The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel (16 page)

The first call from Leopold had come in at 21.48 hours: foreigners killed and injured. At 21.54 hours firing at the Taj attack was reported and at the Oberoi two minutes later. The attack on CST was called in at 21.59 hours and reports arrived at 22.02 hours of the raid on Chabad House, the Jewish centre in Colaba. A few minutes earlier a taxi had blown up in Mazgaon, three miles north of the Taj, killing its driver and one passenger and injuring nineteen passers-by.

Maria focused on the nature of the attacks, scouring eyewitness accounts from Leopold that described two young, clean-shaven men dressed in sweatshirts and combat pants, carrying large rucksacks. It was the same story at the Taj and at CST, where almost sixty were believed to be dead. Two attackers had entered the station just after rush hour, pulling AK-47s out of their rucksacks. One, a six-footer, had thrown a grenade, while the other, barely five foot tall, had fired indiscriminately. And, Maria asked, how had India’s finest responded? Several policemen had been caught on CCTV running away, while another had resorted to throwing a plastic chair after his thirty-year-old bolt-action rifle jammed. Right now station coolies were dragging bodies away on luggage carts, leaving the concourse criss-crossed with bloody skid-marks.

Reports of a second explosion started coming in, another taxi, this time on the western expressway at Vile Parle, in the north-west of the city, the force of the blast decapitating a passenger whose head had been flung into the basement of Golden Swan City Club. The old criminal order of fade-attack-fade was over, Maria muttered.
Fidayeen
rules were in play, while the police were wrapping themselves up in red tape, and the state and centre appeared inflexible. ‘They learn and adapt. We stagnate, squabble and steal from one another.’ Maria wondered if this force of 40,000, protecting a city of 13 million – well below the UN recommended minimum – was even capable of getting a grip on the crisis.

He studied a printout of recent police calls and saw that Mumbai’s front-line defences were already in disarray, with police units having been sent helter-skelter in the absence of the Commissioner. Armed units had gone to pick up the wounded while regular patrols had reported to the worst hotspots. So far there had been one moment of clarity: a call from a beat marshal at 22.27, reporting an unusual marine landing at Badhwar Park. Maria dispatched a team to talk to local residents and search the abandoned yellow dinghy.

The water. How many gunmen had come in? Wild estimates were being bandied about but in truth an army could have arrived from Pakistan for all Maria knew. Just then, his phone rang. It was one of his Crime Branch inspectors: ‘Sir. They’re heading your way.’ The
fidayeen
from CST appeared to be making their way towards police headquarters.
Are they attempting to take out the police communication lines too, leaving the city blind?
, Maria worried. He called an armed Striking Mobile unit to take position outside the main gate and turned to his men: ‘They are coming for us.’ He broke out the last arms. He had to inspire them to stand and fight. He gathered everyone. ‘It is down to you.’ He sent men with firearms to reinforce the perimeter cordon, and to choke off the staircase. Then he went back to his desk, anger rising. At 22.40 he made an entry in the Control Room diary: ‘I have spoken to the Chief Secretary. We need the National Security Guard or the army to help us deal with this.’ This was the state’s call and it was still dithering. Then Maria had a 1993 moment. This felt like a nation waging a war against Mumbai and in Maria’s opinion Pakistan was the obvious candidate. But would the Islamic Republic take such a risk? Its foreign minister was presently in Delhi, staying at the Taj hotel, having come to India to
participate in long-awaited talks. The newspapers had been full of it this morning.

Maria’s wife called. Their son was due to take a bus to Ahmednagar, five hours to the east. ‘Should he go ahead?’ she asked. ‘Let him go,’ Maria told her. ‘God forbid if this whole city is finished, we are all finished, then there is someone in the family who will be safe.’

Two miles south of police headquarters, inside the Taj, Amit Peshave was hiding in a thicket beside the pool, wondering how much longer he could keep thirty-one guests quiet. A few were stoic, and praying. Some were terrified, fidgeting and crying. He was most worried about a drunken party of Indian MPs, who were throwing their weight around, loudly taking calls and threatening people. It would only take one act of inappropriate clowning to draw the killers over. He had tried the door to the transformer room, through which he had hoped to exit on to the street, but found it was locked from the inside. Somehow, he would have to locate whoever had the key. Peeking through the shrubbery, he could see through the pierced cement wall the lights of Merry Weather Road. It was eerily quiet. ‘Where the hell are the police?’

An Indian couple quietly sobbed. Amit wriggled over. ‘Sir, madam, how can I help?’ The fretting husband explained: ‘Our six-year-old boy is missing.’ They had been dining in Shamiana and their son had gone to the toilet moments before the attack started. Now they were separated. Amit’s heart sank. The toilet was opposite the Harbour Bar, which meant the boy was trapped or dead. The woman struggled up. ‘I will go,’ she said. Amit pulled her back. ‘You will not. There are thirty-one lives here.’ She tried to slap his face and he clasped her hands. She began to call out her son’s name. ‘OK,’ Amit hissed. ‘I will find him.’

Holding his breath, he stepped out on to the pool terrace and straight into the path of a gunman. Dressed in black, with a pudding basin haircut, he was different from the one Amit had encountered in Shamiana, and he seemed equally surprised to see the Taj staffer, his rifle momentarily slipping. In that split second, Amit pelted
towards Shamiana, but the gunman recovered and loosed off three shots as Amit’s foot caught the paving, tipping him on to the grass, the rounds
phut-phutting
close by. As he lay there, the gunman aimed again. Glass crashed all around.

He opened his eyes to see a spurt of bullets as the recoil dislodged the rifle, sending rounds smashing into glass windows and doors. Amit tried to get up. But the gunman pulled something from his bag, lobbed it and Amit heard it thud behind him. He rolled over and saw a matt-green grenade lying in the grass like a fallen coconut. He clutched his ears and stared, waiting for the explosion. But nothing happened.

For the next forty-five minutes, Amit didn’t move, thinking maybe he was dead. He looked at the grenade lying innocently beside a hosepipe and gazed up into the sky, mesmerized by the carpet of stars but no moon. ‘I pray for my parents and all of my family,’ he whispered. He thought about the opportunities he had missed – past girlfriends and indiscretions. ‘I
have
had a good life.’ When he finally got his senses back and realized that the gunman had gone, he scrambled to his feet, and slipped inside the devastated Shamiana, telling himself that he was the luckiest man alive. The first thing he saw was Rehmatullah, lying dead. The waiter’s skin felt like cold, pressed meat.

Bile rose in his throat but Amit pushed on, heading for the Harbour Bar toilets, as gunfire snarled. Two rifles shot up the corridor, grenades tossed to the right and left. The toilets were still way ahead, around the other side of the open lobby. Behind him thirty-one lives depended on him. He could not do it. Feeling like a failure, he turned and worked his way back to the bushes, rehearsing what he was going to say, crawling this time, hiding behind pillars and furniture, until he reached the silent poolside. As he slipped back into the thicket, he noticed one of his guests, a British man, was bleeding heavily from a gaping wound in his hand. His brow was beading, the colour leaching from his skin. He needed urgent medical attention. Amit had to find the man with the transformer room key.

First, he sought out the frantic parents. ‘Sir, ma’am, I
have
tried.
But I can’t get through. You said you believe in God. Now you have to pray that they won’t kill an innocent child.’

Zone 1’s Deputy Commissioner of Police, Vishwas Patil, had slipped out of the PM’s security meeting at 9.10 p.m., with every intention of going back two hours later, when the group planned to complete its session. He had hot-footed it from the Trident–Oberoi to the cramped police apartment he shared with his wife and two young children, opposite the Brabourne cricket stadium, a few minutes’ drive north-west of Colaba. At 9.25 p.m., he was eating daal and rice that his wife had fetched from a nearby takeaway, when his mobile had started ringing.

It was his boss, the Additional Commissioner (South). ‘Vishwas, there’s firing at Leopold’s.’ Three days before, Patil had visited the café on a follow-up inquiry, having discovered in July that an intelligence bulletin had named it as a potential target of a Lashkar attack. He had told the café’s owner to hire extra security, and had registered more than ninety cases against illegal pavement hawkers who converged outside, forcing them to move so as to limit the potential carnage from any bomb. ‘God sent me some signal,’ Patil told himself as he picked up his Glock and an unopened box of forty rounds. By the time he got downstairs, the Director General of Police (DGP), the most senior policeman in the state, had called. ‘Vishwas, go to the Taj,’ he ordered, trumping the earlier call. One of the DGP’s relatives and Maharashtra’s Additional Chief Secretary were stuck inside the hotel.

As his Tata Indigo drove towards Apollo Bunder, a mile south, Patil loaded two magazines. He had applied for the Glock six months back. Now he had seventeen bullets in the clip, and a spare, with a few loose rounds in his pocket. He was thankful. A normal side arm for his rank was a six-shot revolver or ten-round pistol. His constables were protected even less well. After the bomb blasts of 2003, Mumbai police had raised the dedicated Quick Response Teams (QRTs), trained in commando tactics by the army. Though they were supposedly armed with AK-47s and 9mm pistols, Patil learned
that not a single AK round had been purchased for three years and the QRTs had not done any firing practice since September 2007. The next tier of city defences was the optimistically named Striking Mobiles, teams of five or so, armed with rusty carbines and self-loading rifles, often without ammunition. It was well known they had to account for every round fired. After an encounter he would often see them on their hands and knees looking for the casings. The few who were issued with bulletproof jackets found they did not ‘cover vital organs’, with one classified report noting the plate design ‘was defective’. Long before tonight, he had warned his superiors: ‘Mumbai’s battle readiness is in doubt.’ And he had made the same point in the Oberoi hotel meeting earlier today.

As his vehicle approached the glittering Taj façade, he thought back to how he had driven past as a young student, worrying that he would never be part of the world inside. These days he no longer cared. Looking up he saw guests silhouetted in the windows, waving or talking into their phones. Taking a snap decision, he directed his driver down a side lane and called the Taj’s security chief, Sunil Kudiyadi, hoping that the hotel’s beefed-up defences had held firm.

Getting out in Merry Weather Road, Patil was amazed to see that the Time Office entrance was still wide open. Worried, he headed for the swimming pool terrace, wondering what else the Taj had scaled back on, as keeping this entrance secured was in the long list of measures he had submitted to the hotel. He marched in, several feet away from where Amit Peshave and his group of guests still crouched, dashing off to the far side of the pool before any of them could call out. ‘Alert everyone,’ Patil whispered to his 21-year-old wireless operator, who radioed Rakesh Maria in the Control Room. Patil spotted Kudiyadi emerging from the Palace lobby and waved him over. As he approached, words tumbled out. ‘Terrorists . . . are killing people.’ His Black Suits had been deployed all over the hotel but they were unarmed and terrified. ‘How did the gunmen get in?’ Patil asked bitterly. ‘Tower lobby and Northcote entrance, sir.’ The last time they had seen one another had been at the security meeting in October.

Kudiyadi explained that two weeks earlier the armed police
picket had been dismissed from outside the Tower lobby. ‘They had asked to be fed while on duty and the hotel grew irritated.’ The Northcote side door had never been secured, despite assurances that it would be. Many of the agreed security steps had been dismantled as soon as Patil had gone on leave, the hotel arguing it could not be expected to sustain a war footing. Exasperated, Patil asked: ‘Where are the gunmen now?’ Somewhere on the upper floors of the Palace, said Kudiyadi. ‘It appears that they know exactly where they are going, sir.’

‘Take me,’ Patil said and Kudiyadi led him into the bottom end of the south wing and up a service staircase to the first floor. Gingerly they opened a door to look down the wing. Everything seemed peaceful. Crouching low, his pistol drawn, Patil heard sobbing. Creeping along the wing, turning left towards the Grand Staircase, he saw two injured women writhing on the floor outside the Ballroom, their hands shattered by bullets. Horrified, he motioned for two of Kudiyadi’s Black Suits to haul them back, while the radio operator called for medical assistance. Patil and Kudiyadi retraced their steps, taking the service stairs up to the second floor. As they poked their heads out, it also appeared deserted.

Close to the Grand Staircase, they edged around a pillar and spotted men armed with assault rifles ascending to the third floor. Patil counted three, possibly four. A few good shots might end this now, he thought, judging the distance between them at around thirty feet. He aimed his Glock and squeezed off some rounds. The gunmen ducked, before spinning around, directing a prolonged burst back towards them, chiselling into the marble. He was outgunned. These were no amateurs.

A few metres along, inside room 253, Amit and Varsha Thadani sat on the bed in their party outfits, clutching each other, listening to the volley of shots. They should have been enjoying their wedding reception in the Crystal Room but instead were discussing whether to create a bunker or make a run for it. Minutes earlier, Amit had opened the door, blustering about ‘taking them on’ and Varsha, his
new, doll-like wife, had dragged him back. ‘There’s a strong smell,’ he told her. She knew it was gunpowder and began to cry. She could not stop thinking about their friends and family who probably were downstairs in the Crystal Room and the lobby, including her brother. Were they hurt or trapped or worse? Where was Amit’s mother? She was supposed to have brought up the wedding jewellery half an hour ago and wasn’t answering her mobile.