Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

He thought that one of the escort would then have clamped a hand over her mouth. He heard their boots and the scrape of her sandals, then the squeal of the unlocking of the cell block’s outer door and the clang as it was shut again.

There was a deep, limitless silence around him. He stood alone in the cell and the walls seemed to close around him, the ceiling to slide down on him. He saw the high window, the grime on the glass that repulsed the brightness of the low sunlight, and the bulb that burned dully above the protective screen of wire. An hour before he had come to the cell to see her stripped, dressed in the white cotton smock that was too large for her, made for a man, which had been soiled with the excrement of the last traitor whose bowels had burst as he had kicked under the rope, he had been telexed from the al-Rashid barracks. A general of mechanized infantry, commanding a division, had crossed the Jordanian frontier and had reached Amman. A brigadier of anti-aircraft artillery defences, and two colonels of the Engineer Corps – with their families – had fled their homes. A colonel in an armoured regiment had driven his car into the cover of trees beside the Tigris river, sealed the windows, squeezed a pipe on to the exhaust and was dead… There would be others, there always were. A few escaped, but others stayed, believed it was possible to disguise their guilt from him, the shield of the regime.

The quiet burdened him, and the emptiness of the cell. Her calm had made the silence that seemed to crush him. He could not escape the gaze of her eyes. He felt the weakness at his knees and he would have fallen had he not reached out and steadied himself against the door of the cell. He had seen many men taken from the cells, and afterwards he had gone to the home of his son and sat the children on his knee and told them stories or played with them with their toys on the rugs, but that morning he was far from his son’s home and his grandchildren. He staggered out of the cell and leaned, breathless, against the corridor wall.

Commander Yusuf heard the crowd’s voices. She would be on the ladder to the platform of planks. She would be seen. His composure returned as the silence ended with the shouts, jeers, yells of the crowd outside the gate.

He stood by the closed cell door. ‘Do you hear it?’ he murmured, in his soft singing voice. ‘She is alone, as you are alone. She is beyond help, as you are beyond help.’

‘One one six zero.’ Omar was looking through the binoculars.

‘One thousand one hundred and sixty yards, check?’

‘That’s what I said, Mr Gus.’

He had never fired at that distance. The furthest target on the Stickledown Range was at a thousand yards. His finger made the final adjustment to the sight’s elevation turret.

At its maximum height in flight, the bullet would be on a line that was 135 inches above the aiming point, then it would drop.

‘Wind isn’t so strong, maybe three to five miles per hour at our point, coming from the side. From smoke, between the office and the apartment block – four two zero yards – it is more strong, five to eight miles per hour. At three-quarters distance, by the governor’s house, it is again as strong. I can see from the flag there.’

‘If the flag’s on top of the building that’s too high for trajectory, doesn’t count.’

‘I know that, Mr Gus. The flag is from a window balcony, at her height.’

‘What is it, at her?’

‘It is again more gentle, from the side.’

The bullet, at that range, would be in the air for the time it would take to speak, not gabble, two phrases of seven syllables each. ‘Point three three eight ca-lib-re. Point three three eight ca-lib-re.’ He must allow for wind deflection at the muzzle point when the velocity was greatest, then twice more during its flight… Two clicks of deflection on the windage turret. Before the wind straightened it, the bullet would fly on a course that was initially eighteen inches to the left of the target.

‘Check.’

He thanked God that the wind at the muzzle point was not moderate but gentle, not fresh and not strong. He could not see her. Men were clustered around her. The reticule lines of the sight were on the noose. There was no traffic on Martyr Avenue and he sensed the swelling quiet of the crowd, who had jeered as she was led out but now stood in hushed silence.

Then, two of the men in dun olive uniforms bent in front of her, and he thought they pinioned her legs. She stood so still. He breathed in hard, filled his lungs, and waited for them to lift her feet onto the chair.

The commander was outside the cell block. He had no need to be there, he could not have counted the number of executions he had witnessed, and with minor variations they were all the same. The quiet had drawn him out of the block. He did not know why the Party men, the Ba’athists, did not lead the cheering and shouting. He could see her through the open gates, small and hemmed in by big men, below the noose. He looked hard and expected to see her back and shoulders quiver, but her head had not dropped. Away past her was the length of Martyr Avenue, and then the foothills of the mountains. He saw the hands grip her body, to raise her, and he turned away as if he had no stomach for it.

There were open windows with curtains flapping in them, roofs with lines of washing, the shadows thrown by water tanks, and the dark recesses in unfinished buildings where the sun did not penetrate. Using the magnification of the telescopic sight, Major Karim Aziz roved over the windows, roofs and the skeletal sites.

When the first light had peeped over the high distant ground he had sent the woman inside. He was calm. He had made the necessary calculations. For the sniper to have a view of the scaffold, between the side screens, he must be on Martyr Avenue. As he had requested, the street below him was blocked with armoured cars. It was, and he had paced the distance, 525 metres from the balcony to the scaffold. The sniper must be further back, but Aziz did not believe the man would trust himself to shoot at a greater range than 850 metres. He believed himself to be within 325 metres of the greatest prize his life had yet offered him.

There was no sound to distract him. Not a car moved on the street, not a hawker cried out, and the great crowd was stilled as if it held, guarded, its breath. The quiet was good and brought him the peace he needed.

He knew they had led her out, the crowd had told him, but in the quiet he did not know whether they had lifted her yet onto the chair. He could not turn to see. It might be the flash of light from the rifle’s sight, or the brief brilliance of the firing gases, or the dispersal of dust on a window sill. He thought the target would be the hangman. It would be the sad and stupid gesture of a man demented by helplessness to shoot the hangman.

The gesture would leave her, in terror, on the platform for another minute or another five minutes before an officer had the courage to crawl forward, lift her, set her feet on the chair, the noose on her neck and kick the chair. To shoot the hangman would not help her. He had no complaint, as long as the sniper fired and, through firing, exposed himself.

There was a low moan from the crowd, wind on wire, and he thought they lifted her.

He stared through the sight at the windows and roofs and the open floors of unfinished buildings.

She was on the chair.

Hands steadied her.

She stared ahead of her, across the crowd and up the length of the street. He wondered whether she looked for him.

He let the breath slip. His words were silent. ‘Don’t move. I am here. Don’t move your head. My love…’ He squeezed gently on the trigger.

This was not Stickledown. He was on the third floor of an unfinished office block facing down the Martyr Avenue in the city of Kirkuk. He was in the bubble where it never rained, was never too cold and never too hot, and the wind never freshened. The boy was beside him but he no longer knew it.