The death of the officer, leader of a gang of Secret Army Organisation killers who had sought to shoot the President of France, was to have been an end-an end to further attempts on the President’s life. The single “whack” seconds later of the coup de grâce was lost in the rising din of traffic from beyond the walls. The crash of rifle fire, when it came, caused no ripple on the surface of the waking city, other than to send a flutter of pigeons skyward for a few moments. Beyond the walls a Berliet truck blared for passage as some smaller vehicle crossed its path towards the centre of the city the sound died away, masking the “Take your aim” order from the officer in charge of the squad. The mumbling of the priest was a helpless counterpoint to the crackling of twenty rifle bolts as the soldiers charged and cocked their carbines. A foot scuffed the grit, a tiny release from tension, as the blindfold was wrapped around the eyes of Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, age thirty-five, blotting out the light for the last time. At that hour on March 11, 1963, in the main courtyard of the Fort d’Ivry a French Air Force colonel stood before a stake driven into the chilly gravel as his hands were bound behind the post, and stared with slowly diminishing disbelief at the squad of soldiers facing him twenty metres away. One It is cold at 6:40 in the morning of a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad.

Forsyth day of the jackal