by Adrian Levy
At Inshan, the southernmost village in the valley, from where the treacherous track reached up to Mardan Top, the pilot brought the helicopter down on a white ‘X’ in the middle of a field near the mosque. Hundreds of villagers were waiting. ‘Army commanders escorted me to where most of the women and children were assembled. In just moments, the crowd overcame their hesitation and pressed close to me. As I talked about the reward for information and began to hand out posters and matchbooks, reluctance disappeared and hands shot out, snatching the papers right out of my grip. My three photo books were pawed over. I heard exclamations as they saw the pictures of the hostages tied up. I asked if they had ever seen these men. Yes. They said the hostages played cricket and soccer “Right here,” as they pointed to an open grass field. I asked if they were ever tied up. No. They were free. The captors washed their clothes. Did the hostages ever speak of their families? No. They said they just wanted to be free.’
There was no time to linger in the village. The helicopter was waiting to take them further south. ‘In Dachin,’ Jane wrote, ‘two medical assistants said they treated the hostages on 5 and 7 September [1995] six hours by foot up the valley at Afti. Don had conjunctivitis for two days, and influenza. Paul Wells had dysentery. Twenty-five militants were with them. Very tall kidnappers, long beards. Foreigners. They didn’t understand the language. They were heavily armed.’ Jane struggled to take notes, worried to be relying on an Indian Army translator she did not trust: ‘I would hear two minutes of talk, then get a twenty-second rerun,’ she wrote later in her journal. ‘What had I missed? These were people who had been in contact with Don, who were in the midst of telling me about him, when suddenly … the helicopter blades were warmed up and whopping at full speed, and I was being called to leave. I was so close. I had a taste. I want so much more.’
But this would be as near as she would get. The remainder of her trip turned into a fug of illness, insects, humidity and cancelled appointments, leaving her yearning for Spokane. On 8 August she wrote in her journal: ‘I’m sick and tired of it all and I want to go home. Be done with the whole thing. I’m tired of the water tap not working, sick of all the flies sitting all over me. Tired of waiting, honking horns, dirty and smelly diesel fumes, stupid traffic jams, idiotic security who are afraid a raisin will explode, and so on … But at least one of these days I can go home.’
Bob Wells would return to Kashmir one last time that November, travelling with Jane, Julie, Cath, and Dirk’s sister Birgit in a trip facilitated by the Indian authorities. Mavis Mangan was supposed to have come too, but she had suffered a heart attack after her previous visit, and Charlie had recently been diagnosed with angina. Losing Keith was destroying them both.
Arriving in Srinagar, Bob was immediately pulled aside and told the valley’s police chief wanted to see him. Paramdeep Gill, Inspector General (IG) Kashmir Zone, an officer who had been closely connected to the universally feared STF, the man who had personally overseen the defection of Alpha’s men back in 1994, leading to the creation of the hated pro-government militias, had something private to discuss.
Taking a family liaison officer from the British High Commission with him, Bob was ushered into a wood-panelled room with blacked-out windows in a large, heavily guarded police complex in the Srinagar district of Batamaloo. Gill told him he had started his own inquiry into the hostage crisis, an unofficial diversion that he was certain, with his abilities, would get to the truth. The al Faran Crime Branch probe – which had been sealed – was, Gill felt sure, incompetent or inadequate, or both. Then, without warning, he pushed a couple of photographs across the table. One of them was a graphic image of a decomposing head. ‘We’ve found your son,’ he said. Bob was horrified. He forced himself to look, trying to see beyond the rendered flesh and flaps of hair, and wondering what kind of way this was to break the death of a child to a father. ‘That’s not my son,’ he said at last, tears of rage stinging his face. Paul had undergone extensive dental work before heading off to Kashmir in June 1995, but this head did not have a single filling.
Gill was not listening. For six months, he said, the STF had been following up leads that had led them to a grave in the cemetery of Akingham, a small town just south of the Mughal gardens at Achhabal, in the hills above Anantnag town. There they had dug up a body wrapped in a grey shawl, buried without Islamic rites. It was Paul Wells, he claimed, tapping the photos on his desk. ‘You know nothing,’ said Bob, reddening and standing to leave. ‘This is a disgusting circus!’ he shouted.
An official from the British High Commission lodged a complaint about Gill’s behaviour, but the IG was not easily floored. He sent hair and bone samples to the Central Forensics Laboratory in Ahmedabad, and another sample to a lab in Calcutta. A third batch of DNA was examined at a police forensics facility in Hyderabad, while experts from New Delhi were flown up to Srinagar to examine fragments at the Government Medical College. The story rumbled on until January 2000, when Gill finally announced that scientists at two credible Indian labs had concluded that the DNA they tested was indeed from Paul Wells. Reading the news in Britain, Bob and Dianne were devastated. This was all about international recognition for the Kashmiri police, Gill told reporters. However, he believed that the force was now entitled to claim the $2 million reward from the US Department of Justice and two more rewards of ten lakh rupees (£20,000) each from the US State Department and the Jammu and Kashmir government.
The British Foreign Office had had enough. It requested a DNA sample from the Akingham corpse. Three months later it issued a terse statement: ‘DNA tests in this country have established that the remains brought back to the UK … are not those of Paul Wells.’ The sample belonged to a man of South Asian origin. The Foreign Office suggested that what had been tested in the Indian labs might have been the reference sample provided by the Wells family, against which the remains were supposed to have been matched. Whether the two had been switched or accidentally mixed, no one could say. Either way, it reflected gravely on the Indian authorities, and the sense of distrust caused by the affair was compounded by statements from Akingham residents, who said that they had told the STF search team that the grave they had dug up belonged to Ziauddin, a fair-skinned Afghan fighter slain by security forces during an encounter in late 1995. They had buried him themselves.
By the decade’s end, the physical search was over for Jane, Julie, Anne and Cath, who between them had been back to Kashmir more than a dozen times, racking up over eighteen months in the region, but discovering nothing definitive, all of them still kept from knowing anything of the Squad’s findings. IG Gill had produced two more bodies, both of them supposedly identified by inconclusive DNA evidence, and the women had decided they did not want to see any more. Soon after the November 1997 trip Julie began talking about Keith in the past tense. ‘It’s hard to admit to myself, but I feel we may not see each other again,’ she said. ‘I would carry on the fight for ten years if I thought he was alive.’ But she was beginning to accept that he was not. After a third body, presented as Keith’s, turned out not to be, she knew she was done with Kashmir. She got a job, and bought an Alsatian puppy. For a while she returned to the London flat she and Keith had shared before leaving for South Asia, before fleeing the memories to return home to the north-east, where eventually she began to build a new life with old friends, her family and a new relationship that became a marriage.
For a long time Cath refused to let Paul go, holding on to what she saw as a simple truth: no crime could be hidden forever, and sooner or later somebody, somewhere would give something away. As far as she was aware, nothing had ever been proven: ‘That’s what makes me feel they’re still alive.’ However, Cath’s hopes eventually faded, as she came to terms with the realisation that Kashmir was comprised of secrets, buried so deeply they might never come to the surface. She too found another partner whom she eventually married, and together they had a child.
‘We gave her our blessing,’ said Bob Wells. He and Di
anne struggled to break free from the past too. For a long time they wanted to leave Blackburn. ‘There were just too many memories in that house,’ Dianne said, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to move, irrationally worried, as any loving mother would be, that if Paul did come home alive and they were not in Feniscowles, he would not know where to find them. But in 2001 Bob and Dianne managed to let go, selling up and heading out to an isolated semi on the edge of a village near Carlisle, with a view over a meadow grazed by sheep. Gradually their sitting-room walls filled up with photos of new grandchildren, hanging alongside the old shot of the teenage Paul in his hiking boots and Aertex shirt halfway up Scafell Pike. ‘We had to keep on living,’ said Bob, who boxed up all Paul’s possessions and piled them at the back of the attic, along with Dianne’s scrapbooks about the kidnapping. ‘We had to face the inevitable. Our son was dead. Paul was never coming home.’
In Oslo, Marit Hesby and her daughter Anette Ostrø, Hans Christian’s cherished younger sister, sponsored a memorial fund to put promising young actors through theatre school, backed by the Norwegian government and supported by the Swedish actress Liv Ullmann. Anette finished college and became a successful film-maker, moving back to Norway, where she bought a wooden house on an island in the silvery Oslo fjord. She filled it with photographs of Hans Christian, keeping his Bhima costume, a big black-and-red notebook recovered from Kashmir, and all of his fantastical, nonsensical, mystical and passionate letters parcelled up in a large cardboard box. Every weekend Marit went down to the black-timbered cabin by the water in Tønsberg, which was kept exactly as it had been when Hans Christian visited it as a child. She would dust and clean his souvenirs before driving over to the churchyard and placing blue flowers at the spot where she had buried his ashes. Every year she and Anette exchanged Christmas cards with Paul, Keith and Don’s families. Occasionally they exchanged news too, although, however irrationally, Marit and Anette could not shake off their feelings of guilt. They were somehow better off than the others. They had learned the grisly, horrible truth about Hans Christian’s fate, and had been able to physically bury him. Almost every day, their minds slipped back to that day in the German Embassy when Ambassador Elbe had turned pale before telling them that a white-skinned body had been discovered. At the time they had felt secretly jealous of the others, but over the years that followed they had learned to be grateful.
John Childs rarely talks about the events of 1995, even to his family. He did not wish to take his unresolved feelings out of their box too often, although he kept coming back to them privately, churning them over. Did the kidnapping change him? He claimed not, but increasingly he sought out his own company. Eventually he left his job with Ensign Bickford and moved away from Connecticut, to the North-East Appalachians in the wild and wooded far north of the United States, settling in a modest slatted house in the small farming community of Shelburne, Vermont, where locals were more likely to cross into Canada to shop for wood-fired bagels than to drive down to New York. Here, among the gnarly orchards and lakes, he embraced the outdoors once more, spending his weekends skiing or climbing, and running with his new girlfriend Jackie. On his walls were antique maps and mementos, the signs of a well-travelled man who appreciated the span of the globe and human efforts to chart it, so much so that he had a hobby trading in digital maps. Professionally, he had remained in engineering weapons systems, although now for General Dynamics, in a job that took him on frequent foreign trips. But something about John Childs, a reader of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a man who had studied the Beirut hostages, suggested that most of his exploration was internal.
‘I didn’t avoid India,’ John reflected in November 2011, his eyes cast to the floor just as Jane and others remembered him. ‘I just had no cause to go back there.’ John Childs was not the kind of person to duck anything. Over the years he had become even more self-reliant. ‘I am not evasive. I guess some people might see me as distant. But they would be totally wrong. Myself and Jackie are deeply private people. That’s all. People don’t get it. We just don’t go out much,’ he said, laughing. Behind his armchair was a wall of books, some guitars and an amplifier, all he needed to keep himself entertained. ‘And perhaps I was always like this. A fatalist. Someone who suspects the worse. Or is it more so now? I’m just not sure, but I have never forgotten for a second what happened to me all those years ago.’ He went on to recount in intimate detail the days he spent as a captive, recalling touches, tastes, smells and distances, redrawing the route through the Kashmiri mountains, recalling the characteristics of his captors and his fellow captives, and how his growing sense of doom made him bolt, climbing hand over fist up into the dark Kashmiri heights.
John Childs was full of small inconsistencies: certain the Meadow had not traumatised him, but needing to talk about it; dismissing the weight he carried as the only hostage to escape, while probing the reasons for his good fortune. ‘My belief, after all this time, is that I was lucky on that day,’ he said, interlacing his large hands, steadying a tapping leg. ‘For once my planets lined up, if that’s how you want to put it. I picked my strategy. I leapt and got away. But on any other day, the same choice would have failed, and I would have been caught, hauled back to the hut.’ He held his head in his hands. ‘“Why couldn’t you just bring Don with you?” Jane asked me.’ The impact of those words had never left him. The last image he had of Don, Keith and Paul was of them sleeping, exhausted, in the hut as he slipped away. ‘From the start, I knew I had to escape. I sensed we would all die. My time came, and somehow it worked out OK. In a struggle there can only be you. But, you know …’ He paused, half-closing his eyes as a large grey-and-white cat rubbed against his legs. ‘Even today, I can’t sleep between sheets. For the past sixteen years I’ve slept on top of my bed, under a rough blanket, like the horse throws we slept beneath in captivity. I don’t know why. Maybe it makes me feel closer to my comrades who were left behind.’ He looked shocked to have uttered these words, as if he had never planned to reveal them, but still thinking of the men who would never be found. ‘Oh, God. I’ve never told anyone that before.’
Recently John had lost a close work colleague to cancer, he said. Then Helen, his much-loved mother, died too. These events shook him up, bringing back memories of the Meadow anew. ‘My mother’s passing made me realise that paying respects and appreciating the person who has gone, the saying “Goodbye,” is very, very important. So if you can’t, if there is no goodbye …’
Jane Schelly wasn’t the sort ever to let go. As Don used to say, if she had a plan, she stuck to it. Don’s mask collection still adorned the walls of their red-and-blue-painted sunken living room. His study remained cluttered with his books, and his coat still hung by the front door. She did not remarry. She did not forget. But eventually she did pack away most of Don’s possessions, placing them in the attic alongside her Kashmir journals, the maps, the newspaper cuttings and photographs. ‘I did not want to have to go back there constantly for the rest of my life,’ she said recently. She was not talking about leafing through the physical keepsakes, but about a place in her head where she had stored everything she knew about her Kashmir nightmare.
EPILOGUE
Fill Your Arms with Lightning
On Christmas Eve 1999, an Indian Airlines plane carrying 178 passengers was hijacked en route from Nepal to New Delhi. It was forced to land in Kandahar, Afghanistan, the birthplace of the Taliban, the austere Islamic fundamentalists who had seized control of the country three years before. The Indian government was faced with an extremely difficult and sensitive situation, as it did not recognise the regime and had no diplomatic presence in Afghanistan.
That night, the Taliban contacted the United Nations to pass on the hostage-takers’ demands. They wanted thirty-six Muslim prisoners released from Indian jails, and $200 million in cash. At the top of the list was Masood Azhar, General Secretary of the Movement. Indian newspaper readers were reminded that kidnappers had tried three times already to free him, t
wice in 1994 and once in 1995, when they had seized six Western backpackers in Kashmir, one of whom had been beheaded, while four had vanished. Masood was currently lodged in Kot Bhalwal high-security prison in Jammu.
Worried relatives of the Indian Airlines Flight 814 hostages, aware that their government’s previous negotiation strategy had been criticised as being ‘ramshackle and opaque’, took things into their own hands. Storming a press conference attended by Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh, they demanded that the government ‘do whatever is necessary to ensure the safety of all of the IC814 passengers’. There were less public pressure points too. Sitting in seat 16C on the grounded jet was a senior Indian intelligence operative posted to Nepal, who had been returning to India to visit his sick wife. She was the daughter of a powerful official in the Prime Minister’s office, and her elder sister was married to a former director of the elite National Security Guard, a force that dealt with hijacking incidents. These important voices now resounded around the marble palaces of government.
In New Delhi, C.D. Sahay, a veteran agent who had run RAW’s Kashmir operations in the nineties, which included working on the al Faran case, was surprised when he got a call asking him to negotiate with the hijackers. Agent Sahay was aware that Masood had been due to be repatriated to Pakistan earlier in the year. However, inexplicably, the plump prisoner had tried to break out of jail on 14 June, jemmying himself into a narrow twenty-three-foot-long tunnel excavated by other prisoners, but becoming stuck. The Afghani, Masood’s constant companion over the past six years, had been trapped behind him, and was shot dead by Indian paramilitary police as he reversed out of the hole. Masood was led back to his cell uninjured, and his sentence was extended.