The Meadow (46 page)

So they
had
been plotting an escape. Ramm’s men postulated that they were trying to win over the village women who cooked for them. Maybe it was for this reason that Ostrø had been murdered, Ramm suggested.

Some other notes were dated too. On ‘Dag 24’ (which for Ostrø would have been 1 August) he referred to trouble brewing inside the kidnappers’ camp: ‘Here has been a fight and that was good. Now one needs to go carefully because it is a minefield.’ Tensions were high, and the kidnap team seemed to be in danger of splitting. ‘People are locked in. Other fellows are locked in too. They are left over to other people without weapons and they could not defend themselves.’ Ostrø appeared to be referring either to sympathetic villagers being locked up with them, or to Movement men who had been won over by the hostages.

On another page was a similar reference to fighting: ‘Holy fight, the battle’s just begun. We’re melting silver bullets. To be on the run. The dogs are hungry with their tongues outside. Still we try to have fun and be a preacher in the night.’ Ostrø was trying to mess with the heads of these men whom he thought of as slavish animals. But then Ramm’s team came across a more literal entry: ‘I have changed a bit since I wrote the first note and I hope your chances are good.’ Ostrø could only be addressing the other hostages, they concluded, which meant he had been separated from the others, although he was still close enough to them to believe he could get this note to them, maybe carried by the women, or by one of the Movement’s tame fighters who
had been won over. But what had he done to be singled out? ‘I can’t personally put my faith in these people. I believe it will be harder for the big Kommando [sic] to put a death order on you with me alive.’

One week before Ostrø was killed, he had done something so momentous that he believed al Faran’s leader, whoever that was, was considering having him killed. The FBI and Scotland Yard were convinced he had made an unsuccessful break for freedom, and that he was telling the others it was up to them to flee on their own. ‘You might get home before me,’ he continued. ‘I am doing it now because I still have some strength left. I am slowly vanishing and I am of that kind which you can’t really see if I am sick.’ He was on hunger strike, perhaps intending to become a sacrifice, or to distract attention from the others. ‘Good luck to you all,’ he had signed off. ‘God bless you in the fight!’

More fragments of what he had been going through lay in the pages of a little green prayer booklet,
The Hidden Words of the Baha’ullah
, that investigators established he had bought during a visit to the Bahá’í temple in New Delhi on his way to Kashmir. ‘So what has the world to give today?’ he had scribbled in the margin. ‘A wet blanket, a cold, news in Urdu, good warm tea, bread without health, light from God, rain and blue heaven …’ He went on to identify one of the kidnappers, ‘Schub, a fighter, but he is only good and kind’ – possibly a reference to someone with the Pakistani name Shoaib, the FBI noted.

Here also were poignant reflections on his old life: ‘To all the girls I have known, how big a part I am in you, I don’t know. But I do know that one kiss from you can put me out of balance, can send me high up in heaven out of control.’ But these moments of elation were fleeting, and by the next message his mood had darkened: ‘I’m hiding myself. It’s turning to evening. There are so many lonely others who will fight God. They are all seeing. Don’t stand alone.’ Was he feeling the weight of his isolation from the others? Some phrases were filled with a palpable sense of the strain he was under: ‘I write this with my hands tied.’ Some contained considerable foresight: ‘Why such very bad people behind a prophet? The Muslim brotherhood represents
pain, fear and hatefulness. Are you going to begin the next world war? Islam against developed countries. Are we going to suffer because of their ignorance? How does one meet hatred and isolation? Don’t we have the same right to breathe and do things like they have?’

Throughout, his growing pessimism was palpable. ‘To my family,’ he wrote. ‘If I should die now … I don’t die poor … You have been the essence that I have built my life on. A big train of gratitude and happiness is going through Asia to Norway to come and live in the house you have built in your dreams. Think of me. Think of castles, drakes, women with long hair. Think of little puppies, old skinny books, the innocent, growing seeds, rainbows, stars, the sun – and grow?’ In a dark corner he had conjured the things that made him happy.

‘To my family,’ he wrote again. ‘If I should die now, there will come bubbles of the tenderest love to those who are going to keep going with this life on earth which I have loved. The warmest hugs … I’m not afraid to die. You should know I’m well. I have had it better, but I’m not in any pain. Inside me there is lots of light. If I should die now, I have to tell you there are lots of things unfinished. My unborn children have missed an exciting childhood and my ocean of love. My family will never see me again. My best friends will put a ring of flowers on the top of a tower. If I should die now, I will not be satisfied. Much time will be wasted. Much suffering for me and mine without meaning … Open up lord, open up my eyes because I see my limitations and I am very silent.’

Then came the last set of notes. ‘Now I’m tired. It will be evening. The voice has been reduced and the listeners have become dust.’ He had no audience left, just his own imagination. ‘The butt has been broken, which dream shall now be dreamed?’ All he could hear were the angry voices of his captors. ‘Repetition and noisy men repeat themselves and are very boring, monotonous.’ They were arguing about how to deal with him. ‘One destructive hope, to escape home.’ But he feared that due to his hunger strike he no longer had the strength to run. ‘The well is empty and the stomach is cavernous. I am tired and stop for the night. The sky is still blue but only very little from outside comes into this cell.’

At the very end, he had run out of paper. He wrote the last message on a strip of bark, probably ripped from one of the silver birches that rose behind Sukhnoi village. It was the hardest to read. ‘I’m standing on a swing and grey skies become red,’ he began. ‘Suddenly it was over without warning. Broken knuckles, every organ breathing for air over the ocean waves. Then, it was over. There was no screaming, no hysteria, women yelling or children crying. Only the silence of old men’s stagnation and their peace and their quietness, their stillness of knowledge. Far away the golden castle supported by four elephants, Shiva’s temple. Around, shifting horizons. Then, it was over. The river’s cosmic fleeting was ended. Old men’s dry tears over material loss. Hissing snakes and self-pity. So it was over, a person with black eyes, Allah and My Lord. A pistol. I was not afraid. The End.’

The post mortem found broken skin on the knuckles of both of Hans Christian’s hands. His lungs had inhaled a mist of blood after the knife’s first, blunt cut. But there was no pistol. In the end they had used his own army knife.

Saklani had barred Commander Ramm from going outside the compound in the daytime, and there had been nothing from the kidnappers since the last deadline had expired on 15 August to prove that the remaining hostages were still alive. Ramm’s nights were spent watching bootleg videos with American military advisors and contemplating a small photograph he had tucked in his wallet soon after arriving in Srinagar, a picture of the hostages that he kept close to an important letter from his son. ‘I carried the photograph as a kind of reminder that amid the stifling bureaucracy of the G4 and the complications of negotiating, there were
lives
at risk,’ he said. But as the days dragged by, Ramm began to doubt that he would be able to exert any influence on this crisis, especially after al Faran issued another warning on 18 August that if the army or anyone else launched a raid, ‘we will kill the hostages immediately’. This turned the Indian authorities even further inwards.

Then a small movement in the tectonic plates of state occurred. Inexplicably, Ramm was offered a phone call to Rajinder Tikoo, the
Indian police negotiator he had not met, and whose transcripts of his conversations with the al Faran contact he had never seen. The conversation was brief and uninformative, but jovial. The Inspector General of Crime Branch made it clear he was delighted to talk to Ramm, and admitted that he was struggling in his task. He even asked Ramm for his help, hoping the ‘huge and sophisticated’ intelligence machine back in London could be made to work for him. He also asked Ramm ‘if “from our perches high in the sky” we could see movement in a certain area’, suggesting that whatever technical intelligence the Indian Army had, it was not sharing it with the Kashmir police. Ramm said he would find out.

Tikoo approached Saklani and asked if Ramm could be present, as a coach, during the phone calls with al Faran, but his request was turned down: ‘This seemed a bit too much like a Western takeover bid,’ Ramm wrote in his journal. But he got another call, and another, with Tikoo feeding him anodyne titbits, as he clearly hinted that their conversations were being listened in to, and that he was limited in what he could reveal. ‘We gave him quicker and better-prepared analyses than his own people could produce,’ Ramm recalled. ‘We were good at this. We had resources in New Delhi, London and Washington all working hard to corroborate the information provided by Tikoo. We wanted to help, if only they would let us help.’

Eventually General Saklani seemed to ease up, as Ramm and Tikoo talked regularly. Ramm formulated a strategy. ‘Go for proof of life,’ he advised Tikoo. The killing of Hans Christian Ostrø had put an end to the dialogue, and there was no proof that the other hostages had not been killed. One way to revive the talks and get away from the kidnappers’ demands would be for the Indian side to make some demands of its own: ‘Prove the captives are still alive, with the ultimate goal being something groundbreaking – like a live conversation with the hostages.’

Tikoo loved this idea. He felt isolated, even hated, dismissed in the Indian media after Ostrø’s death as an ‘incompetent unnamed Indian negotiator’. Ramm could see the stress Tikoo was under: ‘Sometimes, late in the night when he had been pleading with the rebels on the
telephone or having a clandestine meeting with an emissary, he would call me and we would chat on the telephone.’ The Commander would sit with his sleeping bag wrapped around him, listening to Tikoo’s worries. On 19 August Tikoo called in a panic after Jehangir, the al Faran caller, had rung to tell him he should say farewell to the hostages, as they were about to be killed. ‘I felt sorry for Tikoo. He was too often having to absorb the stress and horror on his own, and he badly needed support. He was under very considerable personal pressure. “Oh well,” Tikoo would say, yawning down the telephone line to me at three in the morning, “I have Mr Johnnie Walker to give me a hand. Good night, my friend.”’

Finally, after many days and weeks of asking, Ramm and Tikoo met face to face at Saklani’s office. Each was pleasantly surprised by the other. ‘Although deferential to Saklani, Tikoo held his ground when he felt he had a point,’ Ramm wrote in his journal. ‘He would make his point forcefully, nodding, smiling, stabbing at the air with the end of his good English briar pipe – of which he had a collection.’ Tikoo was quick to open up. ‘When we were alone with him, in a side room of Saklani’s house, he whispered, “Fucking soldiers don’t understand coppers. They think differently to us.” I found this a very Anglo-Saxon comment, in one way so absolutely typical of police-canteen language and culture, but so incredibly out of place in the foothills of the Himalayas. I laughed out loud, too loudly for Tikoo’s comfort, and he quickly “shushed” at me.’ Tikoo, Ramm felt, ‘could have been dropped into most Met police stations and would have blended in’.

In the early hours of 22 August, the day before Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings’ tenth wedding anniversary, IG Tikoo received an unexpected call at his home in Transport Lane. The Movement was making a drop, and he was requested to pick it up personally, in an elaborate and potentially deadly piece of theatre. ‘Where?’ he asked. ‘Khanyar,’ replied his contact – the downtown neighbourhood of Srinagar where the previous month the Border Security Force had stormed the house from which al Faran had been making the calls, causing the negotiations to become fraught. ‘The crossroads near the Tomb of Jesus.’

The location was a busy intersection in the middle of Srinagar’s old city. It had been given its name because it lay near Roza Bal, an ancient shrine to a Kashmiri saint that some ardent, creative Christians believed also to be the final resting place of Jesus, said by them to have gone there after surviving the crucifixion. The small, single-storey shrine building and the nearby Jamia Masjid mosque, Srinagar’s largest, were surrounded by traffic, the Iqbal market and traditional wooden shop-houses. The area was always thronged with people, making it, in Tikoo’s mind, the perfect location for an ambush. But he came as instructed, in an unmarked white Ambassador, and casually retrieved a dropped envelope, ripping it open as the car made its way back towards Lal Chowk and safer ground.

Inside was a photo: four familiar faces, although they were now visibly tense and numb, skeletal but
alive
. Of course there was no Hans Christian. When Ramm saw them he felt chastened. Don and Dirk sat in the middle, holding a newspaper dated 18 August, their beards visibly longer than before, although they were still wearing the same, now ragged clothes. Keith was at Don’s side, dressed in the warm woollen waistcoat he had bought from the
shikara
salesman on Dal Lake. Paul, dressed in a heavy tartan shirt, was hugging his knees despondently. They all wore identical expressions of hopelessness. There was a cassette tape, too. ‘My name is Paul Wells. Today is 18 August 1995. I am fit and healthy. I have no problems. Catherine, I love you. See you soon.’ He sounded better than he looked. There were similar messages from Don, Keith and Dirk. ‘Julie, I love you very much,’ said Keith. ‘Please pass on my love to my family.’

Prompted by Ramm, Tikoo knew what to do. He would thank Jehangir for the package, but tell him that all it proved was that the hostages had been alive the previous Friday. He would then ask him to provide concrete proof they were alive today. After that, things might get going once more.