by Adrian Levy
He was sleeping when they reached him. ‘That day, my fourth day of trekking, I had been to the highest elevation and had got altitude sickness. I was flat out. The first thing I knew about what was going on outside was when I woke to find a man pointing a gun into my tent. He told me to get up, and outside I saw another gunman.’ When John shouted at the man to get out, a gun was shoved in his face. He instantly recognised it as a Kalashnikov. As he scrambled outside he grabbed his passport, and was ordered to hand it over. He felt the weight of his money pouch beneath his shirt. It was filled with all his cash and credit cards. ‘They’re not getting that as well,’ he thought to himself as one of the gunmen led him down the hillside, still hazy from his sleep. Ahead of him he saw a large group of long-haired mujahideen-type figures guarding a handful of seated Westerners. He glanced back to see if there was any way of escaping up the hill, and caught sight of the second militant searching his tent for valuables. Had they staked out the woods too? ‘I saw him take my Canon camera with my social security number etched on it. He stole my sunglasses, too. I was furious.’ Could he make a run for it? If not now, then when?
John sat down beside the other foreigners, and took in his captors. ‘I could see that they were armed to the teeth with knives, semi-automatics and handguns. From that moment on I knew this was very bad news, whichever way I looked at it. Some of them were just kids, but the older ones had Kalashnikovs that looked like they had seen some battles. They were very nervous about the Indian Army coming into the camp, apart from the one who was evidently the leader. He did all the talking. He kept things calm. He carried himself with authority. He had a bearing that told me he was serious about this operation, whatever it was, a stillness of having experienced real fear and survived it.’
As he waited in silence for their captors to explain their next move, John ran over the past twelve hours in his head. Something came to him. That morning, Dasheer, his guide, the only Kashmiri he had grown fond of (although Dasheer had not seen any evidence of it), had urged him several times to break camp and move back down to Pahalgam a night early. ‘At the time I thought he was trying to con me, get back to his family early, take a day’s money for a trek that would now not happen, and we argued. “This is bullshit,” I told him. This was my holiday, and I wanted all of the nights camping I’d paid for. But then it suddenly became clear to me. Did all the locals know that something was going down? The jungle drums, that kind of thing. I’m utterly convinced that Dasheer tried to save me by getting me out of the Meadow, but I’d been too stupid and arrogant to listen.’ John had read about crimes like these in Colombia or Ecuador. ‘But this kind of thing only happened to someone else.’
With all the foreigners corralled beside the river, the leader turned his attention to the Kashmiri schoolboys, who, clearly of no use to him, were marched into the larger of the two dhokas, followed by all the other Kashmiris on the campsite, except for Julie’s guide Bashir. ‘We could see the schoolboys being pushed into the hut, no one saying a word, like a silent movie,’ recalled Julie. After a brief scuffle to secure the door, the leader began barking questions in rudimentary English at the foreigners, helped by Bashir. ‘Are any of you in the army? Do you work for your governments? Are you married?’ What were the right answers, Julie thought, panicking. Were there any? Did religion matter? Who was fighting whom? Everything she knew about Kashmir had left her mind as soon as they had been surrounded. She struggled to recall what the local troubles were about. Was there a way of answering that would safeguard their lives? They were not cut out for this. John Childs, who had still not looked up at the others, muttered a prayer under his breath.
All the time the leader thumbed the passports: British … American … Canadian.
A decision was made. The leader pointed his gun: ‘You, you and you.’ Paul Wells, Keith Mangan and John Childs stood up. ‘This is it,’ John thought as he was led back up to his tent to retrieve his walking boots and padded trekking jacket. ‘You complete idiot. Why the hell didn’t you just turn around and go home at the first sign of trouble? Now you’re going to die. You’re going to be shot in this hellhole and you’re never going to see your girls or your parents again.’
The women froze. Where were the men being taken, Julie demanded of Bashir as the gunmen searched the camp for a last few possessions to steal, including their travellers’ cheques. The leader answered for him. The group’s commander was waiting in Aru to question them, he said. ‘Israeli spies are operating in the valley. Your husbands are now suspects. Bring some warm clothes.’ Spies? It sounded too ridiculous to be true. As the gunmen started to move away, Keith was still frantically searching for his jacket in their tent. They were not prepared to wait a moment longer, Bashir said. Julie took off her jacket and pushed it into Keith’s arms. ‘Take mine,’ she said, looking her husband in the eyes as he was pulled away. Then she locked eyes with the teenage gunman. ‘Leave him alone, he’s just an electrician from Teesside,’ she wanted to scream in his face.
‘No harm will come to your men,’ the leader said, as Julie and Cath began to cry. ‘After their passports are checked, they will return in the morning.’ Cath and Julie watched Paul, Keith and the silent John (whose name they still did not know) being frog-marched down the Meadow and into the dark. ‘I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye,’ Julie said. ‘They just took off down the river, the ten armed men, and our three.’
Julie and Cath huddled in silence as the rain drizzled. ‘I don’t think they’re coming back,’ Cath said finally. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Julie, fighting back her tears, ‘they are coming back.’ Outwardly confident, inwardly she was falling to pieces. ‘I wanted to believe they would come back,’ she recalled. Saying it out loud might make it come true. ‘“They will bring them back; of course they will bring them back,” I was saying to myself, while all the time what you’re really thinking is, “I bet they don’t.”’
It was almost 8 p.m. by the time Jane and Don saw the armed party returning from the Upper Camp. They had been gone for more than two hours, and now they seemed to have other foreigners with them. As the party got closer, Jane recognised Keith. She caught his eye and he acknowledged her, but his previously happy-go-lucky face was now sober and worried. She did not recognise Paul Wells, with his straggly ponytail and goatee, or John Childs, a gaunt-looking man who refused to make eye contact with anyone, his face swivelled to the ground. Childs, she recalled, as she rewound this moment over and over again in her mind, was the one who most struck her. He looked a wreck. He would vividly remember the episode too. ‘My mind was absolutely clear. I knew what was going down. I understood at that instant that we were being marched to our deaths. I knew that I would never get out of this unless I took drastic action. I felt, instinctively, that I could trust no one, and that the only way to save myself was to take matters into my own hands. What everyone else deduced was not my concern.’
Seconds later, before Jane could take in what was happening, one of the gunmen came over. Her guide Bashir translated. ‘He says that Don must dress warmly. He is going to Aru with the others. There is a senior commander waiting to question them about being Israeli spies.’ Jane’s head whirled with questions. ‘For the love of Pete, we had no idea what this was all about,’ she recalled, searching for meaning in the eyes of Don’s captors.
Doing what he was told, Don went into their tent and put on his blue Gore-Tex fleece and trousers, his blue hat and a Patagonia fleece. He was already wearing his yellow-and-black Casio altimeter, and decided to keep it with him, but as he emerged he handed Jane a pile of clothes. ‘These are yours,’ he said forcefully. She knew what he was doing. He had concealed their documents in them, and, typical Don, he was worrying about her. He also glanced down at a pair of shoes by the door, where he had just hidden their cash. ‘He suspected they were going to loot the camp and that he might not be coming back any time soon,’ said Jane. ‘I don’t recall actually saying goodbye. We just looked into each other’s eyes.’
Now was not the time to cry.
As Don and the other three hostages were led off into the night, it began to rain. A wave of helplessness washed over Jane. Just before they reached a log bridge, where during daylight hours a villager from Aru ran a teashop, the leader turned to look back at her, before ordering the party off the trekking path and up the left-hand flank of the valley. As they scrambled up the bank, Jane recalled that she had been instructed to go to the Upper Camp and stay there for two hours, while Bashir and Sultan had been told to remain by the tents. Taking one last look at the kidnap party as they disappeared into the silent shadows above her, she started walking in the other direction, up the Meadow. She must not put Don and the others at risk, she said to herself. She must do what she had been ordered. If they played by the rules, the armed party might feel compelled to do the same.
When she reached the Upper Camp half an hour later, plodding silently through the gloom, she heard sobbing coming from a tent. Inside it she found Julie Mangan, whom she had briefly chatted with earlier in the day. Beside her was Cath Moseley, a blonde young Englishwoman she had not seen before. The three of them sat together in Julie’s tent as the rain drummed on the flysheet. ‘I just sat there as Keith walked away,’ Julie said. She was crying, ‘This has really happened. This has really happened.’ Jane, the eldest among them, told the others they were in it together, and should stop thinking about what had been done, and start working out what to do next. Should they follow the gunmen’s instructions, or should they raise the alarm? Jane reckoned they had no choice, as sentries might be watching from the forest. To go against orders might worsen their loved ones’ situation. Julie and Cath nodded, grateful for her composure and barely able to speak. A compromise was reached. ‘If Don, Keith and Paul had not turned up by dawn, we agreed we would all walk back down to Aru, and if we could not find them there we would continue on down to Pahalgam and seek help,’ said Jane.
At 10 p.m., Jane returned to her own tent at the Lower Camp. Julie had tried to convince her to stay, but Jane secretly hoped that Don would make it back. If anyone could, Don would, and she wanted to be there just in case. As she walked alone in the moonlight, the landscape took on a new, more menacing hue. Dark silhouettes of trees surrounded her. In the distance, the bleating of a goat sounded like a child’s cry. All the worries they had talked through before going on this trip came flooding back. She wished they had never come to Kashmir. But now she was in this predicament, she would have to deal with things as Don would deal with them, logically, methodically and rigorously: ‘It was pointless wasting energy on regrets.’
As she entered the camp, her heart sank. Sultan and Bashir were nowhere to be seen. And Don’s camera, the daysacks they had bought on last year’s club trip to Montana, all the things she had carefully folded up on their bed and packed back in Spokane barely two weeks before, were gone.
She crawled into the wreckage of her tent and pulled something warm over her. The silence she had once craved now deafened her. She ran over what had happened, trying to piece it together. She should not panic – Don would find a way out of it. In a fix on an ice wall, bivouacked on a summit ascent or beaten flat by sculling snow, he always did. And anyhow, things always looked brighter in the morning.
At first light, Jane heard voices. Don! She looked at her watch. It was only 4 a.m. Heart thumping, she poked her head out of the tent. The first rays of the sun were gilding the ridgeline, and a party of Kashmiri teenagers was passing through the campsite. One of them came over and introduced himself as Khurram Parvez, a student from Srinagar. He spoke good English, asked if she was all right, and explained that he and his friends had been in the Upper Camp too, and had spent the night locked in a shepherd’s hut. They had just broken out, leaving several foreign trekkers behind. She told him her husband had been taken, and that she wanted to wait here a little while longer, in case he returned. She asked him if he understood what was going on.
Khurram had some ideas. Before being locked up, he had spoken to one of his captors. ‘He talked to us in broken Urdu,’ Khurram recalled. The man’s accent suggested he was Pashtun. ‘He was abrupt. He asked us where we were from. When we told him Srinagar, he said, “Why are you trekking when your brothers are dying, fighting the Indian Army?”’ Khurram could tell that this was not a rhetorical question, and the man expected answers. Fearful that whatever he said would anger him, Khurram had replied that he and his friends were students.
‘Then all of us were asked to line up. My friends were scared. My cousin and I continued trying to talk. We asked one of these guys, “Where are you from?” He said, “Dar-e-Khyber [the Khyber Pass, in Pakistan].” I asked them which militant group they belonged to. He replied, “Harkat ul-Ansar.”’ Khurram had felt a chill. He knew the Movement was a Pakistan-backed militant group, but to Jane the name meant nothing.
Khurram told Jane they would raise the alarm. She nodded, and returned, dazed, to her tent. She must have dozed off, because the next time she looked at her watch it was 6.30 a.m., and Bashir and Sultan were back, boiling up tea. Her frustrations exploded. Where had they been, she demanded. What did they know about the men who had taken her husband? Were they in on this? Unshaven, with black circles round their eyes, they appeared to be terrified, and Sultan looked as if he was about to burst into tears. The gunmen had ordered them to run into the forest, Bashir told her. They had obeyed, frightened that if they did not they would be killed. ‘Sorry, sorry, so sorry,’ they both kept repeating. Kashmiris were all too intimate with the cost of the militancy, although Jane did not know that yet.
Where was Don, she wondered. He should have been back by now. She had to get her head together. She went down to the riverbank. She scanned the ridges and forests. 7 a.m., 5 July. Nothing was moving apart from a gujjar family on a goat track high above her. She’d give it another half hour, then she would move. Suddenly she saw a figure walking up from the direction of Aru. Was it Don? She ran down towards the man, her heart thumping. But as she drew nearer, she pulled up quickly. It was a Kashmiri wearing a pheran. He waved, but she did not return the gesture, suddenly unsure of him. When he reached her a few minutes later he introduced himself as Dasheer, John Childs’ guide. In the chaos of the previous evening she had not noticed him among the party that had returned from the Upper Camp before taking off with Don. The gunmen had ordered him to come back with a message.
Dasheer handed Jane a damp note, explaining that the commander of the group had written it. She snatched the piece of paper, but found it was in Urdu. Frustrated and shaking, she handed it back and asked Dasheer to translate it. Addressed ‘For the American Government Only’, it listed twenty-one prisoners the gunmen wanted freed in return for Don, Keith, Paul and John. The deadline was 14 July, nine days from now. The note threatened: ‘accept our demands or face dire consequences. We are fighting against anti-Islamic forces … Western countries are anti-Islam, and America is the biggest enemy of Islam.’ For the first time, Jane realised that something life-changing had just happened: ‘That’s when it really hit me.’
Where was her husband right now, she asked, struggling not to cry. Dasheer had no idea. He’d been sent packing by the commander, and had last seen the kidnap party heading over a high-altitude ridge. ‘What about Aru?’ she asked, thinking of the story they had been told of the commander waiting to check passports. They hadn’t gone there at all, Dasheer replied. ‘It was like a really bad dream,’ says Jane. ‘I went into some kind of trance.’ But even in her heightened emotional state, she instinctively knew what to do. She would summon up all the courage and stamina she had developed over years of climbing, descend to Pahalgam and whip the authorities into action, and as quickly as possible. But first she would have to marshal the others, Julie Mangan and Cath Moseley. ‘Come on!’ she shouted at Dasheer, intending to hike back up to the Upper Camp.
As she packed up what was left of her belongings, Jane heard voices: Julie, Cath and others from the Upper Camp had come down to her. They
had heard nothing from anyone in the past twelve hours. There was a Japanese tourist and an American woman with her teenage daughter who had also been staying at the Upper Camp, but had not been targeted. When Jane showed them all the note and explained what it said, Cath started crying. Julie was already numb. Bart Imler, the Canadian, was so weak he could barely walk. They all had to leave the Meadow, Jane said, right now. ‘It’s imperative we reach someone in authority from the British or American embassies as soon as possible.’
‘Walking out was a terribly difficult thing to do,’ Jane recalled. ‘It was hard to leave the site. It was hard to see Bart, the young Japanese fellow, the American woman, and to know they were coming out and Don wasn’t. It wasn’t anger, but maybe envy. That they were lucky and we weren’t. “Why us?” I kept thinking. “Why Don?” What had we done? It wasn’t that I wanted anyone else to be taken. It was just hard to imagine why … that we were the ones with the bad luck that day.’
5 July 1995 was an idyllic, sunny day, but none of them were taking in the landscape. Following the silvery twists and turns of the Lidder River, Jane Schelly, Julie Mangan and Cath Moseley retreated from the Meadow as quickly as they could. Along the way they gathered witnesses and other trekkers. ‘It’s not safe,’ they told every passer-by. ‘People have been abducted. Don’t believe what the tourist officials tell you.’ Every herder or villager they saw on the path represented a potential kidnapper or spy.
On the way down they stopped off at Aru, the village where they had been told Don, Keith, Paul and John would be taken for the so-called passport checks in the middle of the night. The story seemed even more unlikely given what Dasheer had recounted of the previous night’s journey. Nobody in Aru admitted to knowing anything about foreign fighters passing through in the company of four Westerners. And the villagers shrank back in fear when Jane tried to engage them in conversation: ‘We hoped to get some information, a sighting or a direction, but there was nothing.’