"You people drink tea and shoot paper. My guys shoot men. Send the amateurs in first, and we'll clean up what's left of them."He would remember saying it. He would be made to.Ian Halloran—17 years in the Regiment, two selections passed, and the second one from the assessor's side of the beasting—did not answer. He did not sit up. He did not look at the captain. He wrote three short words in the corner of his map, folded the map along its worn creases, and slid it back inside his smock. In the top pocket of that smock, unseen, was a bent brass button from his grandfather's Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders tunic, carried since he was 17 years old, and he touched the edge of it with the pad of his thumb, the way another man might have crossed himself.Kohler took the silence for a score line. He tipped back on the folding chair, pulled the folded square of yellow chamois from his breast pocket, and cleaned the lenses of his Oakleys in slow, deliberate circles—a tick from Kandahar, from a shura, where he had wanted to look like a man who had time. He set the glasses back on his nose. He looked at his own lieutenant, a 26-year-old called Terrence Hobley, and he grinned.And Hobley, to his lasting credit, did not grin back.Around the table, there were British officers and non-commissioned officers who could have corrected the captain in one sentence. None of them did. Douglas Merrick, the major commanding B Squadron, wrote something left-handed in a green notebook and did not raise his eyes. A trooper called Wynne Prosser, the youngest man in the tent by nine years, learned in that moment a specific lesson about the Regiment which no course had ever taught him: which was that the correction was not going to be verbal. It was going to be arithmetical.Outside the tent, a Chinook was running its rotors down. A dog was barking somewhere near the ammunition bay. A radio in the corner squelched and cleared. And a United States Army captain with a Ranger tab, two Afghan tours, and a Bronze Star with V had just told a room full of British Special Forces operators that they drank tea and shot paper, and that his men were going to have to clean up their bodies.And there was a clock running now that he could not see.By last light on the same day, he would be standing beside an airstrip, watching those same men walk past him in single file, and the number in Merrick's green notebook would not be one he could argue with.He was, at 9:13, already finished. He simply had not been told yet.