The Siege: The Attack on the Taj Mumbai

by Cathy Scott-Clark

  Shortly after 10.30 p.m., chefs and waiters had guided a column of guests down a service corridor, popping out into the club’s foyer, which Bhisham, the journalist, instantly recognized. He had been here once before, for a press junket thrown by Ratan Tata. Emboldened, he asked if staff could open the bar. Writing about food and drink, he regarded himself as a connoisseur. ‘Look, you got the best, bring it out,’ he teased. But the Chambers manager politely refused. Bhisham mournfully texted his friend: ‘Best single malt collection in the country and not a drop to drink.’

  Another group of guests was led in, among them a huffing Andreas Liveras, accompanied by Remesh and the spa girls. They saw that in one of the smaller rooms a group was conducting a business meeting. ‘Look, everyone’s carrying on as if nothing is happening,’ Remesh whispered to his boss. Mindful that many guests had not eaten, the kitchens produced trays of mint chutney sandwiches. Andreas asked Remesh to grab some extra rounds. ‘Hide them in case the food runs out,’ he said, plonking himself on a large chaise longue, fielding calls from his office and family in London, as well as the Alysia. ‘Everything’s fine,’ he assured Nick. ‘We’ll sit tight until the army get here.’ He rang his son Dion: ‘It’ll all blow over, don’t worry.’

  The mood darkened when someone switched on the television, blaring facts mixed with conspiracy theories: more than sixty terrorists were roaming Mumbai’s streets, the police were overwhelmed and hundreds were dead. Footage of the bloody station concourse at CST stopped the chattering. Bhisham walked over to his horrified mother and took away her phone. An insensitive message would tip her over the edge.

  More guests arrived, including Mike and Anjali Pollack. She was frantic. The normally cool financier looked agitated, too. A few minutes before, one of the gunmen had tried to get into their hiding place in Wasabi, prowling outside the locked service door. A chef had brazened it out, redirecting the gunmen, saying the room was empty, narrowly escaping with his own life. Now all that Anjali could think about was their two young sons, staying with her parents in another part of the city. ‘We could have died,’ she cried.

  As Chambers filled up, Bhisham and his mother moved down the corridor to one of the smaller VIP suites, the Lavender Room, just as an explosion shook the floor. Had they been found already? The lights and TVs cut out. Sitting in the dark, Bhisham messaged a friend: ‘Heard the blast. What is happening?’ The friend replied that the top floor of the Palace was now ablaze. Bhisham panicked: ‘Is it serious? Is the army inside the hotel?’ He turned to his mother, who was praying. ‘What a great wedding.’ There were now 250 people locked in Chambers, and only six policemen inside the hotel.

  Outside on the pool terrace, Amit Peshave was getting more anxious by the minute. It was 11.30 p.m., and despite the dozens of calls he had made nobody seemed to know where the transformer room keys were. The bleeding British guest was getting weaker and his shirt was soaked in blood.

  Amit’s phone buzzed. It was his old room-mate Hemant Talim, a trainee chef in the Golden Dragon. ‘Amit, how’s things?’ he asked calmly, warned about his friend. ‘Look, we’re all in Chambers now. We need to know your exact location.’ Amit explained his predicament. Call Chef Oberoi, his friend suggested. Amit got Oberoi on the third go: ‘Chef, I’ve got a Brit guy here who’s going to die, drunk MPs out of their minds and a missing boy.’ Oberoi tried to calm him, saying he would contact maintenance people to bring the key. Then Amit noticed out of the corner of his eye that one of the MPs was staggering into the open, and over to a statue of a lion that he attempted to climb. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he rasped.

  Thirty minutes later, he heard hollow knocking. Someone was now on the other side of the transformer room door. The guests jostled anxiously. Then the doors were flung open, and everyone pushed forward. Amit noticed a man jumping down from the top of the transformer room roof, a European guest, wearing a red bow tie and a dinner suit. He must have been hiding up there all the time and hadn’t said a word. ‘James Bond!’ Amit said to himself, watching in amazement as the man hared off. Now he had to get the injured British guest to a hospital. He shouldered the man’s weight and stumbled out into Merry Weather Road.

  Up in Souk, on the top floor of the Tower, Bob Nicholls and his South African commandos were in security mode. There were upwards of fifty people in the restaurant, including the wife of the Taj Group’s CEO, feeding back updates from her husband, who was trapped in his office eighteen floors below. ‘He says we are in the safest place,’ she assured them. Bob had been receiving his own updates, from a Mumbai-born business partner, watching things unfold on TV back in Johannesburg, Bob’s wife Melaney sitting beside him. ‘There’s firing all around the Palace but the Tower looks untouched,’ the first message said. ‘The whole city is under attack. Stay put.’

  Across the room, the US Marine captain Ravi and his brother went through their wallets, taking out US dollars and driving licences. They needed to erase everything that identified them as Americans or connected Ravi to the US military. He stuffed some essentials, including his stars-and-stripes credit card, into a sock. He thought about ringing his girlfriend back home in San Diego but decided against it. When his sister called, he told her he was nowhere near the action. What could she do? From now on he would also stay apart from his Indian family, worried that if he were caught, he would contaminate them, too.

  Coming from San Diego, Ravi and his brother planned to fake Spanish accents if they got singled out. ‘I hope to hell we never get to that point,’ he murmured. But there were some things Ravi could not change, especially the fact that so many years spent in the US Marines rubbed off on a person. Now his neck was as wide as his head, which was scalped into a distinctive buzz cut. Everything about the way he carried himself, and especially his sloping shoulders and lean frame, said military.

  Ravi strolled over to the South Africans’ table. He reckoned the gang of square-jawed, close-cropped men were from the same tribe. ‘Look,’ he said to Bob, without giving anything away about himself, ‘I’d just like to help if I can. I have some experience in this kind of situation.’ He didn’t volunteer any more information and the South Africans didn’t ask. Bob put him to work, accompanying one of the ex-commandos on a recce. They needed to find somewhere safer than Souk, with its wrap-around windows. If a bomb went off in the lift lobby, everyone would be cut to shreds by flying glass. Through the kitchens, Ravi found a conference hall that occupied the rear portion of the top floor, the Rendezvous Room. He threw back the door and to his amazement there, sitting quietly, were a hundred Koreans. He tried to question them, explaining that they all needed to bed in together, but they spoke only a little English. They were badly spooked and could not be left alone. Ravi rushed back to Bob with the bad news. The Korean delegation swelled their numbers to 150-plus.

  Ravi saw no sense in remaining in Souk now. ‘Let’s decant.’ Rendezvous was far easier to secure. Once they had got everyone inside, Bob grabbed a mic from the conference podium and began addressing the crowd. Everyone here had a different reading of the crisis. Those from the city saw it in ways that Bob could not imagine. They had lived through communal riots and serial bomb blasts, watched coal kings become Muslim godfathers, creating an alphabet of crime gangs that held the city to ransom, sending khaki gunslingers like Maria to war. Only in Mumbai would the inequality within the criminal underworld become a pressing political issue, with Hindu chauvinists trying to undercut the power of Muslim godfathers, by falling behind their own saffron crime boss, a Hindu don, who operated out of his lair in a mill workers’ slum. If you were going to get your throat slit, there’d better be equal opportunities for all criminals of every faith in the city of seven islands.

  Bob was sure-footed, the Marine captain thought. There was something about his everyman demeanour that appealed, even though he actually had no front-line experience. ‘Don’t talk loudly on the phone,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell people on the outside where we are. Keep close to the floor. Don’t move
around. Don’t sit under the chandeliers. Don’t talk to the press.’ He circulated a piece of paper, asking everyone to write down names and addresses. He did not say it was a ‘dead list’.

  Now they needed to build a fortress. One of Bob’s commandos climbed inside a false ceiling, above the lifts, ready to drop on whoever entered. Ravi disabled the lifts by jamming chairs between the doors, and then secured the restaurant entrance shut with wire. Inside, they began constructing barricades to block two outward-opening fire exits, piling up tables and parts of the podium, placing chairs either side, with which they planned to clobber any gunmen who tunnelled through. Ravi also quietly recruited waiters to sit by these exits, to act ‘as canaries’. As far as he was concerned, this thing wasn’t likely to end any time soon. They were bedded in for a long wait.

  They all heard the explosion that rumbled up through the hotel. Ravi knew it was far too loud to be a grenade. ‘I can see smoke,’ Bob said, sounding worried for the first time, and peering down on to the sixth floor of the Palace, clearly visible below the Tower. He could see flames emerging from the roof. How will we escape if the fire turns the Tower into an inferno?, he worried to himself.

  On the top floor of the Palace, at the opposite end to the Tower, Sabina Saikia heard the blast too. Horrified, she called her friend Ambreen Khan: ‘What should I do?’ Ambreen reassured her. ‘Look, I’m on the way over. Call up the duty manager now.’

  ‘I’ll call Karambir Kang,’ Sabina suggested. Ambreen said no. She had seen on the news that his family was also trapped. ‘He will be busy. Call the duty manager.’

  Sabina called back minutes later. ‘Ambreen, I’m scared. There’s shouting and footsteps outside my door.’

  ‘Peep out. Make sure they don’t see you.’

  ‘It’s men with guns.’ She sounded shaky.

  ‘How many?’ Ambreen got her to focus on the details.

  ‘Three. They are young and also have backpacks.’

  Ambreen was horrified. ‘You have to hide.’

  A few minutes later Sabina rang her brother Nikhil in Delhi. ‘A man is knocking, saying “housekeeping”. Should I answer?’ ‘No!’ She rang off and then called back: ‘He’s knocking again, this time saying “security”.’ ‘Don’t answer!’

  Ten minutes later she was back on the line. ‘I’m in the bedroom and smoke is pouring in. What shall I do?’

  ‘Put wet towels around the door,’ Nikhil urged.

  Sabina started babbling: ‘I need to speak to Shantanu. I need to speak to the kids.’ There were her older sisters. And there was her mother. ‘I need to speak to them!’ They were together in Delhi at the niece’s pre-wedding party, watching the Taj on TV, more than three hours away by plane.

  She rang Ambreen again. ‘Someone is talking in Punjabi outside. He’s knocking on the door with something metal.’ There were several dull thuds. ‘Ambreen!’

  A mile away from the stricken hotel, out in the narrow lanes of Cuffe Parade, Colaba and Nariman Point, where police were facing standoffs with gunmen at Chabad House and at the Trident–Oberoi, and from the midst of the maelstrom of callers crying out for assistance, a Western intelligence agency plucked a single mobile phone number.

  Isolating long-distance calls from local and putting these through a key-word sieve had left them with a stack of possibilities. Using linguistic search tools to work on this stack, looking for Urdu and Punjabi speakers, had further reduced that pool. Identifying key phrases, using equipment that was officially denied to exist, had eventually slimmed the list to one possibility, assigned to a local Bharti Airtel SIM: +91 9910 719 424.

  The news passed to Indian external and domestic intelligence, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and Intelligence Branch (IB), was that the caller could be a participant or even the ringmaster in the terrorist operation. The IB contacted the state intelligence chief, who contacted Crime Branch’s boss, Rakesh Maria, in the Control Room, and the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) headquarters. There, in the technical section, a veteran ATS eavesdropper, experienced at truffling in the digital world, would isolate the phone’s unique identifier and apply for a warrant to listen in.

  Maria called his Crime Branch number two, the pug-faced Additional Commissioner of Police Deven Bharti: ‘Find the caller,’ he told Bharti. If this phone led to those directing the terror, they could decapitate the assault on Mumbai.

  Bharti, who was out at the airport on a gang-related operation, pulled back to South Mumbai. At police headquarters he met up with the Deputy Commissioner of the ATS and they both signed out portable direction-finding equipment, with which to home in on the phone’s signal. He and the ATS deputy set out in their cars with their laptops open, waiting for someone to call or for that number to be called.

  To get an accurate position, they needed to triangulate between at least three phone towers. From there, the number could be isolated inside a map grid, and then a building, where human muscle would come into play: door to door and room to room. Bharti, who had done this before, knew it called for perseverance. Splitting Colaba and Nariman Point into a lattice on a map, he got comfortable, earphones plugged in, laptop on his knees, waiting. He knew they had only the duration of the call, however brief, to lock on and map it.

  At 11.30 p.m., +91 9910 719 424 was switched on. ‘Salaam Alaikum.’

  4

  A Goat, a Knife and a Matchbox

  May 2008 – Pakistan

  A party of Lashkar trainee fighters bumped along in a hand-painted bus that spluttered and lurched into the wooded mountains of Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Qahafa the Bull, the mujahid trainer, and chacha Zaki, the outfit’s military commander, had selected them from a much larger pool of recruits, and from this group they intended to choose the final ten-man team for Operation Bombay.

  Arriving at the House of the Holy Warriors, on the bowl-like plains high above Muzaffarabad, the men were frisked for cigarettes, opium and tobacco, before being photographed and fingerprinted. No one would be allowed to leave without an instructor for fear of contaminating the outfit, although none of them had any idea as to where they were being assigned. Anxious and exhausted from the bone-breaking 350-mile journey, the trainees were shown to their canvas barracks, sixteen in each tent, each one issued with a number to replace his real name.

  They would be allowed only one monitored phone call a week. Qahafa the Bull and his instructors regulated sleeping, eating, washing and praying. Chatting about home life was discouraged. All of them did it anyway.

  One of the thirty-two was Ajmal Kasab, who had no idea that he was on the way to Mumbai.

  Born in September 1987 in Faridkot, a scrawny village hugging the highway on the poverty-stricken far eastern fringes of the Punjab, Ajmal’s neighbours eked out a living in a landscape dotted with shrines and long-forgotten ruins dating back to the Indus Valley Civilization. This was a historic recruiting ground, with many levies drawn from here by the British, and for centuries before them by warring princes. But Partition had sent the Hindu and Sikh residents fleeing to India, while their homes were taken over by Muslim refugees, who barricaded themselves inside brick compounds to endure Pakistan’s Year Zero. Physically closer to India than to any of the Punjab’s great cities, villagers were raised on stories of loss, and grew up despising their looming neighbour. The mosque was the only communal meeting point.

  Chacha Zaki, who came from Okara, Faridkot’s nearest city, twenty miles away, had left the district to fight in the secret Afghan war of the 1980s, as did hundreds of thousands of others from the Punjab. Afterwards, he had joined up with a lecturer at Lahore’s University of Engineering, Hafiz Saeed, who spun emotive stories of his family having lost thirty-six relatives during the Partition slaughter. In 1990, the fighter and the lecturer (who was also a cleric) formed Lashkar-e-Toiba to spread a message that those who fled and their descendants could take revenge by destroying India, piece by piece. They fed off the anger, destitution and sense of dislocation that permeated every household
.

  In Faridkot, Ajmal and his four siblings lived behind a turquoise tin door. The main street was a sump, strung with petrol pumps and mechanical repair shops that serviced passing trade. Once the family had been goat herders and later they had sold meat, giving them their surname, which loosely translated as ‘butcher’. But the Kasabs had fallen on hard times and Ajmal’s father laboured 150 miles away on the building sites of Lahore, earning 400 rupees (£2.50) a week. The family home had no toilet or electricity. They drew their water from a communal tap, threw their rubbish over the wall and slept nose-to-toe in the room where they ate, lit by a single kerosene lamp.

  The home was ruled by Ajmal’s mother, Noor Elahi, who fell pregnant during her husband’s occasional visits, but otherwise lived a covered life inside the family compound. With his father absent, Ajmal, the second son, a boy whose name in Arabic meant ‘the handsome one’, was rebellious. Short and muscly, he grew his hair long, chewed tobacco and hung out at Faridkot’s bus stand. But the district was changing, its mood lifting, mainly through the success of Lashkar, which had made its reputation taking on one of the largest security establishments in the world in Indian-administered Kashmir, supporting an insurgency that had exploded there in 1989.

  Forlorn Okara sent so many soldiers on jihad it became feted as a ‘blessed city’ and Lashkar made sure everyone heard the message: free literature handed out after Friday prayers, the health checks conducted by Lashkar-sponsored doctors, lavish tamashas hosted for every shaheed, or martyr. Lashkar volunteers would shower the community with sweets and his family with compensation before the deceased’s testament was read aloud like a battle citation. Dying for jihad in Kashmir was the highest accolade one could strive for in a bitter landscape where the alternative was living for nothing and it brought respect and dignity to families who previously had none. Visiting commanders toured like pop idols. Posters of martyrs were pinned in doorways in Okara, where in other cities one would see Bollywood movie posters. Collection boxes filled up in the grocer’s shop. Graffiti dominated every village wall: ‘Go for jihad. Go for jihad.’ Others attested to the new world order: ‘Neither cricket stars nor movie stars, but Islamic mujahideen.’