The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel (18 page)

Ravi saw no sense in remaining in Souk now. ‘Let’s decant.’ Rendezvous was far easier to secure. Once they had got everyone inside, Bob grabbed a mic from the conference podium and began addressing the crowd. Everyone here had a different reading of the crisis. Those from the city saw it in ways that Bob could not imagine. They had lived through communal riots and serial bomb blasts, watched coal kings become Muslim godfathers, creating an alphabet of crime gangs that held the city to ransom, sending khaki gunslingers like Maria to war. Only in Mumbai would the inequality within the criminal underworld become a pressing political issue, with Hindu chauvinists trying to undercut the power of Muslim godfathers, by falling behind their own saffron crime boss, a Hindu don, who operated out of his lair in a mill workers’ slum. If you were going to get your throat slit, there’d better be equal opportunities for all criminals of every faith in the city of seven islands.

Bob was sure-footed, the Marine captain thought. There was something about his everyman demeanour that appealed, even though he actually had no front-line experience. ‘Don’t talk loudly on the phone,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell people on the outside where we are. Keep close to the floor. Don’t move around. Don’t sit under the chandeliers. Don’t talk to the press.’ He circulated a piece of paper, asking everyone to write down names and addresses. He did not say it was a ‘dead list’.

Now they needed to build a fortress. One of Bob’s commandos climbed inside a false ceiling, above the lifts, ready to drop on whoever entered. Ravi disabled the lifts by jamming chairs between the doors, and then secured the restaurant entrance shut with wire. Inside, they began constructing barricades to block two outward-opening fire exits, piling up tables and parts of the podium, placing chairs either side, with which they planned to clobber any gunmen
who tunnelled through. Ravi also quietly recruited waiters to sit by these exits, to act ‘as canaries’. As far as he was concerned, this thing wasn’t likely to end any time soon. They were bedded in for a long wait.

They all heard the explosion that rumbled up through the hotel. Ravi knew it was far too loud to be a grenade. ‘I can see smoke,’ Bob said, sounding worried for the first time, and peering down on to the sixth floor of the Palace, clearly visible below the Tower. He could see flames emerging from the roof.
How will we escape if the fire turns the Tower into an inferno?
, he worried to himself.

On the top floor of the Palace, at the opposite end to the Tower, Sabina Saikia heard the blast too. Horrified, she called her friend Ambreen Khan: ‘What should I do?’ Ambreen reassured her. ‘Look, I’m on the way over. Call up the duty manager now.’

‘I’ll call Karambir Kang,’ Sabina suggested. Ambreen said no. She had seen on the news that his family was also trapped. ‘He will be busy. Call the duty manager.’

Sabina called back minutes later. ‘Ambreen, I’m scared. There’s shouting and footsteps outside my door.’

‘Peep out. Make sure they don’t see you.’

‘It’s men with guns.’ She sounded shaky.

‘How many?’ Ambreen got her to focus on the details.

‘Three. They are young and also have backpacks.’

Ambreen was horrified. ‘You have to hide.’

A few minutes later Sabina rang her brother Nikhil in Delhi. ‘A man is knocking, saying “housekeeping”. Should I answer?’ ‘No!’ She rang off and then called back: ‘He’s knocking again, this time saying “security”.’ ‘Don’t answer!’

Ten minutes later she was back on the line. ‘I’m in the bedroom and smoke is pouring in. What shall I do?’

‘Put wet towels around the door,’ Nikhil urged.

Sabina started babbling: ‘I need to speak to Shantanu. I need to speak to the kids.’ There were her older sisters. And there was her mother. ‘I need to speak to them!’ They were together in Delhi at
the niece’s pre-wedding party, watching the Taj on TV, more than three hours away by plane.

She rang Ambreen again. ‘Someone is talking in Punjabi outside. He’s knocking on the door with something metal.’ There were several dull thuds.
‘Ambreen!’

A mile away from the stricken hotel, out in the narrow lanes of Cuffe Parade, Colaba and Nariman Point, where police were facing standoffs with gunmen at Chabad House and at the Trident–Oberoi, and from the midst of the maelstrom of callers crying out for assistance, a Western intelligence agency plucked a single mobile phone number.

Isolating long-distance calls from local and putting these through a key-word sieve had left them with a stack of possibilities. Using linguistic search tools to work on this stack, looking for Urdu and Punjabi speakers, had further reduced that pool. Identifying key phrases, using equipment that was officially denied to exist, had eventually slimmed the list to one possibility, assigned to a local Bharti Airtel SIM: +91 9910 719 424.

The news passed to Indian external and domestic intelligence, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and Intelligence Branch (IB), was that the caller could be a participant or even the ringmaster in the terrorist operation. The IB contacted the state intelligence chief, who contacted Crime Branch’s boss, Rakesh Maria, in the Control Room, and the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) headquarters. There, in the technical section, a veteran ATS eavesdropper, experienced at truffling in the digital world, would isolate the phone’s unique identifier and apply for a warrant to listen in.

Maria called his Crime Branch number two, the pug-faced Additional Commissioner of Police Deven Bharti: ‘Find the caller,’ he told Bharti. If this phone led to those directing the terror, they could decapitate the assault on Mumbai.

Bharti, who was out at the airport on a gang-related operation, pulled back to South Mumbai. At police headquarters he met up with the Deputy Commissioner of the ATS and they both signed
out portable direction-finding equipment, with which to home in on the phone’s signal. He and the ATS deputy set out in their cars with their laptops open, waiting for someone to call or for that number to be called.

To get an accurate position, they needed to triangulate between at least three phone towers. From there, the number could be isolated inside a map grid, and then a building, where human muscle would come into play: door to door and room to room. Bharti, who had done this before, knew it called for perseverance. Splitting Colaba and Nariman Point into a lattice on a map, he got comfortable, earphones plugged in, laptop on his knees, waiting. He knew they had only the duration of the call, however brief, to lock on and map it.

At 11.30 p.m., +91 9910 719 424 was switched on.
‘Salaam Alaikum.’

4.

A Goat, a Knife and a Matchbox

May 2008 – Pakistan

A party of Lashkar trainee fighters bumped along in a hand-painted bus that spluttered and lurched into the wooded mountains of Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Qahafa the Bull, the
mujahid
trainer, and
chacha
Zaki, the outfit’s military commander, had selected them from a much larger pool of recruits, and from this group they intended to choose the final ten-man team for Operation Bombay.

Arriving at the House of the Holy Warriors, on the bowl-like plains high above Muzaffarabad, the men were frisked for cigarettes, opium and tobacco, before being photographed and fingerprinted. No one would be allowed to leave without an instructor for fear of contaminating the outfit, although none of them had any idea as to where they were being assigned. Anxious and exhausted from the bone-breaking 350-mile journey, the trainees were shown to their canvas barracks, sixteen in each tent, each one issued with a number to replace his real name.

They would be allowed only one monitored phone call a week. Qahafa the Bull and his instructors regulated sleeping, eating, washing and praying. Chatting about home life was discouraged. All of them did it anyway.

One of the thirty-two was Ajmal Kasab, who had no idea that he was on the way to Mumbai.

Born in September 1987 in Faridkot, a scrawny village hugging the highway on the poverty-stricken far eastern fringes of the Punjab, Ajmal’s neighbours eked out a living in a landscape dotted with
shrines and long-forgotten ruins dating back to the Indus Valley Civilization. This was a historic recruiting ground, with many levies drawn from here by the British, and for centuries before them by warring princes. But Partition had sent the Hindu and Sikh residents fleeing to India, while their homes were taken over by Muslim refugees, who barricaded themselves inside brick compounds to endure Pakistan’s Year Zero. Physically closer to India than to any of the Punjab’s great cities, villagers were raised on stories of loss, and grew up despising their looming neighbour. The mosque was the only communal meeting point.

Chacha
Zaki, who came from Okara, Faridkot’s nearest city, twenty miles away, had left the district to fight in the secret Afghan war of the 1980s, as did hundreds of thousands of others from the Punjab. Afterwards, he had joined up with a lecturer at Lahore’s University of Engineering, Hafiz Saeed, who spun emotive stories of his family having lost thirty-six relatives during the Partition slaughter. In 1990, the fighter and the lecturer (who was also a cleric) formed Lashkar-e-Toiba to spread a message that those who fled and their descendants could take revenge by destroying India, piece by piece. They fed off the anger, destitution and sense of dislocation that permeated every household.

In Faridkot, Ajmal and his four siblings lived behind a turquoise tin door. The main street was a sump, strung with petrol pumps and mechanical repair shops that serviced passing trade. Once the family had been goat herders and later they had sold meat, giving them their surname, which loosely translated as ‘butcher’. But the Kasabs had fallen on hard times and Ajmal’s father laboured 150 miles away on the building sites of Lahore, earning 400 rupees (£2.50) a week. The family home had no toilet or electricity. They drew their water from a communal tap, threw their rubbish over the wall and slept nose-to-toe in the room where they ate, lit by a single kerosene lamp.

The home was ruled by Ajmal’s mother, Noor Elahi, who fell pregnant during her husband’s occasional visits, but otherwise lived a covered life inside the family compound. With his father absent, Ajmal, the second son, a boy whose name in Arabic meant ‘the
handsome one’, was rebellious. Short and muscly, he grew his hair long, chewed tobacco and hung out at Faridkot’s bus stand. But the district was changing, its mood lifting, mainly through the success of Lashkar, which had made its reputation taking on one of the largest security establishments in the world in Indian-administered Kashmir, supporting an insurgency that had exploded there in 1989.

Forlorn Okara sent so many soldiers on jihad it became feted as a ‘blessed city’ and Lashkar made sure everyone heard the message: free literature handed out after Friday prayers, the health checks conducted by Lashkar-sponsored doctors, lavish
tamashas
hosted for every
shaheed
, or martyr. Lashkar volunteers would shower the community with sweets and his family with compensation before the deceased’s testament was read aloud like a battle citation. Dying for jihad in Kashmir was the highest accolade one could strive for in a bitter landscape where the alternative was living for nothing and it brought respect and dignity to families who previously had none. Visiting commanders toured like pop idols. Posters of martyrs were pinned in doorways in Okara, where in other cities one would see Bollywood movie posters. Collection boxes filled up in the grocer’s shop. Graffiti dominated every village wall: ‘Go for jihad. Go for jihad.’ Others attested to the new world order: ‘Neither cricket stars nor movie stars, but Islamic
mujahideen
.’

Teenagers like Ajmal read stirring youth publications printed by Lashkar’s media wing, which liberally used the testimonies of slain fighters to solicit new recruits, even penning a cartoon strip in one, which children nicknamed
Shaheed Joe.
The outfit knew what it was doing. ‘Children are like clean blackboards,’ declared a Lashkar provincial chief. ‘Whatever you write will leave a mark on them for ever.’

Ajmal’s turning point came in 1999, the year Pakistan and India went to war in the Kashmir heights at Kargil and his father Amir came home from Lahore sick with TB. From now on, Amir would earn about half of his construction wage, around 250 rupees (£1.50) a week, wheeling a handcart laden with fried snacks around Faridkot’s dusty square. He fought with his son, whom he expected to
make up his loss, eventually sending the thirteen-year-old to work as a labourer in Lahore. Up at 4 a.m., washing in public toilets, Ajmal grew bitter and exhausted, his ambition blunted, his fear and loneliness pricked at night. He missed his mother and resented his vicious father.

After six backbreaking years in the building trade, Ajmal met a cocky youth who worked for the Welcome Tent Service, a catering business based in Jhelum, a city on the road to Islamabad. He was recruiting cooks, and offering hot food, safety and more money. The hungry Ajmal moved to Jhelum and made a new friend, Muzaffar, whose name meant ‘victorious’. He had his own ideas about surviving. Rolling
rotis
by day, he took Ajmal prowling at night, encouraging the smaller teenager to wriggle through bathroom windows, breaking into homes and offices.

With money in their pockets, Ajmal and Muzaffar went to the cinema and watched multiple showings of
Sholay
, a high-octane Bollywood thriller in which a veteran cop recruits two thieves, one of them played by Amitabh Bachchan, to catch one of their own. In November 2007, they headed for Pakistan’s cantonment city of Rawalpindi to buy a gun, hoping to become fully fledged hoods.

The city was buzzing with a carnival-like atmosphere. Elections were coming, Benazir Bhutto was back in town after an absence of almost a decade and the streets with filled with festive
shamianas
and fairground rides in preparation for Eid. Wandering around the tents, Ajmal and Muzaffar met an elderly man, who bought them tea and persuaded them to visit the local Lashkar recruiting office. They were welcomed like long-forgotten relatives with plates of rice and mutton. ‘They asked us our names, telling us to come the next day with our clothes and supplies.’ When one of the men in the office wrote ‘Daura-e-Sufa’ on a chit, telling them to travel to an address in Muridke outside Lahore, they readily agreed. Ajmal could barely read but with those few pen strokes, they had, without realizing it, enlisted on a two-week Lashkar conversion course.