were totally alone.’
John had always been the one who’d unflinchingly confronted unpopular thoughts, even at the cost of making friends. He knew that saying these things out loud would have made him sound mean-spirited. But all he wanted was to live. He needed to see his mother, his father, his daughters again. He believed in the power of his imagination. That was what would get him out of here.
By the faint light of the embers of the fire he could see his sleeping comrades’ faces, pinched with exhaustion. How much ground had they covered over the past seventy-eight hours? Twelve hours of walking and climbing every day, stopping only to pray and at dusk. His, Keith and Paul’s beards were beginning to show, which he was sure would please their captors, as it made them less obviously foreign. He felt bad about what he was starting to plan, and knew it would have an impact on the other hostages. ‘But I had no other option. I chose to live. And I knew if I didn’t do it now, I would die.’ Everything depended on the number of sentries outside, and how alert they were. John was banking on the fact that no one would be rising for another three hours, until the 4 a.m. prayers. His stomach knotted in spasms. He was not sure if it was fear, dysentery, altitude sickness or a parasite. Whatever it was, he would use it to his advantage.
He got up and silently wound his way, boots in one hand, between the sleeping bodies. Gingerly pushing the tarpaulin door-flap aside, he emerged into the cold night air of the mountains: wood smoke, pine resin and snow. A sentry who was sitting beside the entrance to the compound looked up. John acknowledged him, then grimaced and gripped his stomach, as he had done many times over the past days. The sentry nodded and went back to cleaning his weapon. John walked out of the compound, counting three more guards dotted about in the trees, all of them in various states of slumber. He knew there were more sleeping in the next hut. Gripping his stomach again, he groaned gently before stumbling into the woods and finding a place to squat. He shivered and watched, taking in the scene.
Somewhere nearby, a river was gurgling. He drew himself a mental map. Why hadn’t he gone home after Calcutta? He berated himself yet again, thinking about his daughters, Cathy and Mary. Did they know he was missing yet? Probably not. News travelled slowly in what he saw as the swamp of India. Here he was, in a deadly Himalayan scrape, with his trousers around his ankles. But he had to try to quell the self-pity, and do something. His captors had become more blasé with every mile under their belt. Head up and inhale, he said to himself. Above him the sky was dark and cloudy. Perfect, he thought. An overcast night would make it easier to travel unnoticed. A few minutes later he stood and hauled up his trousers. It was not yet time. Was he prevaricating? No, he had a plan. He had a simple idea that would change the course of the next forty-eight hours. But it was not yet late enough. He stumbled back into the sour-smelling hut.
Four days earlier, when they had first been marched up the mountainside away from the other campers in the Meadow, all John Childs had dwelled on as the rain poured down his neck was how unbelievably stupid he had been. If he had heeded Dasheer’s advice he would have been back in Pahalgam by the time the gunmen had entered the Meadow. He would have read about the incident in the newspaper as he boarded his plane to New Delhi, and told his work colleagues back
in New England about his scrape with death. From the moment he had awoken to find a militant standing in his tent he had come down on himself hard: coming to Kashmir had been ‘the biggest screw-up of my life’.
The hostage party, with Dasheer tagging along at the leader’s insistence, had climbed for a couple of hours through a pitch-black forest, slippery and prickly, the rough path made treacherous by moss-covered rocks on which their feet skidded, twisting ankles and jarring knees.
John, who was still feeling the effects of walking at high altitude for seven hours the previous day, struggled to keep up. And all the time there was a gun muzzle knocking the small of his back, reminding him of the consequences of lagging. His rigid mountaineering boots, designed for crampons, scraped another layer of skin from his heels as negative thoughts crowded into his mind. His socks were wet with blood. He had to fight his pessimism, and dig deep to find his fitness, or the route and his fatalism would kill him.
‘Stupid, selfish idiot,’ he said under his breath over and over, convinced he was about to die, looping into a self-destructive cycle. Now his daughters, his parents, the people he loved most in the world, would have to deal with his death, telling their friends he had gone off to Kashmir on a selfish adventure. His parents would go to their graves without seeing their son again. Would anyone ever find his body? Would there be a funeral? Then there was his sister Barbara and her children. And his younger brother Richard. All these lives messed up by his reckless decision to go trekking in the most dangerous location in the world.
The red flags had been obvious from the minute he touched down in Srinagar. Why had he not heeded them? Watching the younger militants racing up the hillside ahead of him, clearly exhilarated by their catch, John felt like hurling himself off the side of the mountain. He was so angry that even after several hours of climbing, he couldn’t bring himself to look the other hostages in the eye. What must that look like to them? Shame? Pride? Bitterness? There was no point worrying about how the others saw him. He seldom cared about the
impression he made. By the time they had scaled the ridge, hundreds of metres above the Meadow, all of them were soaked to the skin and depressed.