The Weight of a Mustard Seed (23 page)

Lt. Colonel Walid asked him if he had a written order or a signed sentence from a judge. The manner of their arrival was highly irregular and outside the usual process. It bothered him, it made him nervous, he could not take responsibility for it. There should be notification and documentation.

“Where is the judge who will attend and witness the execution?” he asked the officer of the Presidential Bodyguard. The officer of the Presidential Bodyguard made a gesture that indicated that this was not the kind of case which needed a judge.

“I have to verify this,” Lt. Colonel Walid told him. “This is an extraordinary situation. I should make sure.”

“Look, brother, Lt. Colonel,” explained the Presidential Bodyguard determinedly, “we have the order of Mr. President (may God protect him), to execute this order for execution—”

Just at this moment Colonel Hassan's car (a single car, which was unusual because he usually traveled in a convoy of two cars) drew up at the gates and the Colonel got out.

“What's going on?” he asked, “is something wrong?”

The officer of the Presidential Bodyguard took Colonel
Hassan to one side. Lt. Colonel Walid could see his boss listening and then nodding curtly in concurrence. Colonel Hassan got back into his car and signaled for the others to follow him. The four cars, Lt. Colonel Walid's bringing up the rear, drove, not to the execution block in the prison, but to a disused corner of the prison grounds. Lt. Colonel Walid had never visited the area; he knew about it only dimly and now, in the dark, his impression was garbage, waste, mud, stands of high reeds. There was no track and the cars bumped over the uneven ground toward a clearing. When they stopped and he got out, he could smell the rotting scrap food, stench of fetid salt-rimed swamp dump. His shoes caught on the thin rustling edges of scudding windblown scraps of plastic bags and he shook his feet with disgust.

It occurred to Lt. Colonel Walid that Colonel Hassan knew this place and that he knew what he was doing there. In the distance the bombing continued and mingled with the adrenaline of the urgency of the situation in front of him. The officer of the Presidential Bodyguard and Colonel Hassan got out of their cars and Colonel Hassan called out to the other guards, “Bring him!” The words came out as easily as he would have called for an extra chair to be fetched. Then he leaned back inside his car and took out a Kalashnikov with a folding metal stock.

The handcuffed figure who was, Lt. Colonel Walid could now see, wearing a neat, clean well pressed uniform with the badges of rank removed, was brought out and held upright, arms pinioned on either side by two guards. A black and white
kaffiyeh
was wrapped around his head as a blindfold. He was a tall man with the erect grace and proud bearing of a leader. He stood straight up with dignity and said in a clear strong voice,
“By God, I am sorry: I have done nothing wrong, I did nothing for this to happen to me. Why? But we come from God and we return to God.”

It was a strong clear voice and as he retold these final words Walid dropped his eyes for a moment of impression, a mark of respect.

At the time, however, his thoughts were an agitated veering blur. They spiraled and collapsed in on each other and watching this scene, taking in the rush, the smell of the filthy earth beneath, the brutality of speed and dispatch, he felt his own execution hurtling toward him.

 

L
T
. C
OLONEL
W
ALID
was typical Amn officer. Imagine him a regime everyman. Competent enough, immured: he was not a monster although he saw monstrous things and then ignored them. “What could he do?”

His curriculum vitae could have been written by template.

When the war against Iran ended in 1988, Walid, like many in the security services and the army, felt betrayed. What had they been fighting for? What had eight years of blood been worth if Iran was to be given its border at the midway point of the Shatt al Arab, exactly where it had all begun in 1980? When Saddam invaded Kuwait and the consequences were disastrous many questioned, in the melee of the
intifada
that followed,
openly
, the efficacy of the President. Lt. Colonel Walid
was among them. He began to want to kill Saddam and restore his country. He knew about the injustices, the thousands of prisoners, good officers executed for desertion and the corruption of the regime, its criminality, he had seen Colonel Hassan beat prisoners to death with electric cattle prods—these things were extreme and not right; but these things he was used to. His main concern was that of the country, reduced and outlawed, brought to its knees and subjected by a President who gripped power by its neck and choked it.

Walid said that in 1992 he joined a secret opposition movement, a network of officers led by a General, within the army and security services. It was very difficult to organize such a group in the circumstances of informant terror—indeed plenty of fake opposition movements were set up as traps to lure the less than loyal—and it was dangerous to meet and impossible to talk in offices, on the telephone or in each other's homes or in earshot of more than three members at a time. Some funds were apparently procured from Arab countries, some plans, perhaps even a coup, were mooted. Ultimately this group—and it was probably not the only one—dared not or could not risk action.

 

A
S
L
T
. C
OLONEL
Walid watched the tall officer stand up straight and defend his last living dignity before his God he felt he was watching himself. He was stabbed with the premonition of his own death. His mind raced and flickered paranoia. He imagined that the bound officer was connected with his opposition group, that he had already been betrayed. Perhaps Colonel Hassan, who he usually enjoyed warm relations with, was watching him closely to see how he reacted through this elaborate terminal charade.

On the waste ground, the killing ground, Colonel Hassan and the Presidential Bodyguard officer began arguing.

“I am the one who will execute him,” said the officer of the Presidential Bodyguard.

“No. I will shoot him, it is my job and position to do this.”

The nervous army Lt. Colonel wanted nothing to do with it, stepped back and told Colonel Hassan, “Do what you want.”

Lt. Colonel Walid got into his car and drove away. He could not bear to witness the killing. He did not want to see himself shot on some patch of waste shit.

“You were frightened?” I asked him gently.

“No. I was not frightened,” he insisted; I never heard an Iraqi admit to fear.

When he was half way back to the main paved road he heard the three bursts of automatic gunfire, thirty bullets maybe, and then a gap and then a single ringing shot.

His mind was in turmoil. He imagined in a rush what would happen to his family if he was shot. He thought: Who was that officer? Could it have been my General? Could my mind be so disoriented with torment that I did not recognize his voice? Could I not gauge anything beyond the blindfold? Who was this man, high rank and proud, who had stood up straight and been shot, summarily by that thug criminal bastard Colonel Hassan?

If it had been his General he should find out immediately and face his fate. In his hyper concentration, this information became a desperate focus of needing to know. His own words came back to him like a taunt. Some months before he had told his General: “We will all be shot for sure. Let's revenge ourselves before we are arrested. It is better to be killed fighting them, than to wait to be executed by them like sheep.”

He slowed his car and parked it on the side of the road and
decided to walk back toward the clearing. He hoped to encounter Colonel Hassan and find out what he could. He felt himself in a stumbling dreamnightmare. He began to retrace his steps, “I don't know why but I will tell you why. I couldn't wait for Hassan to come back before asking him who this person was.”

Colonel Hassan saw him and got out of his car and the two walked back to their quarters together. Colonel Hassan shook his hand and asked him why he had left like that. His manner was perfectly normal, warm and collegial.

Lt. Colonel Walid told him that he had sensed that the Presidential Bodyguard were hiding something.

“They did not tell me who he was so I had the impression they did not want me to know, so I thought it would be better if I just left.”

Then in his overwhelming desperation, he attacked him with the question burning his thoughts: “Do you know who it was?”

“You didn't recognize him?” Colonel Hassan was amused.

“No, I didn't know, I thought maybe it was a Minister.”

“No.” said Colonel Hassan, “It was Kamel Sachet.”

Lt. Colonel Walid's panic had taken hold and even with this exonerating information, he could not let go of it. Perhaps Colonel Hassan was lying in order to lull him into a false sense of security. He asked him where they had put the body and Hassan told him they had stuffed it in the carcass of an abandoned refrigerator that had been lying on the dump.

“If you leave it there, the dogs will eat it,” Lt. Colonel Walid advised him, making his horror sound like a logistical concern. “It will be a problem. Why not put him in the morgue.”

Colonel Hassan thought about this for a moment and then agreed that he would go back himself with a few guards and take the body to the morgue.

They said good night and parted. Walid could not settle. The bombing had stopped, Kamel Sachet's body lay close by cooling into death. The hour had become late and silent and the stars came out brightly against the partial blackout. Walid walked alone for an hour around the prison grounds and then he got into his car and drove home. He waved at the Abu Ghraib checkpoint where they knew him and a second, farther checkpoint set up during the alert. He was driving a government car and he was not stopped. There were no other cars on the deserted roads. The bombing could start up again at any time. The area that he was driving through was a likely target. He couldn't feel the fear through his fear that he couldn't feel, or later, even admit to.

When he reached his home he found everyone still awake, listening for more bombs. He greeted his wife and she saw the wildness in his face and asked him what was wrong, but he said only, “It's the bombs: didn't you see the bombs?”

“You didn't tell her?”

He shook his head from side to side to side, rocking his thoughts.

“No, never, never. No one.”

He sat in his garden in the middle of the murdering night and drank three glasses of arak and declaimed Mr. President, may God shit on his grave.

“Baghdad is on fire and he doesn't care,” he said out loud. His receding adrenaline left a residue of anger. Still he could not bring himself to articulate what he was really thinking. He blamed his anger on the bombs, but it was not the bombs that night that had touched him.

“He only wants to keep his power! He doesn't care about people when they are killed! Only his position!”

In the morning, back at the prison which he should never
have left during an alert, Colonel Hassan invited everyone to breakfast to show his hospitality to the evacuated officers.

Afterward Lt. Colonel Walid and Colonel Hassan went over to the Long Sentence section of the prison. They talked about Kamel Sachet. Walid said, no he had never met him, although of course he knew him by reputation. He was lying, because during the night he remembered, once, maybe ten or twelve years before, he had met Kamel Sachet at a friend's office, a man who had an import-export business, just once, he had shaken his hand.

“Do you want to see him?”

They went to view the corpse, retrieved, shelved and refrigerated in the prison morgue. It had been wrapped in a black shroud as an insult to signify a deserter, a traitor. Colonel Hassan unwound the black folds to reveal Kamel Sachet's face striped half red blood. There was a crusted entry wound at the top of the skull indicating that the final coup de grâce had been shot from above, vertically downward.

Colonel Hassan pointed this out and said, “That was my bullet!”