Magic Bus (33 page)

‘Once, my unit captured a big guy in the Maoists. We knew that whoever killed him would get a medal,' explains Rishi. I assume he's on leave, trying to earn a few extra dollars. ‘And a medal means promotion, money. The commander gave the order just to hold him, but any of us could have finished off the man, at one o'clock in the morning, saying, you know, he was running away.'

In 1996, after years of injustice, compounded by the frustration following a dismal flirtation with democracy, the tiny Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) declared a ‘People's War' on the state. The government's brutal and indiscriminate response alienated many countrypeople and drove thousands to join the insurgency. In less than a decade, the nascent movement went from attacks with ancient muskets on rural police stations to blockading the capital.

‘Maybe you think this is strange, but I went to the temple that night and lit candles and prayed that the Maoist would not be shot. In the morning, I was happy that he was still alive.'

‘I don't think it's strange,' I say.

‘Months later, I was going through his village, and I met a man who was his spitting image. It was his father.' He shrugs at my surprise. ‘Nepal is not a large country. We are used to such coincidences. He took me inside his house and showed me photographs of his son. I knew then, if I had killed that man, I could not have faced that day.'

As we climb the terraces, new mountain ridges are revealed behind us. Across Phewa Tal, I catch sight of the World Peace Pagoda. Then a green canopy of trees closes over us, snatching it from view. In the doorway of a bamboo shack, a woman picks stones from rice.

‘Maybe you also think it strange that I wanted to see action from close quarters,' he says, now moving ahead of me as the path narrows. ‘All my life I dreamt of winning the battles for my country. But Nepal had no foreigners to fight other than tourists, and we can't fight you. There are too many,' he laughs. ‘This way,' he says, showing me a shortcut up the wooded hill. He
pauses at the crest for me to catch my breath. ‘The insurgency brought the chance for me to see action.'

Over ten years, the bloody conflict has claimed more than 12,000 lives, two-thirds at the hands of the soldiers like Rishi. In the course of waging their ‘revolutionary struggle', the rebels – motivated by a grass-roots idealism and the Naxalites across the border – resorted to torture and murder. Their leaders ordered the conscription of children and the execution of school teachers, landowners and village headmen. To try to contain the violence, the government spends $100,000 a day on the military – in a country where the average annual income is $230. In its hunger for revenge, the RNA has acted with equal ruthlessness, killing innocents forced to shelter Maoists and burning villages in the mountains. In police ‘search-and-kill' operations, like the recent Kilo Sierra Two, hundreds of women are alleged to have been raped. But Nepal is not only losing its people to bullets and pressure-cooker bombs. In some months, as many as 100,000 young Nepalis cross the border into India, desperate to escape the daily extortion of money by the rebels and of information by the army.

‘I was posted to the Mountain Warfare School and the 4th Brigade in Nepalganj,' says Rishi, pausing on a wall to light another Yak.

‘You learnt your English there?'

‘From the British advisers,' he nods. ‘I always volunteered for seek-and-destroy missions. My unit received reliable information about a Maoist camp in the Mugu valley. With forty soldiers, I moved across the
lekhs
for three days and nights. In the small hours of the third morning, we intercepted a rebel group. I chased their leader and pinned him down after a hand-to-hand fight.'

Rishi flicks ash on to the dry stones. I listen, his story interrupted only by the calls of cuckoos.

‘We took defensive positions against counter attack. But we weren't prepared for being surrounded by nearly three hundred women. They claimed that the captured men were their innocent husbands and sons. This was a trick situation, of course; the militants
played very smartly, because the villagers blocked our exit routes and tried to force their way through our cordon.'

‘We couldn't fire on them but we had to move out before the situation became violent. There was no possibility of air evacuation – my country has only six helicopters – so I made a decision to climb down from the mountain at night. We started around midnight, cutting through the forest to avoid both the women and potential ambush sites, changing our routes so as not to be trailed. The Maoists assumed we'd try to get back to the main camp, so we headed instead in the opposite direction to a police checkpost. It was across difficult terrain, but it was the safest.'

‘Later we learnt that the man I'd caught was a district commander. He had been going home to meet his newborn son and celebrate with his family. For the first time, I saw the human face of insurgents, and I went to our unit temple and prayed for him.'

He tosses aside his cigarette.

‘My brigade commander recommended me for a medal. “So, tiger, you have tasted blood,” he said to me. I felt like a tiger, roaring for more: more action, more honour…'

‘More money?' I ask.

‘Of course. I hear the Mugu valley will be reopened to trekkers soon,' he replies and starts to climb again.

As the day warms, a diaphanous haze gathers in the valleys. We walk above it and the woods through an encampment of handicraft-and tea-stalls. A few other travellers join us here, though none has passed us on the path.

Foreigners had not yet been targeted by the Maoists but, as almost all the trekking routes pass through their areas, many are required to pay a 1,000-rupee ‘donation' – about $13 – to the cause. Only last month, the Minister of Tourism assured the world that Nepal was safe for visitors. The next day, the Gaida Wildlife Jungle Camp was burnt to the ground and four bombs were dropped on the tennis courts of Kathmandu's Soaltee Crowne Plaza Hotel. That same week, in a lodge in Gangdrak, an American trekker watched a government Puma helicopter gunship swoop down on a populated valley, shooting ‘at everything that moved'.

Back along the trail in Morocco, Penny's first little paradise, forty-three people were killed a few months ago when suicide bombers attacked a tourist restaurant, a five-star hotel and the Belgian Consulate. Like the Luxor massacre and Yemen kidnappings, the Casablanca bombings marked the start of an international campaign targeting Western travellers and the expansion of domestic terror campaigns to Bali, Mombassa, Sharm el-Sheikh and beyond.

Rishi and I walk past the last restaurant beneath the summit of Sarangkot. A grand sweep of mountains suddenly appears before us, pure white peaks rising steeply above stone-blue flanks, dazzling the horizon and my eyes. I stagger back, unbalanced by the sight, grabbing a metal railing. Beneath a boundless sky, no one speaks, and the silence, broken only by the distant rush of water, heightens the sense of timelessness.

‘You see now why we have to fight?' says Rishi. ‘For this paradise.'

‘This paradise is a war zone,' I say.

A Japanese tour group appears at the look-out. A young Nepali puffs up ahead of his chubby English girlfriend, carrying their motorcycle helmets. Only then do I realize that on the opposite side of the hill a paved tourist road snakes up to Sarangkot.

‘I have brought you to the most beautiful view in the world,' says Rishi, nirvana's warrior. ‘I wouldn't say no to a tip.'

That evening, a story circulates around Pokhara about the latest government action in Doti district. In response to a provocative ‘cultural revolution entertainment' show at the Sharada Higher Secondary School in Mudbhara, the army surrounded the building, pulled off its roof tiles and started firing into the classrooms. Eleven Maoists and four school children were killed in the firefight, and more than a dozen others left wounded.

‘The injured students have not been treated as of yet,' reported the
Kathmandu Times
. ‘Bullets have not been removed from their bodies due to lack of money.'

‘When that Thunderclap Newman song “Something in the Air” came out, I thought it was a signal,' says Penny, ‘to go back on to the streets and restart the revolution. I was gutted to realize it was just a song.'

We're sitting by the lake at Mike's Breakfast. A twisted band of cloud separates the foothills from the mountains, as if levitating the silver peaks above the earth. A seasoned
dharma
bum with orange protection cord and hiking boots sits at the next table. Penny slept through the previous day and following night but woke from her dreams in an irritable temper. Earlier this morning, she grumbled at the bathroom mirror, ‘You know, Jack, I preferred being young and impressionable.' I hadn't counted on a free restaurant newspaper further darkening her mood. Or on it evoking an extraordinary story.

‘Did you read this?' she asks me, shaking both the
Nepali Times
and her head.

‘About Sharada School?'

‘About Charles Sobhraj,' she says. She swallows her coffee in a gulp. ‘He's been arrested in Kathmandu.'

In the summer of 1970, a personable young Indo-Vietnamese and his pregnant French wife drove an old Triumph Herald along the trail to India. The charismatic couple had met in Paris two years earlier, the twenty-four-year-old Sobhraj proposing to Chantal behind the barricades that tumultuous May. But unlike many of their contemporaries, they weren't heading east to work on their karma. Sobhraj, a petty thief and compulsive gambler, was on the run from the police.

In Bombay, Sobhraj – intelligent, arrogant and rebellious – graduated from cashing bad cheques to black-marketeering. Born
in Saigon to a prosperous Sindh businessman and his Vietnamese mistress, he aspired to live the wealthy life which the family had lost on emigrating to France. With his mixed features and gift for languages, Sobhraj was able to disguise his identity, travel on pickpocketed passports, smuggle duty-free Rolex and Cartier watches across borders. He advanced to stealing Alfa Romeos and BMWs to order, driven from Europe and around India's import ban by backpackers. Those backpackers – and passports – were usually acquired at a crowded, hippie café called Dipti's House of Pure Drinks on Ormiston Road.

Sobhraj had no sympathy for the overlanders' pleasure in recreational drugs or their rejection of parental conservatism. As an outsider, he wanted to snake his way into established society, not to reject it. But he realized that many young travellers were gullible and that he could use them. He manipulated their vague ideals and enlisted their help by giving an air of revolutionary glamour to gem-smuggling and the robbery of ‘bourgeois' tourists.

Sobhraj was a ruthless, amoral and ambitious con-artist. In the course of his travels, he escaped from half a dozen police lock-ups, smuggled arms into Iran, sold passports to the PLO, abducted his own child and abandoned his wife in a Kabul jail. When Chantal divorced him, he hardened himself against attachment and offered his services to the major operator in the Chinese heroin trade.

By the mid-seventies, amateur drug-smugglers had disrupted the business of the larger organizations. Naive kids carried half-keys across borders, got caught and attracted unwanted publicity. Sobhraj was commissioned to discourage small-time couriers and dealers. The method he decided to use was killing them. In India, he had learnt to use pharmaceutical drugs – Librium, Largactyl and Quaaludes – to disable and pacify his prison guards. Now, he applied his knowledge to young travellers, often on the spurious assumption that they were involved in smuggling, sneaking laxatives into their drinks to induce illness and then soporifics to numb them.

His first victim – after he suffocated a Pakistani driver in the back of a Chevrolet – was André Breugnot, a Frenchman who
may have worked for a European heroin ring in Chiang Mai. Next, he abducted Teresa Knowlton, a twenty-two-year-old American en route from Seattle to Nepal for a meditation course. He offered to take her to the beach at Pattaya. There, he and an accomplice drugged her with 150 milligrams of Mogadon, dressed her in a bikini and swam out into the South China Sea to let her drown. He battered and incinerated a flamboyant Turkish pusher and a young Amsterdam couple who had saved for five years for their ‘trip of a lifetime'. Their charred and smouldering bodies were found dumped on a Thai roadside. In Kathmandu, he killed a burly Canadian trekker named Laurent Carrière and the Californian junkie Connie Jo Bronzich, who had arrived on a bus from London a few days earlier. Her blackened, naked body was found beside the Bhagmati river.

In each case, Sobhraj's gracious outward manner won his victims' initial friendship. He presented himself as an urbane gem-dealer and once bragged, ‘As long as I can talk to people I can manipulate them.' By 1977, he had cast a pall over the Asian trail and was wanted for at least twenty murders in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Pakistan and Nepal. He was caught only after drugging an entire busload of French tourists at Delhi's Vikram Hotel.

During his sentence for robbery and manslaughter in the high-security Tihar jail, Sobhraj – who also used the name Alain Gautier – escaped twice, once by feigning appendicitis and, then, in 1986, by throwing a birthday party and feeding grapes and biscuits injected with sleeping pills to his guards. On both occasions he was recaptured, yet he remained outspoken and defiant, managing to have a telephone and fax installed in his cell. In 1997, after serving twenty-one years, he was deported to France. According to the
Nepali Times
, Asia's premier serial killer had now returned and was arrested at the Yak and Yeti Casino on Friday.

‘He swore that he never killed good people,' says Penny, ‘but isn't there goodness in everyone?'

The sunken black eyes of a sullen man gaze out from her newspaper. His motivation remains a mystery. Bitterness at the
opportunities of Western youth? Revenge against the father who failed to help him to build a future? A lack of feeling or too much feeling? Sobhraj once confessed – then later retracted the boast – that his sadistic murders were ‘cleanings' for ‘fun'. He never admitted to feeling remorse. ‘Does a professional soldier feel remorse after having killed a hundred men with a machine-gun?' he once asked. ‘Did the American pilots feel remorse after dropping napalm on my homeland?'