The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel (39 page)

The family gathered on Divar Island, a spit of land in the Mandovi River, in Goa, waited, desperate for the next update. Later, his younger brother Kevin received a call. He listened intently but there was nobody there. Kevin was about to put the phone down when he heard a crackling. He strained and waited. A voice came on the line, thin and vibrating; a ghostly presence: ‘Kevin? Dadda?’

Only one person used that word. It was Boris. Speechless, Kevin passed the phone to his father. ‘Yes, Baba, I can hear you,’ Urbano said, his face crumpling. ‘Baba, I
can
hear you. Baba,’ he sang into the phone. But all he could hear now was an abysmal silence.

In the Taj, Kelly Doyle had finally got herself noticed and was lowered down to the ground by a fire crew as the sky turned salmon pink. After Will had fallen she had contacted his father by text, trying not to lose control. ‘Please keep calm,’ Nigel had pleaded, unable to fully understand her disjointed account of some terrible accident. He would alert the Foreign Office, he said, and come to Mumbai immediately, contemplating the nightmare of having to repatriate Will’s body. He would bring Kelly’s mother too.

Outside the hotel, with no one to console her, Kelly plunged into a chaotic crowd of people wrapped up in their own private tragedies.
She could not make herself understood but somehow she would get help.

Without money or any idea where Will’s body had been taken, she begged her way across the city, visiting one hospital after another, barefoot and wearing the dress she had worn for a dinner that never happened. The A&E departments felt like warzones and she wandered through them, calling Will’s name, contemplating when she would be brave enough to start lifting shrouds in the mortuaries.

Eventually she arrived at the Bombay Hospital, where Amit Peshave was still helping out, tending to his colleagues. Roaming around, she was pointed in the direction of a side room, where an unidentified European man lay in a giant plaster cast. Shock had turned him bright yellow, and the parts of his body that were still visible were covered in blood and dirt. Electrodes were connected to his chest and a plastic pouch fed fluids to his bloodstream, an oxygen cylinder was at his shoulder and he had transparent tubes up his nose and in his arm. She stared at the face and the hairline. ‘Will,’ she suddenly cried. It was definitely Will. His chest heaved as all around him banks of machines beeped and flashed, monitoring his vital signs. Will was alive. ‘Will.’ He seemed not to hear her. Euphoric and confused, she tried to grab a nurse as she struggled to find out what was wrong with him. A morphine drip stuck out of his arm. ‘Will,’ she cried. She studied his face, as his eyelids flickered. He came round and stared up at her, and then at his surroundings, his eyes taking in the mass of wires, tubes and cabling. A machine beside her sounded an alarm as his lids shut fast again.

‘He’s crashing,’ Kelly screamed. She could not lose him again. ‘My boyfriend, please help . . .’ A surgeon entered and introduced himself as Samir Dalvie, a spinal injuries specialist. ‘Please be patient,’ he said, pointing to the chaos around them. Will was in shock. He needed emergency surgery on his shattered pelvis but Dalvie was the only consultant who had reached the hospital and he was supervising three operating theatres simultaneously. Kelly nodded, too scared to ask for a prognosis as Will came to again. ‘Kelly,’ he murmured, ‘I love you.’ She smiled weakly. ‘Please,’ he continued, ‘get me the fuck out of here.’

10.

A Black Cat and a White Flag

Thursday, 27 November 2008, 8 a.m. – Mantralaya, South Mumbai

The commandos gathered beneath coconut palms in the gardens of Mantralaya, the state’s administrative complex at Nariman Point, impatient and anxious. Even here, a mile away from the burning Taj, a smoky aroma filled the air. Twelve hours after the ten Pakistani gunmen had motored ashore in their dinghy, India was finally scrambling the National Security Guard (NSG), with the 51 Special Action Group at its core. They were trained in rescuing hostages and breaking sieges, and their anthracite black uniforms, ski masks and dexterity gave them their nickname: the Black Cats.

Everyone here was on deployment from their army unit, having survived a notorious 780-metre-long obstacle course, christened the Seven/Eight/No by foreign military trainers: a backbreaking succession of crawls, climbs and leaps traversed with a full pack and loaded weapon. Before they could catch their breath, they had to obliterate distant targets and jog through the broiling day and freezing night on route marches that switched altitudes. Dropped into an underground Kill Room that could mirror dozens of South Asian scenarios – markets, tightly packed
chawl
s, hospitals and hotels – they were strobed and deafened by klaxons, while trying to hit only bad-guy targets, delivering a double-t ap of two bullets, ensuring that whoever went down was definitely dead.

The force was tailor-made for the Mumbai operation. So why, the men wondered, as they checked over their kit in the lush gardens where the overnight dew was steaming, had it taken so long to get
them here? Brigadier Govind Sisodia, their Deputy Inspector General (Operations), a small, punchy man, with roving eyes that rapidly took in a crisis, had been asking the same question since the previous evening. He had watched the opening salvos of the Mumbai assault on TV at the force’s barracks in Manesar, south-west of Delhi, and informally mobilized the men shortly after 10 p.m. They had been ready to deploy to the technical area of Palam airstrip in under thirty minutes, and yet they had arrived a half-day late for India’s worst terrorist outrage, by which time at least 156 people had died with 240 seriously injured. Jyoti Dutt, the Brigadier’s boss, was furious about the cack-handed mobilization that he blamed on political incompetence and infighting. But there was no time to dwell on it now.

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.