Executive orders - Tom Clancy [242]
IT WOULD HAVE been uncivilized to deny them a chance at prayer. Cruel though they were, and criminals though they had been, they had to have their chance at prayer, albeit a brief one. Each was in the presence of a learned mullah, who, with firm but not unkind voice, told them of their fates, and cited scripture, and spoke to them of their chance to reconcile with Allah before meeting Him face to face. Every one did-whether they believed in what they did was another issue, and one left for Allah to judge, but the mullahs had done their duty-and then every one was led out into the prison yard.
It was a sort of assembly-line process, carefully timed so that the three clergymen gave each condemned criminal exactly three times the interval required to take each out in his turn, tie him to the post, shoot him, remove the body, and restart the process. It worked out to five minutes per execution and fifteen minutes for prayer.
The commanding general of the 41st Armored Division was typical, except that his religion was something more than vestigial. His hands were bound in his cell before his imam-the general preferred the Arabic term to the Farsi one-and he was led out by soldiers who a week before would have saluted and trembled at his passage. He'd reconciled himself to his fate, and he would not give the Persian bastards he'd fought in the border swamps the least bit of satisfaction, though inwardly he cursed to God the cowardly superiors who had skipped the country and left him behind. Perhaps he might have killed the President himself and taken over, he thought as his handcuffs were looped to the post. The general took a moment to look back at the wall to gauge how good was the marksmanship of the firing squad. He found strange humor in the fact that it might take him a few extra seconds to die, and he snorted in disgust. Russian-trained and competent, he'd tried to be an honest soldier-nonpolitical, following his orders faithfully and without question, whatever they might be-and therefore had never been fully trusted by his country's political leadership, and this was his reward for it. A captain came up with a blindfold.
A cigarette, if you please. You may keep that for when you sleep later tonight.
The captain nodded without expression, his emotions already numbed by the ten killings done in the past hour. Shaking a cigarette from his pack, he put it into the man's lips and lit it with a match. That done, he said what he felt he must: Salaam alaykum. Peace be unto you.
I will have more than you, young man. Do your duty. Make sure your pistol is loaded, will you? The general closed his eyes for a long, pleasurable puff. His doctor had told him only a few days before that it was bad for his health. Wasn't that a joke? He looked back on his career, marveling that he was still alive after what the Americans had done to his division in 1991. Well, he'd avoided death more than once, and that was a race a man could lengthen, but never win, not really. And so it was written. He managed another long puff. An American Winston. He recognized the taste. How did a mere captain ever get a pack of those? The soldiers brought their rifles up to aim. There was no expression on their faces. Well, killing did that to men, he reflected. What was supposed to be cruel and horrible just became a job that-
The captain came over to the body that was slumped forward, suspended by the nylon rope that looped around the handcuffs. Again, he thought, drawing his 9mm Browning and aiming from a meter away. A final crack put an end to the groans. Then two soldiers cut the rope and dragged the body off. Another soldier replaced the rope on the post. A fourth used a gardener's rake to move the dirt around, not so much to