by Adrian Levy
The Brigadier’s head was already swimming after a puzzling series of early-morning briefings that had left him feeling unsure about the mission in Mumbai. The police had told him that the number of gunmen was said to be ‘anywhere up to twenty’ and the most savage team, locked down inside the Taj, had an unknown quantity of AK-47s, as well as military-grade explosives, grenades and side arms, whereas TV reports had been far more specific, placing the fidayeen numbers at ten. No one had much to say on how distant handlers were directing the gunmen, although the NSG had heard that telephone intercepts were being analysed elsewhere.
In Dutt’s opinion, the intelligence agencies were being ‘positively evasive’, skipping over the warnings that ran back to 2006 and offering an assessment so broad that it was useless to a force looking to eke out any small advantage in what they were sure would be close-quarters fighting inside byzantine buildings.
He suspected that the Mumbai authorities were deliberately blurring the picture, obscuring the actual size and capabilities of the invading force, lest they be criticized for failing to engage a small, albeit well-armed and highly motivated fidayeen squad. Brigadier Sisodia knew better than to air such views in public. A tight-lipped, invisible soldier, with thirty-three years’ service under his belt, he kept his own counsel. He had always been this way and his wife and son mostly inferred what he had been up to from the state of his boots. Since July 2007, when he had been selected for the Black Cats, he had become especially guarded.
He tried to void his mind. The Brigadier’s sole focus was his men. Splitting them into three groups that would take on Chabad House, the Trident–Oberoi and the Taj, he told them they would be facing well-trained belligerents, whose aim was to prolong the terror and extract maximum publicity by creating strongholds and executing hostages. There would be no negotiations, the Brigadier warned. ‘It is kill or be killed.’
The commandos pressed rounds into the clips of their Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, taping the magazines together, tightened their webbing and pulled down their balaclavas. Boarding his vehicle the Brigadier watched the task force, engines gunning, stream out into the bright morning in municipal buses. Behind came the tactical and weapons specialists, the bomb squad with their dogs, field medics, a communications team that would rig mobile control posts to keep them talking, and intelligence officers instructed to mill around in the crowd near the Taj, giving the commandos peripheral vision.
9.15 a.m. – Apollo Bunder
‘Blood, glass, charred wood.’ When Brigadier Sisodia finally marched into the Taj, the scale of the destruction struck him. He wondered at the firepower that had carved up the marble floors and blown the crystal chandeliers into smithereens. It was going to be a long, hard slog, he warned, as he established a Black Cat command post beside the police in the Tower lobby, run by a Special Forces colonel and aided by Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan, a sinewy officer whom Sisodia had ordered to lead the Taj units. A product of the National Defence Academy, the elite joint services training college outside Pune, Major Unnikrishnan, a 31-year-old Black Cat instructor, could have chosen to stay behind in Manesar. But he had volunteered.
An exhausted-looking Karambir Kang introduced the Black Cats to the MARCOS commander and to Sunil Kudiyadi, the Taj security chief, who was sitting with a spent huddle of Black Suits. Having run the gauntlet all night unarmed, Kudiyadi’s team looked on as he described the harrowing Kitchen Brigade slaughter, as well as the developing crisis in the darkened cellars. Hundreds were still stuck in their rooms in the Tower, too, he warned, and many more remained unaccounted for in the Palace wing, although fire crews had plucked some to safety, at extreme risk to their own lives. Others had been less lucky, caught up in the inferno or picked off by the gunmen, including Karambir’s wife and sons, trapped on the sixth floor with Sabina Saikia, the food critic. As condolences were murmured, Karambir raised his hand: ‘I will stay here until the very end; otherwise the terrorists will have won.’
The MARCOS commander briefed Sisodia on the Chambers, where his men had engaged in a bruising battle, in which they had been unable to dislodge the gunmen, who had gone to ground in the kitchens. There were still scores of guests trapped inside the club, he advised, all of them shell-shocked after eleven hours.
Brigadier Sisodia asked for the hotel’s plans and Karambir handed over a sheet of paper. After all this time, rescuers were still working off a basic drawing that was not to scale and only recorded part of the first two floors. ‘Impossible,’ the Brigadier snapped. ‘We need architectural plans.’ Karambir shook his head: ‘Sir, we have been searching all night but the man cannot be found.’ The Brigadier was uncompromising: ‘Obtaining them is the priority.’
The MARCOS commander took the Brigadier to one side. ‘There are two worlds in this hotel,’ he warned, ‘the backstage and front of house.’ Without the help of hotel staff, the Taj was a treacherous sniper’s paradise. At one point his men had pushed through a service door only to pop out, unexpectedly, in another wing, with their backs exposed to the gunmen. The inferno had also left behind miles of unstable corridors that could collapse at any minute.
The Brigadier marched up to the flagging Taj security men and flung them a bundle of flak jackets: ‘You’re coming with us.’
9.30 a.m. – the Chambers
Bhisham Mansukhani heard a clang, clang, clang, and nearly leapt out of his skin. Someone was banging on the barricaded Lavender Room door. ‘Open up,’ a voice shouted in English. ‘Don’t move,’ someone hissed, as everyone inside inched away. ‘Please open the door,’ a softer, female voice implored from outside. ‘I think it’s one of ours,’ the club manager whispered, opening it a fraction, to see men in ski masks, brandishing guns, alongside a female staff member. Overjoyed, he threw the door back as a cheer rose up. Black Cats clattered in, hushing everyone with a warning that the gunmen were still close by.
‘Walking only,’ a commando instructed, as Dr Tilu tried to lift the semi-comatose engineer, Kamble. ‘He’s dying,’ the doctor argued, but the Black Cat was emphatic. As Dr Tilu laid him back down Kamble whispered for someone to contact his wife and two children. ‘You’ll be able to do it yourself,’ Dr Tilu replied, uncertainly. She knew that if they had been freed sooner, his wounds were treatable. But the grinding delays had put Kamble on the danger list.
In the library, Remesh Cheruvoth, the cruise director, was fading too. As the Black Cats moved swiftly through the room, checking for concealed gunmen, someone helped him to his feet. ‘Follow us down,’ they shouted as Remesh, his shirt blood-soaked, called out weakly: ‘I must take Mr Liveras’s body.’ Bereft, he had carefully laid out his boss on the chaise longue. ‘Living only,’ the commando snapped, leaving Remesh to undo Andreas’s watch, his numb fingers fumbling, finding his wallet too, unclipping his necklace, taking his BlackBerry and Nokia handsets, giving them to one of the Alysia’s spa girls. ‘Please give them to the captain,’ he asked, shuffling away, tearfully, into the hall.
Anjali Pollack, who had been separated from Mike for five hours, came out into the corridor with their dining companions, feeling so euphoric that the Black Cat leading her out seemed ‘as handsome as Brad Pitt’. She stopped other guests, asking if they had noticed her ‘tall, nearly blond American husband’, finally glimpsing soldiers entering the club toilets and returning with a familiar lean silhouette in a crumpled striped shirt. She waved at Mike as the crowd pushed her on, until they reached the Tower lobby, where everyone lurched to a shocked halt. A corpse lay rolled up against the wall. The furniture was shredded by gunfire, the carpets were charred and blotted. Blood was spattered everywhere.
Police stood around, speaking into walkie-talkies while small huddles of masked soldiers oiled their guns. Smoke clung in the morning air like village campfires. As the guests walked towards the exit, broken glass crunched beneath everyone’s feet. Someone scooped up a spent cartridge, stowing it in his pocket, but Bhisham did not want any souvenir. He shuffled forward with the others, transfixed by
the sunshine streaming through the glass doors.
Finally, he was outside, as cameras clicked and whirred and the warm morning sun was on his face. A police van drew up, and a constable beckoned over Bhisham’s aged mother, who was hobbling on bleeding feet, offering to take her to the nearby Azad Maidan police station. Bewildered, Bhisham waved her off, before climbing into a waiting bus. He stared up at the windows of the Taj, wondering if the Thadanis had made it out too.
Mike Pollack caught up with Anjali on the hotel steps. Swinging her around, he whisked out his BlackBerry to snap a picture: Mike grinning broadly, Anjali, caught mid-sob, terror and relief in her eyes.
Ack, ack, ack. Mike spun around, his phone still held aloft, and saw bullets were streaming down from the windows above. People dressed up for the night stood blinking in the day, incredulous. The screaming began as guests dragged one another out of the way. Mike lifted Anjali through the door of an open bus, shouting, ‘Lie low,’ as Taj staffers formed a human shield around those remaining. Hot bullets and frantic bursts of fire pattered everywhere, as Mike was pulled towards a boundary wall, cowering against it, half kneeling. He heard a click and looked around to see a photographer taking a shot.
Bhisham had his face pressed into the grimy rubber floor of the bus and was crying. ‘The whole thing is a crazy film shoot,’ he said, broken by the unending terror, as the bus lurched forward, gathering speed, until finally the gunfire was inaudible.
Within an hour he and his mother were home in Breach Candy, turning on the TV news, searching for reports on missing friends, as if it were all a dream. After showering, he pulled the cork from a bottle of red wine he had been given as a gift in Italy earlier that year. This was the right occasion, he said to himself, as he savoured the plummy, rich red fruits and his mother pulled her face into a look of disgust. ‘Alcohol saved our lives,’ Bhisham exploded. ‘If I’d not taken us upstairs to the Crystal Room for a drink at 9.30 p.m., you and I would have died in that lobby.’
As the wine softened his mood, he felt a pang of something he could not understand. But it was not for the dead and injured, or even for the grand hotel that was still being pummelled, or for Gunjan Narang, the school bully who he now knew had been slaughtered alongside his family in the cellars, or for others whose fates he still did not know. What he felt was disappointment, or perhaps even sadness. ‘I had become so convinced that it was the end for me that I was committed to the idea of my death,’ he recalled. Now that he had survived, it was going to take an age to readjust.
Mike Pollack eventually made it back to his in-laws’ house, exhilarated. ‘Everything that has happened,’ he gabbled to Anjali, as they hugged their two sons, ‘is literally biblical.’ The epic slaughter and disasters of the Old Testament were, to his way of thinking, mythical. But what they had endured inside the Taj was a real, elemental journey. ‘Look what humans are capable of when put in harm’s way,’ he told her, hopping about. ‘See what we became? How we all helped each other?’
Mike was already thinking ahead, disenchanted by what he had done with his life so far, playing the high-stakes game at the edge of human possibility. ‘These things just fall away in the face of death,’ he confessed to Anjali, ‘leaving only what is truly important.’ He would sell up the hedge fund and channel his money and energies into something more fulfilling.
10 a.m. – the cellars
The dark had a flavour. It tasted like cardboard and smelled of gravy. Enveloped by it, Chef Oberoi listened to the sound of approaching footsteps. He was shattered and dehydrated, his stomach growling. Looking around, everyone seemed to have reached the end. There was a knock on the door. ‘Come out.’ The small, portly chef stood, quaking in the darkness. ‘Please stand,’ he signalled to the others – guests and their children, members of his Kitchen Brigade. They would face whatever was out there with dignity.
As Oberoi pushed open the door, torchlight blinded them. Sixteen people, eyes straining, filed out of the door, staring at the masked gunmen before them. ‘Follow us,’ one of them said in Hindi, and it dawned on Oberoi that they were not fidayeen but Indian soldiers. But no one felt elated as they walked silently through the gloom, trying to ignore evidence of the slaughter that had, inexplicably, missed them. Oberoi suspected that he would never be able to forget the sounds of killing as he passed the puddles of congealing blood marking where his colleagues had fallen. After a couple of twists and turns, they were suddenly outside and standing blinking in the warm sunshine, inhaling the smells of a heaving city by the sea.
He caught sight of shell-shocked colleagues huddled together, like the shipwreck survivors, watching the still burning Palace wing, everyone contemplating those who had not made it. Oberoi caught up with their news, and the first report was the hardest to swallow. Chef Banja, his ally and foil, was confirmed dead.
So was Wasabi’s head waiter, the iron-man Thomas Varghese. Young Hemant Talim, the Golden Dragon chef, was critical and Chef ‘Big Foot’ Kamdin had been killed. Oberoi recalled how the Kitchen Brigade joked that he was a giant: ‘Kaiz bhai, tereko teri height maar gayi [Brother Kaiz, your height has killed you].’ Zodiac’s Chef Mateen was also dead. Oberoi had been waiting for him to hand in his notice, after getting a high score in his matriculation exams that would have secured him a place in any top business school. Where was Chef Boris Rego from Shamiana? Missing. Oberoi winced. Rego’s father, Urbano, was a close colleague and a friend, Goa’s most famous culinary star. What would he tell him? And what of Chef Raghu, the banqueting chef who had made a stand in the Chambers kitchens? He was also missing. Nitin Minocha, the Golden Dragon senior sous-chef, a Vijay Banja in the making, the hotel’s emerging talent, was in hospital, where doctors feared he might lose an arm.
Oberoi needed distractions. He had to work. The chef began to organize visits to hospitals. Ratan Tata had pledged to cover all staff medical bills. Funerals would have to be arranged, underwritten by Tata too. Oberoi borrowed a phone and dialled Chef Banja’s wife, Fareeda. He broke the news to her and her eighteen-year-old son, as all around ambulances mustered, ferrying survivors and the dead to hospitals across the heartbroken city.
At Jaslok Hospital, on Pedder Road in Breach Candy, Rajvardhan Sinha, the chief of SB2, arrived. After leaving the Taj with his batch-mate Vishwas Patil, he had hobbled home to find his eight-year-old son getting ready for school. The domestic scene had blindsided him. Up until now Rajvardhan had lived in a bubble of war, prepared to die at any moment. But here normal life was going on. His son was full of questions and Rajvardhan had been careful to stick to the basics. He was caught out when the boy began to cry, running over to hug him, sensing that he had almost lost his father, in a scene of anguish tinged with relief that Rajvardhan imagined was being acted out all over the city. ‘The siege is only part of it,’ he told his wife, a college lecturer. ‘These killers have trespassed on our sense of security.’ She had never seen him so worked up before, and knowing that he would not rest until the siege was over, she insisted he get an X-ray.
Two hours later, his ankle heavily strapped, Rajvardhan hobbled back to his office in Rang Bhavan Lane. From there, he called the state’s head of intelligence, who confirmed that everything pointed to Pakistan. Rajvardhan was ordered to liaise with foreign intelligence agencies, assuring them that India was on top of things, while probing to see if they had anything that pointed to the direct involvement of the Pakistan military.
Rajvardhan’s men had their work cut out, confirming the identities of foreigners who had died in the assault so that their corpses could be repatriated and dealing with the chaos of the paperless living. Many hotel guests and Leopold victims had lost everything, and his men would need to confirm who they were before issuing them with exit permits. He also had the FBI to deal with too. A note on his desk informed him that a parallel criminal inquiry by the Bureau was already underway. He looked out of his window towards the lane where eight hours earlier three senior colleagues had been gunned down: Kamte, Karka
re and Salaskar. How had it happened? Soon they would salute them at their funerals.
At Bombay Hospital, Amit Peshave, who had only slept for four hours in two days, was still working. ‘Kidneys failed. Four or five bullet wounds. Hip. Buttocks. Hands – twice. Thigh. Groin,’ an orderly shouted as a woman from the Taj cellar was pulled out on a trolley, tagged with the name Jharna Narang. Amit recoiled. ‘Blood, fluids, clear the way.’ The woman’s parents and brother, Gunjan, had died, an orderly said, while the gunmen had left her for dead. Amit stared at her blood-spattered face, mesmerized by her murmuring lips that seemed to be chanting.
‘Two shots in the torso, one in the leg.’ Another ambulance had swung in. As Amit helped with the stretcher, a crimson rivulet of blood poured off the trolley, soaking his shirt and trousers. ‘Please, no,’ he gasped, almost dropping the body. Despite his parents being doctors, he had grown up with a phobia of blood. As he glanced up at the patient’s face, he realized it was Chef Raghu, his friend from Chambers who he thought was dead. Sunil Kudiyadi had reported seeing a gunman sitting on Raghu’s corpse, having emptied a magazine into him. Now Amit stared at the gaping, crimson tear in Raghu’s whites and a cascade of emotion washed over him. ‘Blood and wound packing,’ an orderly cried. ‘Pull through,’ Amit urged, welling up. Raghu’s eyes flicked opened and he smiled. ‘Hey, boss,’ he whispered.
Amit needed to walk. He picked up his soiled black jacket and strolled out into the sunshine, heading towards his dorm in Abbas Mansions. Along the way he bumped into a friend from the Trident–Oberoi hotel. Both of them guessed what the other had been through, so they walked along in silence, sipping a small flask of Honeybee rum. When Amit rounded the corner of the Taj, a soldier stepped out of a gateway, aiming his rifle. ‘Stop, or I will shoot.’ His finger wavered over the trigger. ‘Taj staff,’ Amit cried in Hindi, feeling ragged and full of hatred for the world. Something about his frantic tone and dishevelled demeanour rang true. ‘What the hell are you doing, man?’ the soldier asked, lowering his weapon. ‘I was inside there,’ Amit said, pointing to the Taj. ‘And now I have to sleep.’ The soldier saluted, letting him pass into Abbas Mansions.