The Siege

by Adrian Levy

  But Umer was gone, although the phone line remained open. The ATS and Qahafa could hear new voices talking: men whispering in English and Marathi. ‘Open it, man,’ a voice said. ‘Untie it quickly.’ The ATS wondered who else was still there. ‘Release his hands first.’ In Nagpada they speculated that these must be the hostages trying to escape. Where was Umer? Another new voice: ‘That’s it. Now open the window.’ Had the police made it up from the third floor? ‘Smash the glass.’

  Qahafa whispered to Wasi, next to him: ‘I think this is someone else.’ What had happened to the four gunmen? ‘It’s the army talking, the mobile has fallen; someone is breaking the door,’ said Qahafa, confused. ‘Umer?’ he called. Silence. The line filled with the cascading sound of a window exploding.

  ‘They have been martyred,’ Qahafa whispered. ‘Praise be to Allah.’

  Down on the second floor, on the landing of the Grand Staircase, the Black Suit Petwal was still inside the great wooden box and could hardly breathe. He waited, counting, until a break in the firing. Then he flipped open the heavy lid, leapt out and bolted for a pantry, where, seeing a fire hose, he turned it on and squirted a circle around himself, creating a wet buffer.

  Further along the corridor, close to the CCTV room, Inspector Dhole, who could smell his clothes and skin burning, spied a row of fire extinguishers, as incoming rounds and grenades continued to pummel his position. His hands and arms stung as shrapnel sliced into them. Everyone in the column had been cut and burned, and they were three men down. On a UN mission to Cyprus the inspector had undergone intensive training in fire-fighting. He recalled that the instructor had been a Pakistani army officer. ‘Now I’m fire-fighting to save myself from the Pakis,’ he told himself, running for an extinguisher, pulling the pin, and focusing the jet all around his men. The skin on his arms blistered. His face felt like it had been flayed and when he brushed his head with his hand, hair came away. He eyed up the next fire extinguisher. ‘Let’s go,’ he shouted, spurring the others on.

  Dousing and running, as the fire licked all around them, he reached a doorway and kicked it in, the column falling behind him into the cool pitch black. ‘God’s grace,’ he said to himself. ‘We have seen death and escaped.’ He pushed through another door and before him a fire crew loomed, gesturing for them to run. Ecstatic, he realized that that they had reached an exit. Inspector Dhole lapped up the fresh air, falling to his knees. A paramedic ran over, accompanied by an officer he knew well from Colaba station. ‘Name and rank?’ the policeman asked. ‘Dhole. Inspector,’ he muttered, confused that this man was treating him like a stranger. What was up with the dimwit? He ran his fingertips over his face, finding great blisters. The fire had disfigured him. He motioned for the cop to come nearer. ‘I have terrible news,’ he said, his voice cracking. ‘We have lost men. Patil Sir and Rajvardhan Sir are among the dead.’

  Upstairs on the fifth floor, in room 520, five hostages bound hand and foot lay in the dark, with smoke pouring in through the door left open by the departing gunmen. The banker Ram wriggled and twisted, struggling to release the tight bindings digging into his bleeding ankles and wrists. Adil Irani, who was beside him, whispered: ‘Sir, they’ve gone. We need to get out.’ The two men could barely see each other through the gloomy smoke-choked room. The three on the far side of the bed were whimpering: ‘We’re going to burn to death.’

  Ram rolled over. With every muscle straining he struggled up and pulled one hand free. ‘Find something to cut us loose,’ urged Adil as Ram hobbled over to the dresser, his fingers feeling for the central drawer. Pulling it open, he felt inside, scrabbling over the prayer books, a folder of writing paper and a slim envelope of cotton wool. No scissors. He groaned. Feeling around on top of the dresser, his fingertips brushed something metallic. A blunt fruit knife. Better than nothing. He seized it and attempted to saw at Adil’s bonds.

  At the ATS headquarters, and in the Lashkar control room in Malir Town, Karachi, eavesdroppers were still trying to make sense of what they were hearing, as the mobile phone dropped on the floor by Umer continued to transmit. A man could be heard struggling: ‘No, it’s not cutting. It’s not cutting with the knife.’ In Karachi, Qahafa the Bull wondered aloud if he had been too quick to conclude his gunmen were martyred. ‘Umer?’ he called out, hopefully.

  Ram dropped the knife and went back to the drawer, finding a sewing kit with tiny scissors. He stumbled around the room, freeing everyone, until all five sat rubbing their wrists and ankles, wheezing in the toxic fug. Outside the open glass doors, fire flowed like lava. They were still trapped. The butler Swapnil reached over and slid them shut, using wet towels to seal the gap. Their lungs burned. How would they get out? Adil spoke first. ‘I know where we are. The windows, it’s the only way.’

  The young waiter pitched a heavy waste bin against the glass, smashing a single pane before the entire frame gave way in an explosion of glass. As smoke was sucked out, fresh air gushed in and they greedily gulped it down. Ram dared to hope for the first time, and watched the waiter climb out and call over from the ledge. A few stars shone in the sky, but otherwise it was pitch black, the hotel’s tiled roof mottled with inky shadows.

  The ATS and Karachi control both picked up Adil’s shout: ‘Help, help.’

  Qahafa muttered: ‘Umer?’ There was no answer, just the same voice crying out: ‘Help, help.’

  Beckoning the other hostages over, Adil pointed down. They were in the top inside corner of the south wing, facing the pool. Beneath them was the sloping gabled roof of the floor below and, three floors down, a concrete terrace that ran across the top of the Crystal Room. ‘We can climb down there,’ Adil said. Ram looked horrified. ‘Come on, sir,’ Adil urged. He squinted, catching something moving down below. He heard footsteps and saw a figure scurry across the terrace. Was it a gunman? Studying the silhouette, he was sure it was Puru Petwal. After escaping from the CCTV room, the Black Suit had made it out of the second-floor fire-trap unharmed. Emboldened, Adil waved and called out, trying to get Petwal’s attention. ‘Help, help.’ He then realized Petwal was not alone. Five housekeepers were with him. They were waving up. Adil looked down and saw that they were signalling to someone else.

  At the ATS and in Karachi control they heard a voice brief the others in the room: ‘What are they saying? It’s the Taj guys.’ Adil leant right out, and spotted a female guest below him, hanging from a drainpipe. He could hear her sobbing. She was frozen and trembling. Petwal shouted: ‘Please, ma’am, keep going. Don’t lose your nerve.’ Everyone below watched as she inched down. Then she stopped again and shook her head.

  Edging out on to the gable, Adil at last saw the full scene. A male guest lay below on the terrace, with his legs splayed at an unnatural angle. Like many others stuck inside the stricken hotel for six hours without any sign of a rescue, he had decided to take his chances. But he had fallen, smashing on to the concrete. He looked like he might be dead. Petwal and others ran over with blankets and duvets. ‘Jump,’ they shouted up to the woman. From above, Adil watched her let go of the pipe, and tumble through the air, and into the folds of bed linen, before being carried off the terrace, alive.

  Petwal came back and for the first time spotted Adil sitting on the gable. He signalled: ‘Wait’, and ran inside, returning with a coil of fire hose. He motioned for Adil to pull it up. Shouting back, Adil’s voice was picked up by the ATS and Karachi control: ‘Wait, man, I’m telling you, you can’t come from there.’

  Petwal had something else with him, a rope of bedsheets that he tied to one end of the heavy hose, coiling up the loose end before he hurled it up. Once, twice. Adil, who had rammed his legs into the frame of the gable, finally caught the improvised rope and used it to heave up the heavy hose.

  ATS and Karachi control picked up the sound of someone inside the room. It was the butler trying to braid his own rope to attach to Petwal’s. ‘This curtain is thicker than this curtain. Take the pillow.’ They attached the rope and the hose to th
e gable and now they had to slide down, both of them, hand over hand. Offering to go first, Adil pushed off the gable, twisted around to face the building and let the hose take his weight. His last thought before he spun off into an airless world of velvety blackness and lost consciousness was of being glad that the others had not seen the tableau of the stricken man below.

  At the ATS and in Karachi, they heard someone in room 520 shouting: ‘Tie it, tie it, Raju. He is hanging.’ Adil had fainted. Ram screamed at Raju Bagle, the housekeeping boy, while Petwal’s team held the hose taut, praying Adil would not fall. But the rope was slipping fast through his fingers and he fell, crashing to the ground with a sickening thud. ‘Is he dead?’ asked a horrified Ram. Because of the angle of the gable, Adil was now out of view. Those left behind in 520 scrabbled around, looking for another exit. Instead, they spotted the abandoned phone.

  At the ATS and in Karachi they heard footsteps, and a voice. Raju Bagle: ‘I think your mobile is here.’ Ram: ‘No, no, it’s yours.’ Then came a dawning realization that the handset didn’t belong to any of them. Ram: ‘Whose is it then?’ A pause. ‘Arre [Hey], it might be a bomb or something, don’t touch it, throw it away.’ A thud.

  In Karachi, Qahafa the Bull finally disconnected the line.

  Down on the terrace, Adil came to, staring into Petwal’s face: ‘Are you OK?’ Shooting pains gripped his chest. His ribs felt broken and his feet were bleeding. But he was alive. ‘You fainted, man,’ he heard Petwal say, giving him a bearhug. Behind, he could see the housekeeping boys gathering up the body of the other fallen guest, a 39-year-old German TV producer, Ralph Burkei, who would later die from his wounds. His wife, Claudia, who was at home in Munich, had missed his last call, in which he had said he was going to try to climb out of the hotel. She would not learn of his death for several hours more.

  Summoning all his strength, Adil got up and limped into the sight of those hostages still in 520, waving up to them, clutching his ribs. ‘Come down, you have to try,’ he called. Swapnil, the butler, sitting on the gable end, shifted his weight awkwardly, hesitated and then began rappelling down, without making a sound. Next came Raju Bagle, the housekeeping boy. Ram was left with Sunil Jadhav, the bellboy. They looked at each other. Who would go next? What lay ahead of them was a Special Forces obstacle course. Sunil signalled he would rather take his chances than stay and he hauled himself on to the ledge, twisting himself around, and sliding off.

  Ram was alone, listening to the crackling fire behind him. His mind felt like a pack of shuffling cards. He sat on the ledge, his legs dangling. His collarbone ached, and his back and hip were badly bruised. Even though he wanted to live more than anything in the world, his body had gone through too much. He could see everyone waving at him. ‘Come on, Ram. Please try.’ But he had also seen them carrying off the German guest’s body. He could not do it. His eyes welled. He felt too broken and old. Ram crawled back into the smoke-logged room, slumping down by the bed. What came to him was an aromatic smell of beeswax and sandalwood, the sound of bells chiming in a buttery hall, and warm feet on cool, pitted flagstones, smoothed by a thousand years of procession and worship. He was back in the Mylapore Temple of Kapaleeshwara, making a wish, as he had done so many times in his life, pleading with the devi for his freedom. He chanted. ‘Which is it to be?’

  Opening his eyes, he saw some pyjamas lying on the floor and remembered his nakedness. Pulling them on, he made up his mind. He picked up the wet towels from the floor, wrapping them around his face and shoulders, slid open the glass doors and stumbled out into the flames. He wanted to live.

  7.

  Deep Night

  Thursday, 27 November 2008, 3 a.m.

  One mile north of the Taj, Amit Peshave, the manager of the Shamiana coffee shop, paced the corridors of Bombay Hospital, his neatly parted hair awry, his black suit encrusted with dirt and his white work shirt flapping. He looked like he had been sucked up and spat out by a tornado. The hospital’s windowless corridors were doused in a harsh neon light and it was hard to know if it was day or night in this twilight world of the sick and injured. A smell of rotting blood permeated everything and mournful cries echoed up the stairwell.

  In the past five hours, Amit should have died many times over. One of his waiters had been gunned down before him. He had rallied thirty-one diners while under intense fire and witnessed the execution of two guests. Volunteering to search for a missing child, he had also come face to face with a gunman, who shot at him and then threw a grenade. His mind whirled with horror at what had befallen his beloved city.

  After escaping from the Taj, Amit had chaperoned an injured British guest to the hospital, running and then walking against a tide of bloodstained and injured people, learning along the way of all the other multiple attacks. As the man was being admitted to hospital, a woman had called his mobile phone from the UK, revealing that her sister (and his wife) was missing, last seen fleeing to the Nalanda bookshop in the Taj lobby. ‘Please help us find her,’ the sister-in-law implored. Amit had taken down the distraught woman’s number, promising to do his best, before texting Chef Hemant Oberoi, asking to be recalled to the hotel. But the boss insisted he stay put. ‘There will be things for you to do there.’

  Amit had roamed restlessly outside the ward, looking for a cigarette, until midnight, when he had noticed a dishevelled European woman sitting on the floor, dressed in a bloodstained shalwar kameez. As he went over, she had shrunk back, terrified. But he had coaxed a story out of her. She introduced herself as Line Kristin Woldbeck, a Norwegian tourist who had been caught up in the Leopold attack. ‘My boyfriend is terribly injured; he has lost a lot of blood. I saw so many bodies.’ Amit listened, incredulous. It was the first time he had heard in any detail what had happened at the café.

  As they had walked down to the hospital entrance for a cigarette, Amit had spotted a sink. ‘Wash your face,’ he suggested. ‘Yes, my angel,’ Line said, smiling for the first time at the thought of this boyish restaurant manager bossing around someone twice his age. He had sensed her relief as she scrubbed off a rusty layer of dry blood caking her hair, neck, face and clothes. He handed her his jacket to dry herself on.

  Refreshed, Line opened up about Arne, telling Amit how a bullet had sliced open his face from eyebrow to jawbone, and severed the tops off three fingers. A surgeon was attempting to reattach them. She described her friend Meetu, who had not been so lucky, and bled to death on the café floor. She had had to leave her body behind, as she dragged her boyfriend around the city, looking for a hospital, she explained, tears welling.

  Just as Amit and Line came outside for their smoke, gunshots had sounded out. Incredulous, Amit ran back inside as someone screamed: ‘GET DOWN!’ But where was Line? She had bolted down a narrow alley, becoming trapped. When Amit found her again she was howling at the wall. He hurried her back inside. ‘Into the lift, quickly,’ he urged, pressing the sixth-floor button. Upstairs, she collapsed on the floor and burst into tears. Calming her down, Amit left her clutching her boyfriend’s blood-soaked clothes and listening to the clanking lifts, petrified a gunman was coming up. ‘Good luck, Line,’ he whispered. ‘I have to go.’

  Down below, Amit had returned to his injured British guest and caught the news from hospital porters that the most recent gunshots had come from Rang Bhavan Lane, where an ambush had killed three senior police officers: Hemant Karkare, Ashok Kamte and Inspector Salaskar. If these guys can die, Amit thought, what chance is there for the rest of us? Spooked, he desperately wanted to return to his colleagues at the Taj. He texted his chef, Boris Rego: ‘How’s things?’ Rego was busy helping out in Chambers. He tried the Golden Dragon chef, Hemant Talim: ‘You OK?’ Talim was preoccupied, too. Everyone seemed to be working at full tilt to secure the guests. ‘Just wait,’ he was told.

  Back inside the hotel, Sunil Kudiyadi, the Taj’s security chief, sent a text message to Karambir Kang and Chef Oberoi, who were working out whom to evacuate next. There were still five
significant pockets of people trapped. The first was in the Zodiac and Starboard Bar; diners and guests who fled the lobby at the start of the evening.

  The second was in the function rooms on the first floor of the Palace, the Gateway and Prince’s, where the powerful Hindustan Unilever board had been dining. The hotel’s 23-year-old Assistant Banqueting Manager, Mallika Jagad, who was chaperoning thirty-seven trapped guests and twenty-eight staff in the Prince’s Room, had ruled out an escape down the Grand Staircase. But waiters had started fashioning ropes from curtains and tablecloths to escape through the sea-facing windows, should the fire reach them.

  The third group was the 150 diners and Korean conference delegates shuttered away on the top floor of the Tower. The biggest group of all was in Chambers, on the hotel’s first floor: 250 refugees included tycoons, business leaders, MPs, and a high court judge, as well as the journalist Bhisham Mansukhani, his mother and her friends, the yacht owner Andreas Liveras and his cruise director, Remesh Cheruvoth, Mike and Anjali Pollack and their dining companions.

  Disparate guests were trapped inside rooms from the second to the sixth floors of the Palace, among them Amit and Varsha Thadani in 253, and Will Pike and Kelly Doyle in 316. These were the hardest to protect – as Karambir Kang knew, fretting about his own family. And they were the most exposed. Alone and listening to everything: they heard the gunmen pacing the corridors, kicking doors, shooting into some of the rooms, and lighting fires. Some could also make out the excruciating sounds of those gunned down trying to run for it, including a 71-year-old Australian businessman on the third floor, who tried to flee with his wife. He was shot dead, his wife left injured and in agony. Her screams for help were audible to Will and Kelly, and sent a chill down their spines.