Fire

ESCAPE FROM KASHMIR 1996

The guerrillas appeared on the ridgeline shortly before dusk and walked down the bare hillside into the Americans’ camp without bothering to unsling their guns. They were lean and dark and had everything they needed on their persons: horse blankets over their shoulders; ammunition belts across their chests; old tennis shoes on their feet. Most of them were very young, but one was at least thirty and hard-looking around the eyes—“a killer,” one witness said. Jane Schelly, a schoolteacher from Spokane, Washington, watched them come.

“There were ten or twelve of them,” she says, “and they were dressed to move. They didn’t point their guns or anything; they just told us to sit down. Our guides told us they were looking for Israelis.”

Schelly and her husband, Donald Hutchings, were experienced trekkers in their early forties who took a month every summer to travel somewhere in the world: the Tatra Mountains in Slovakia; the Annapurna Massif; Bolivia. Hutchings, a neuropsychologist, was a skilled technical climber who had led expeditions in Alaska and the Cascade Range. He knew about altitude sickness, he knew about ropes, and he was completely at ease on rock and in snow. The couple had considered climbing farther east, in Nepal, but had set their sights instead on the Zanskar Mountains in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. For centuries, British colonists and Indian royalty had traveled to the region to escape the summer heat, and over the past twenty years it had become a mecca for Western trekkers who didn’t want to test themselves in the higher areas of the Himalayas. It is a staggeringly beautiful land of pine forests and glaciers and—since an Indian government massacre of thirty or forty protesters in its capital, Srinagar, in 1990—simmering civil war.

The conflict had decimated tourism, but by 1995 Indian officials in Delhi had begun reassuring Westerners that the high country and parts of Srinagar were safe, so in June of that year Schelly and Hutchings headed up there with only the vaguest misgivings. Even the State Department, which issues warnings about dangerous places (and had Kashmir on the list at the time), will admit that Americans visiting such places are far more likely to die in a car accident than as a result of a terrorist attack. The couple hired two native guides and two ponymen (and their horses) and trekked up into the Zanskar Mountains. After ten days, on July 4, they were camped in the Lidder Valley, at eight thousand feet.

The militants, heads wrapped in scarves, secured Schelly and Hutchings’s camp, rounded up a Japanese man and a pair of Swiss women who were camped nearby, and then left all of them under guard while the rest of the band hiked farther up the Lidder. A mile and a quarter away was a large meadow—the Yellowstone of Kashmir, as Schelly put it—that was guaranteed to yield a bonanza of Western trekkers. Sure enough, the militants returned to the lower camp two hours later with a forty-two-year-old American named John Childs, his native guide, and two Englishmen, Keith Mangan and Paul Wells. Childs, separated with two daughters, was traveling without his family.

The leader of the militant group, Schelly would learn later, was Abdul Hamid Turki, a seasoned guerrilla who had fought the Russians in Afghanistan and was now a field commander for a Pakistan-based separatist group called Harkat-ul Ansar. He ordered all the hostages to sit down at the entrance to one tent. Childs, nervous, looked down at the ground, trying to avoid eye contact with anyone. He was already convinced that the guerrillas were going to kill him, and he was looking for a chance to escape. A cold rain started to fall, and Turki asked for all their passports. The documents were collected, the militants attempted to read the papers upside down, and then they declared that all the Western men would have to come with them to talk to their senior commander. That was a three-hour walk away, in the village of Aru; they would be detained overnight and released in the morning, said the militants. Schelly was to walk to the upper camp with one of her guides.

“After I left, the men [were told] to lie down and pull their jackets over their heads, and that if they looked up, they’d be shot,” says Schelly, who learned these details later from Child’s guide. “The [kidnappers] went through the tents, stealing stuff. And then they took the guys off. By ten o’clock I’d gone to the upper camp and come back down [with the wife and the girlfriend of the Englishmen], and we all piled into one tent because we were still scared. I was awake at four the next morning, and I just kept looking down the trail thinking they’d be coming anytime now. It was six-thirty, and then seven, and then nine; that’s when the knot in my stomach started.”

Finally, Childs’s guide returned. He had a note with him that he had been instructed to give to “the American woman.” It said, “For the American Government only,” and it was a list of twenty-one people the militants wanted released from Indian prisons. The top three were Harkat-ul Ansar.

The kidnapped men walked most of the night. They weren’t being taken to the “senior commander”—he didn’t exist—they were just being led deep into the mountains. The deception reminded John Childs of the tactics the Nazis used to cajole people into the gas chambers, and made him all the more determined to escape. The men walked single file through dark forests of pines and then up past the tree line into the great alpine expanses of the Zanskar Range. It was wild, ungovernable country the Indian Army didn’t even attempt to control, and Childs believed that there was no way anyone was going to save them or even find them. They were on their own.

“I was convinced [the militants] were going to shoot us, and so as soon as I heard someone chamber a round into one of those weapons, I was going to take off into the woods,” says Childs. “At one point we crossed a stream—it was snowmelt season, and the mountain streams were absolutely raging torrents—and I considered jumping in and flushing down to the bottom, but it would have been instant death.”

Childs kept his eyes and ears open and waited. A chemical engineer for an explosives company, he was used to solving problems. This was just another one: how to escape from sixteen men with machine guns. There were personalities, quirks, rifts among his captors he was sure he could exploit. He started lagging while he walked, seeing if he could stretch the line out a little bit; he started taking mental notes of the terrain; he started probing for weaknesses in the group. “Escape is a mental thing,” he says. “Ninety percent is getting yourself prepared to take advantage of an opportunity or create an opportunity. I knew that given enough time, I’d get away.”

Late that night they came upon a family of nomads at a cluster of three log huts. The head of the family stepped out into the darkness to give Turki a hug. Then the militants and hostages all squeezed into the huts and fell into an exhausted sleep. A few hours later, as soon as it was light, Childs sat up and peered through a chink in the wall: alpine barrens and rock, nothing more. Escaping through the forest would have been at least a possibility, but crossing a mile of open meadow would be suicide. He’d be cut down by gunfire in the first twenty steps.

After the hostages were given a quick meal of chapatis, rice, and a local yogurt dish called lassi, they lined up on the trail and started walking again. This would become their routine in the next several days: up at dawn, hike all day, sleep in nomads’ huts at night. The militants bought—or took—whatever food they wanted from the nomads and never had to carry more than a blanket and their guns. They told the hostages that they had been trained in Pakistan, near the town of Gilgit, and had come across the border on foot. They’d been in the mountains for months together and were prepared to die for their cause. When Donald Hutchings tried to engage them in talk about their families, one of the militants just patted his gun and said, “This is my family.”

India and Pakistan have fought three wars over Kashmir, and Turki’s band was the latest permutation in the fifty-year conflict. Harkat-ul Ansar (HUA) is committed to overthrowing Indian (thus, Hindu) rule in Kashmir and absorbing the state into the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Since 1990 the militancy, as the rebel movement is known, has been waging a sporadic guerrilla campaign against Indian authority with automatic rifles, hand grenades, and other small arms acquired from Pakistan. Turki called the group he commanded Al Faran, a reference to a mountain in Saudi Arabia near where the Islamic prophet Muhammad was born. The first time anyone had ever heard of Al Faran was on July 4, 1995, when they came walking down out of the mountains into Schelly and Hutchings’s camp.

The militants led the hostages by day through snowfields and high passes, traveling north. Childs’s impression was that they were simply marking time in the high country, avoiding the pony trails in the valleys, where they might run into Indian soldiers. As the day wore on, the militants became less worried about being caught, and their vigilance slackened a bit. Turki remained dour and implacable, but the younger ones warmed up to the hostages. They called Don Hutchings chacha, meaning “uncle,” and practiced their high school English whenever they could. Far from being threatening or abusive, they did anything they could to keep the hostages healthy: bandaging their blisters, giving them the best food, making sure they were warm enough at night. Not only did the hostages represent possible freedom for twenty-one separatists rotting in Indian jails, but they were also the only protection Al Faran had from the Indian military. They were a commodity, and they were treated as such.

“It was like a Boy Scout troop with AK-47s,” says Childs. “The youngest militant was sixteen or so, a Kashmiri kid who’d been recruited to the cause. He hadn’t been issued a weapon yet because he hadn’t been through training; he was educated and bright, and his English was good. Turki was dead serious, though, and I didn’t let any kind of camaraderie fool me. If he told them to kill someone, these guys wouldn’t hesitate for a second; they were too well trained.”

By the second day Childs had noticed an interesting—and horrifying—dynamic. The hostages, all desperately scared, turned to one another for comfort and support. They talked about their families, their homes, and their fears. But they had also been thrown into a ruthless kind of competition. They knew that if the militants were forced to prove their intent, they would shoot one of the hostages. That much was clear, but who would it be? An American? A Brit? A weak hiker? A brave man? A coward?

Since the hostages didn’t know the answer, they did the next best thing: They tried to make as little an impression on their captors as possible. They didn’t complain; they didn’t cry; they didn’t do anything that might cause them to be noticed. They blended in as completely as possible and hoped that if the time came to kill people, they’d be invisible to the man with the gun.

Childs quickly realized that he was losing the competition not to stand out.

“I was in really rough shape. My boots weren’t broken in, and I’d gotten blisters on my heels before I was captured,” he says. “The days went on, and the skin was rubbed literally to the bone. By the fourth day I was having trouble keeping up.” Childs believed that he and Hutchings, the U.S. citizens, were the most valuable hostages, “but you could burn one American and still have one left over.”

From time to time the hostages discussed the possibility of trying to escape en masse, but the consensus was that they would be putting themselves at terrible risk. Keith Mangan, in particular, was convinced that the situation would resolve itself peacefully. “Look, these things usually end without any tragedies,” he told the others at one point. Childs wasn’t so sure. Not only did he believe that Turki would kill them without a second thought, but he felt singled out for the first execution. Adding to his misery, he had come down with a devastating case of dysentery. By the end of the first day he was stepping off the trail every hour or so to drop his pants. A militant always gave him a Lomotil pill and followed him, so after a while Childs started relieving himself in the middle of the trail, in front of everyone. Soon they were waving him away in disgust, and he thought, “This is going to be useful. I don’t know how, but it will.”

The next time a militant put a pill in his mouth, Childs didn’t swallow. He waited until the man looked the other way; then he spit the medicine out onto the ground.

It took six hours for Jane Schelly to hike out to Pahalgam, a jumping-off point for people heading into Kashmir’s high country. The entire trekking population of the valley—some sixty or seventy people—was by the end walking out with her, and when they arrived at the Pahalgam police station, utter pandemonium broke out. Schelly informed an officer that her husband had been abducted, and she was taken into a back room and interrogated. “I had to decide whether to give them the note or not,” she says, “because it said, ‘For the American Government only.’ I looked over at my guide, and he nodded and I thought, ‘If they’re going to help, let’s get this show on the road.’ So I gave it to them, they copied down the names, and then I went to the UN post. That was at eight P.M.; they called the [American] embassy, and things were kicked into motion.”

The United Nations has had a presence in Kashmir since 1949, after Britain formally relinquished control of its Indian colony and the subcontinent sank into ethnic chaos. The British government’s last administrative act was to draw a border between the Muslim majority in Pakistan and the Hindu majority in India, and that sent six million people fleeing in one direction or the other. Hindu mobs attacked trains packed with Muslims trying to cross into Pakistan, and Muslims did the same thing to Hindus going in the other direction. Trains plowed across the border between Amritsar and Lahore with blood dripping from their doors.

While half a million people were being slaughtered, the semi-independent state of Kashmir was trying to decide whether to incorporate itself into India or into Pakistan. Kashmir was primarily Muslim, but it was ruled by a Hindu maharajah, and that inspired an army of Pakistani bandits to cross the border and try to take Srinagar in a lightning raid. They were slowed by their taste for pillage, however, which allowed Indian troops to rush into the area and defend the city. War broke out between India and Pakistan, and the nascent UN was finally forced to divide Kashmir and demilitarize the border. Fighting continued to flare up for the next forty years, and a surge in Pakistani-backed guerrilla activity again brought the two nations to the brink of war in 1990. This time the stakes were higher, though: India had hundreds of thousands of troops in Kashmir, and both nations reportedly had the capacity to deliver nuclear weapons. Diplomats defused that crisis, but American envoys in Delhi still considered Kashmir the world’s most likely flash point for a nuclear war.

By the time Jane Schelly and Donald Hutchings showed up in Srinagar, as many as thirty thousand locals had been killed since 1992, and Kashmir had been turned into a virtual police state. The brutal tactics employed by the Indian Army had brought a certain amount of stability to the area—it was alleged, for example, that security forces machine-gunned every member of a household that had any association with the militants—but the war continued to rumble on in the hills. In 1994 two Brits had been kidnapped by militants and held in exchange for twenty or so HUA guerrillas serving time in Indian jails. The Indian government had refused to bargain, and after seventeen days the militants relented and let the hostages go. They even gave their prisoners locally made wall clocks as souvenirs of the adventure.

Schelly spent her first night out of the mountains at the UN post, and the next day she moved to a secure Indian government compound. High-level British, German, and American embassy officials flew up on the afternoon flight from Delhi, and by July 7 a formidable diplomatic machine was in gear. Terrorism experts—unnamed in the press—were flown in from London, Bonn, and Washington, D.C. Negotiation and hostage release specialists were made available to the Indian authorities. Surveillance satellites reportedly tried to locate the militants on the ground, and the Delta Force, a branch of the U.S. Special Forces, was in the area being readied for possible deployment. Indian security forces began working their informants in the separatist movement, and Urdu-speaking agents started trying to maneuver between brutally simple parameters for negotiation: no ransom and no prisoner exchanges. Any concession to the guerrillas’ demands, it was feared, would only encourage more kidnappings.

Still, there was some hope that Al Faran could be eased toward compromise. Communication was carried out by notes sent along an impenetrable network of local journalists, militants, and nomadic hill people. Hamstrung, on the one hand, by an Indian government that was not entirely displeased with a situation that made Pakistan look bad and, on the other, by a U.S. policy that forbade concessions to terrorists, negotiators found themselves with almost no wiggle room, as they say. The best they could do was relay messages to Al Faran that pointed out the immeasurable harm the kidnappings had done to the Kashmiri cause; the only way to regain credibility, said the negotiators, was to let the hostages go. To encourage this line of thought, the U.S. government left the negotiating to the Indians—whose country it was, after all—and started pulling strings elsewhere in the Islamic world. They persuaded a Saudi cleric to condemn the kidnappings as un-Islamic, and they tried to massage some of their contacts in Pakistan.

“Al Faran was clearly an HUA-affiliated group, and what we know about HUA is that it’s not very hierarchical,” says a U.S. government source who closely followed the incident. “It’s not at all clear that Al Faran was even interested in communicating with [HUA] headquarters. If we’d had anything suggesting a tightly hierarchical organization, it would have been much easier to negotiate. And they had very poor, unsophisticated decision making. These were not people with a Plan B.”

By the end of the third day, John Childs could barely walk, and the militants seemed to be heading deeper and deeper into the mountains. They were, in fact, just walking in circles, dodging Indian military. To keep himself from sinking into despair, Childs devoted every waking moment to planning his escape. He knew the militants’ sole advantage was their incredible mobility; without that, it would be only a matter of time before they were discovered by an army patrol. Which meant that if any of the hostages escaped, the militants wouldn’t be able to waste too much time searching; they’d have to look quickly and then get moving again.

“My first objective was to get fifty meters away from them,” Childs says. “And then five hundred meters, and then five kilometers. I knew that every bit increased the area they had to search by the square of the distance. And I knew there was no way this guy Turki was going to scatter his crew all over creation looking for me. He couldn’t afford to look for me for more than six hours, so if I could stay away from them for that long, my only problem would be not being seen by the nomads.”

That meant hiding during the day and traveling at night, which strongly favored an escape after dark. That was fortunate, because Childs had one iron-clad reason for getting up over and over again during the night: Dysentery was still raging through his insides. The militants always posted a sentry after dark, but the hostages weren’t tied up when they slept, so the sight of Childs getting up to relieve himself was by now routine.

In contrast with Childs, the other hostages seemed to be doing fairly well. The two Brits, Wells, twenty-four, and Mangan, thirty-four, were depressed but physically strong, and Hutchings was fully in his element. When Mangan came down with altitude sickness, Hutchings had him pressure-breathing and rest-stepping as he walked; when the group got lost in a whiteout, he took charge and told them which way to go. At one point Wells muttered how he would like to grab one of the hand grenades and blow all the militants away, but Hutchings was always personable and helpful. “It’s a lot tougher to kill a smiling face,” he said. Hutchings had years of psychological training; if anyone could manipulate the situation, he could.

It wasn’t until the fourth day, as they were crossing yet another valley, that the militants made their first mistake: They visited a familiar place. It wasn’t much, but it was all Childs had.

“We were in the valley that the pilgrims take to Amarnath Cave,” Childs says. “And Don knew where we were; he’d been there before. He said, ‘Okay, down the valley is Pahalgam, and up the valley is the cave.’”

Childs thought about that for the rest of the day. He wasn’t going to be able to keep up with the group for long, and Turki wouldn’t hesitate to have him shot. Not only would that free up the group, but it would also send a message to the authorities, who obviously hadn’t given in to the militants yet. If he were going to escape, he’d have to do it soon.

“So, are we going to spend the night here?” Childs asked Turki that afternoon, as they were taking a break. He knew the answer, but he wanted to hear what Turki had to say. “No, too much danger,” Turki replied, waving his arm down the valley: Indian military. They wouldn’t dare spend much time searching for someone, in other words.

That night the militants made camp along the east branch of the Lidder River, sleeping in a cluster of stone huts generally used by pilgrims on their way to Amarnath Cave. Childs, rolled up in a horse blanket, lay on the dirt floor of a hut and considered his possible avenue of escape. The camp was at the mouth of two huge valleys that fed into the valley leading to Pahalgam, and Childs’s plan was to escape by climbing up, in the opposite direction of what the militants would expect. He’d hide in the snowfields before dawn, stay until dark, and then start down toward Pahalgam. It was a three-day walk, he figured; he had no food, no bedding, and the valley was filled with nomads who might report his location to the militants. It was, at best, a long shot, but it was better than the odds he had now.

Then, exhausted by four days of forced marches, Childs fell asleep.

“There had been other opportunities to escape, but of course you never know if it’s the right time,” says Childs. “It’s not a movie, where you know when it’s going to end. You keep asking yourself, ‘Is this the best time, or will there be a better time with less risk?’ It took a huge effort to focus my thoughts and say, ‘Okay, you’ve got to do this now. You’ve got to do it when you’re tired and not feeling well.’”

Childs woke up in the middle of the night. It was quiet except for the sound of people snoring and the crash of the river. The dysentery was rolling through his system, so he fumbled in the dark and grabbed his hiking boots—knocking over a metal grate in the process—and crept out of the hut. Ordinarily the sentry would greet him and escort him out of camp. But this time no one stirred—the sentry seemed to be asleep. Childs walked out of camp, relieved himself, and then stole back into bed, wondering what to do.

“You can be passive and not make a decision that may save your life,” he says, “or you can accept death as a possibility. That was the crux of the whole thing.”

Childs lay in bed for an hour, preparing himself, and then he got up again. He decided that if anyone stopped him, he’d just claim he was having another bout of dysentery. He thought about waking up the other hostages, but there didn’t seem to be any way to do that quietly; the others also lacked his pretext for getting up. Childs stepped out of the hut and waited for someone to say something; silence. He edged out of the firelight into the darkness beyond the huts; more silence. There was always the possibility that someone was watching him surreptitiously—or even had a gun trained on him—but that was a chance he had to take. He stood motionless for a moment, frozen at the point of no return, and then he started to run.

“I thought I was in their cross hairs the whole time,” he says. “It was like a dream where you run and run and you’re not getting anywhere because your feet are bogging down. I kept expecting to hear a ruckus behind me, but I never saw any of them again.”

Childs took off straight up a ridge between the two valleys. He was in his stocking feet, and all he had on was long underwear, Gore-Tex pants, a wool shirt, and a pair of pile pants wrapped around his head. He walked and ran as hard as he could until the ridge got too steep to climb without boots, and then he put them on and kept going. He knew the militants would wake up early for morning prayers, and he had to get as far away as possible before then. He hammered upward for the next three hours, and when dawn came, he crept into a cleft in a rock, drew in a few stones to conceal himself, and settled down to wait. As it got lighter, he noticed that anyone walking along the ridge would stumble right into him, so he violated his rule against traveling during the day and continued higher up. He was in the snow zone now, really rugged country; the next hiding spot he found seemed perfect, until it became apparent that he was resting on solid ice. He wound up moving to a small patch of moss on a hillside. There were glaciers and peaks all around him, and he was sure no one would follow him up that high; he was at least at twelve thousand feet.

By midmorning a drizzling sleet had started to fall, and Childs endured that for a few hours—resting on the moss, dozing from time to time—before starting out for Pahalgam. He was almost down at the bottom of one of the side canyons when he heard a helicopter. The sound of the rotors faded in and out, then seemed to head straight toward him. Since he hadn’t heard any aircraft in five days, his first thought was that there must have been a negotiated release of the hostages and now he was stranded in the high mountains with no food and no way to call for help.

“I stood there kind of dumbfounded,” he says, “and I started waving my pants around over my head. The pilot circled, and I could see there was a soldier in there; he had his gun pointed at me. I was a mess by that point. I hadn’t bathed in five days and had mud smeared all over me and looked like a wild man of the mountains. The pilot landed on one skid, I ran up, and [a soldier] said, ‘Are you German?’ I said, ‘No, I’m American. I just escaped from the militants.’ He said, ‘It’s a miracle from God,’ and hauled me on board.”

The militants, as Childs had thought, had searched down valley when they realized he was gone. They didn’t find him, but they stumbled across two other trekkers, Dirk Hasert of Germany and Hans Christian Ostro of Norway. They were subsequently reported missing and were, in fact, the people the helicopter crew had been searching for. Rebel sources in Srinagar say that Ostro was belligerent toward the militants from the start, telling them that what they were doing was cowardly and un-Islamic; they also claim he was armed with a knife and had tried to use it. That is impossible to verify, but suffice it to say that Ostro succeeded in sticking out in the group.

Childs was brought back to Srinagar in triumph and immediately debriefed in the presence of British and American embassy officials. It was the first of endless debriefings over the next several days. “I spent more time in captivity by the State Department than by the militants,” he said later. Childs was then taken to a secure guest house, where he was introduced to Jane Schelly. For Schelly, the chance to talk to someone who’d seen her husband only hours earlier was a relief beyond words.

“Do they have enough food and drinking water?” she wanted to know. “Do they have enough clothing? Do they know that the women are okay?”

Everything Childs had to say about the hostages was positive: They’d suffered no abuse, and the situation seemed similar to the peacefully resolved kidnappings of a year earlier. The current hostage team—referred to as G-4 because the governments of four Western countries were involved—had no reason to believe that this case would be different. While Indian security kept up a steady dialogue with Al Faran, the G-4 team continued to pressure Pakistan to intervene with HUA. (Pakistani officials were stubbornly claiming that the incident had been staged by India to make them look bad.) A rescue was deemed to be too risky; even Indian Army patrols were warned away from areas where the militants might be. Everyone, including the hostages, was worried that a surprise encounter could erupt into a firefight.

Childs flew back to Delhi two days after his escape, speaking to reporters at the airport despite the efforts of officials to bundle him into an embassy car. A few days later, he stepped off an airplane at Connecticut’s Bradley Field, and news crews taped him sweeping his two young daughters up into his arms. He’d gone from the mountains of Kashmir to Hartford in the space of a week, and it rattled him. “Had circumstances been a little different, I’d be dead,” he says. “You expect to live out your normal life span, but it could be over in a second. At the time I thought I’d never see my kids again. Now every breath I take is something I didn’t expect.”

While Childs was facing the news cameras back home, Jane Schelly was still in Srinagar, working frantically for the release of her husband. “Please let Donald go,” she sobbed at a press conference, holding on to Keith Mangan’s wife, Julie. “In the name of God, please let our loved ones go.” Al Faran responded by passing along a statement that said they had let Childs escape on purpose, but that they would resort to an “extreme step” if India didn’t release the HUA rebels. They also sent a photograph of the five hostages sitting on pine boughs in a stone hut, their hands tied behind their backs, their eyes downcast. On an accompanying tape, Don Hutchings said, “Jane, I want you to know that I am okay. But I do not know whether I will die today or tomorrow. I appeal to the American and Indian governments for help.”

The G-4 team decided, for security’s sake, to move Schelly, the German woman, and the two English women back to the British embassy’s guesthouse in Delhi. Negotiations remained deadlocked, and one week later some very bad news came in: The militants had supposedly run into an Indian Army patrol near Pahalgam, and two hostages had been wounded in the ensuing gunfight. The Indian government denied that the encounter had taken place, so Al Faran released some photos showing Hutchings lying on the floor of a house with his abdomen wrapped in bloody bandages. There was no blood on his pants, though, and he seemed to be refusing to look into the camera—refusing, perhaps, to cooperate with the deception. The consensus at the U.S. embassy was that the photos had been staged, an opinion Schelly shared.

On an audiotape sent with the photos, Hans Christian Ostro asked the Indian government to give in to Al Faran’s demands, pointing out that it was tourist officials in Delhi who had misled him into thinking Kashmir was safe. “I even went to the leader of the tourist office in Srinagar, and he gave me his card and said that if there was anything, I could call him,” Ostro said at the end of the tape. “Well, Mr. Naseer, I’m calling you now.”

Another week passed, and still there was no breakthrough in the negotiations. Britain’s Special Air Squadron and Germany’s elite counterterrorism force, the GSG-9, had by now joined the U.S. Army’s Delta Force in Kashmir, even though an Entebbe type of rescue operation was unlikely; the authorities had no idea where Al Faran was, and there were also delicate sovereignty issues to work out with India. The feeling among the G-4 negotiators was that, as with the previous kidnapping, Al Faran would eventually give in.

They didn’t.

On August 14, 1995, “we were at the German ambassador’s residence, having lunch with the other families,” recalls Schelly. “And during the meal several embassy people were called out of the room, and then more people were called out, and I didn’t think anything of it. The German ambassador was called out just prior to dessert. We were eating cherries jubilee, and the next time I looked over, his ice cream had melted all over the place. And then I began to wonder.”

While the families retired to a sitting room for coffee, a group of embassy officials talked somberly in a corner. Eventually one of them came over and reported that the body of a Caucasian man had been found in the village of Seer, outside Srinagar, but they didn’t know if he was one of the hostages.

In fact, they did know, but they weren’t saying. Cars came to pick up the families, the Ostros’ car arriving first. After they had pulled away, the German ambassador put his arm around Schelly and said, “It’s not your husband.” It was not until that moment that Jane Schelly finally accepted the possibility that she might never see her husband again.

The body was that of Hans Christian Ostro. The guerrillas had cut off his head, carved “Al Faran” in Urdu on his chest, and dumped his body by an irrigation ditch. His head was found forty yards into the underbrush, and a note in his pocket warned that the other hostages would suffer the same fate if the HUA prisoners weren’t released within forty-eight hours. The families of the remaining hostages were told that Ostro’s chest had been carved after he was dead, that he had been “peaceful” when he died, and that he hadn’t been killed in front of the other hostages—though how the officials could know that is unfathomable. However peaceful Ostro’s death, though, he may have known it was coming: Medical examiners found a good-bye note hidden in his underwear.

The G-4 team—now down to G-3—responded by demanding proof that the other hostages still lived. The militants passed along a photograph of the four holding a dated newspaper and also arranged for a radio conversation between Donald Hutchings and the Indian authorities. At ten forty-five on the morning of August 21, a negotiator raised the guerrillas on a military radio, and Hutchings was put on:

“Don Hutchings, this is one-zero-eight. When you are ready, please…tell me ‘One, two, three, four, five.’”

“One, two, three, four, five.”

“The first message is…from your families. Quote, ‘We are all staying together in Delhi and we all send our love and prayers. We are helping each other. Be as strong as we are.’ Over.”

“Okay, I have the message.”

“Now, Don Hutchings, there [is] a set of questions for you. You’ll have to provide me with the answers because I don’t know them…. Am I clear to you?”

“Yes.”

“What are the names of your pets? I repeat, what are the names of your pets?”

“My pets’ names are Bodie, B-O-D-I-E, and Homer.”

Hutchings’s existence was confirmed. The negotiator continued with personal questions for each of the other hostages and then signed off, telling Hutchings to “have faith in God and strength in yourself.” Within days of the radio interview, Al Faran began renewing their threats to kill the hostages, and their tone was so antagonistic that members of G-3 privately admitted that they thought the odds of the hostages’ surviving were only fifty-fifty. September crawled by, and then October, and the winter snows started to come to Kashmir. Reports of frostbite and illness among the hostages began to drift in. And then, on December 4, the inevitable happened: Al Faran ran into the Indian Army.

The guerrillas were passing through the village of Mominabad early in the morning when a patrol of a dozen Indian soldiers spotted them from the marketplace and someone opened fire. According to Indian military officials, there were no hostages with them—they were presumably being held nearby—but that’s impossible to confirm. The militants jumped a barbed-wire fence, splashed across a shallow stream, and then ran through a patch of scrub willow. They headed across a dry rice paddy, machine-gun fire hammering behind them, the villagers diving into their mud houses and slamming their doors shut. The militants made it across the paddy and took a stand farther upriver, near the small village of Dubrin, and the Indian patrol called for reinforcements. Soon dozens of troops were firing on the rebels, who held off the army for six hours until dark fell, when they left their dead and ran.

Turki was killed, along with four other Al Faranis. Three days after the gunfight the British ambassador in Delhi received a phone call from a man claiming to be with Al Faran and offering new terms of release: $1.2 million in ransom and safe passage to Pakistan. “You know, you know, we have been treating [the hostages] as our guests for the last five months plus,” he complained. “You can expect that we have spent lots of money.” The ambassador demanded proof that the hostages were still alive, but the man never called again.

And that was it. From time to time, over the next few months, nomads reported seeing the hostages up in the mountains, but those reports came to be suspect when it was revealed that the nomads were making money both as paid police informants and as messengers and suppliers for the kidnappers. In April 1996 a captured HUA militant claimed that the hostages had been executed about a week after the fight at Dubrin, in retaliation for Turki’s death, and that the bodies were buried in a village called Magam. The Indian Army scoured the woods and fields around Magam for weeks without finding anything.

“You want to be optimistic, your heart says be optimistic, but your mind says, ‘Sucker, you’ve gotten your hopes up before,’” says Schelly. “We had a full moon right before Id-ul-Fitr [a feast day at the end of Ramadan], and a friend of Don’s said, ‘This is the last full moon that’s going to pass before Don comes back.’ I was so convinced they would release him for Id-ul-Fitr that I packed my bags and got my hair cut. At one point I had to pull the car over on the way home from work and throw up, I was so worked up.”

Id-ul-Fitr came and went, as did the one-year anniversary of the kidnappings, without any word from Al Faran. Reports continued to trickle in from the nomads, but nothing could be confirmed. Schelly went back to Kashmir in the summer of 1996 to meet with HUA leaders, and she returned there a few months later to start up a reward program. Announcements in local newspapers, on local radio shows, and even on the backs of matchbooks offered money to anyone who would come forward with information. The U.S. government also offered a reward, and India followed suit.

“It’s very difficult to say if the program will be successful,” says Len Scensny of the State Department’s South Asia bureau. “We haven’t had verifiable contact with the hostages in over a year, and we have no current information on their well-being. It’s been an ongoing subject of discussion with very senior officials in both India and Pakistan.”

Meanwhile, John Childs has resumed his life in America—working, jogging, spending time with his daughters. People who know Childs have made joking references to Rambo, which bothers him, and some even ask why he didn’t help the others escape. It’s a question that still troubles him. “I rationalize it and say, ‘I couldn’t have done it any other way,’ but without having done it another way I’ll never know,” he says. “I ask myself constantly, ‘Should I have done anything different?’ Sitting here in my office it’s one thing, but when I actually made the decision to escape, I was tired, I was injured, I was miserable, I was terrified. It revealed something about my character, and I’m not even sure if I’m proud of it or not.”

And Jane Schelly’s hopes are slowly waning. While promoting the reward program in the fall of 1996, she decided to visit the village of Seer, where Ostro’s headless body had been found. She talked with the villagers through an interpreter and then walked along a dirt path by the irrigation ditch where, among the rice paddies, two women had spotted the body a year earlier. “It was so incongruous,” says Schelly. “The village was on a little pass, and when I was there, everyone was harvesting the rice. There [were] stacks of rice straw in the fields and mountain peaks in the distance. It was probably one of the most beautiful spots I’ve ever seen in my life.”

If Don Hutchings is still alive, he’s probably looking out at a scene very much like that one: iron gray mountains, a scattering of mud huts, and a dozen villagers cutting their way across the rice paddies at dusk. One of them, undoubtedly, knows Hutchings is there; one of them, undoubtedly, wonders if telling the army would put his family in jeopardy. He decides to say nothing. And Don Hutchings, peering out through a chink in the wall, watches night come sweeping up his valley one more time.