Kashmir captive's wife uses 'street savvy'

VEILED in a borrowed cashmere shawl for Islamic modesty, Cathy Mackie on Friday stood outside a mosque in a Kashmiri village asking prayer-goers for help in finding her British husband and a schoolboy who were abducted on 6 June by Muslim extremists. Once the faithful vanished inside the green-domed mosque, her thoughts strayed back to Las Vegas and Elvis.

She and David, 36, were wed only last February 'for a laugh', at the Hitchin's Post a Las Vegas quickie marriage chapel covered in wall-to-wall red velvet with mirrored hearts. It seemed fitting that Elvis Presley, any Elvis, should be the best man.

'We found an impersonator, a tall Elvis at six foot two but the best. He'd lost his show and was signing autographs in a shopping mall, recalled Mrs Mackie with a laugh. 'Dave and I bounced up the aisle and then Elvis sang Viva Las Vegas. It was a real knees up.'

But the laughs are over. Now her husband, a Londoner with a badly injured knee, is being pushed along at gunpoint by Islamic zealots who are fleeing over the Himalayas ahead of the Indian army. Mr Mackie's tormentors have never heard of Elvis - or even of London for that matter. They came to Kashmir from Afghanistan and the Pathan tribal area to fight a holy war against the Indian army, and Mr Mackie fell victim, along with Kim House go, 16, who was snatched away from his parents while they were all on a trekking holiday in Kashmir.

'Dave's quiet, easygoing. A bit cynical. He won't flap at all. He's out of shape, though, has a few spare tyres round his middle,' Mrs Mackie said. 'He likes his football and his pint. I expect he's sorriest about missing the World Cup.'

Mrs Mackie does not recognise herself or her husband in any of the countless descriptions that have appeared in newspapers since the kidnapping. 'They've called Dave 'a newly wed businessman' and me a 'lonely bride'. That cracks me up. I'm still having trouble getting used to being known as Mrs Mackie.'

The two had been travelling cheaply for the past two years, through Australia, Japan, the United States, and then India when the disaster struck. They were resting from their hike at an inn called the Milky Way in the Aroo Valley when they and 13 other tourists were herded together by a band of gunmen and robbed.

'There was one point when Dave said, 'Let's grab the sleeping bags and make a run for it - into the trees'. But we didn't. We thought they'd take it out on the villagers afterwards if we escaped,' Mrs Mackie said. Later that night, Dave and Kim were dragged off.

Her tendency to joke about their predicament hides a deep vein of common sense. Although she and Kim's parents, the Housegos - a worldly couple who were travelling up the Himalayas in the best 19th-Century British Raj style, with ponies and native guide, a cook and a bearer - ordinarily would be worlds apart, the shared anguish of the kidnapping has brought them all close together.

She and the Housegos make an unlikely team. A former Financial Times correspondent in South Asia, Mr Housego has marshalled his experience and contacts in the Indian government and among the Kashmiri rebels to good use. Sometimes, though, his view of the broader, geo- political strategies of the kidnapping is punctured, to good advantage, by Mrs Mackie's street savvy.

She has also coped calmly with the incessant refrain of 'They'll be released today or tomorrow', coming from both the Indian government and the kidnappers, who belong to an extremist Kashmiri Muslim organisation called Harakat-a-Ansar.

Mrs Mackie passed out notices in Urdu appealing for help to the mountain folk of Pahalgam on Friday. Though sympathetic, most Kashmiris were too terrified of the guerrillas to talk.

The kidnappers insist they will free their captives when Indian troops stop hunting for them. It could be tomorrow, as the captors keep saying, or a great deal longer. 'I'll stay in Kashmir as long as things are happening. But if the momentum stops, I guess I'll go back to England to drum up support for their release,' Mrs Mackie said.