"He's Finished" — The US Captain Who Mocked the SAS Veteran Minutes Before He Turned the Battle
Chapter 13
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Merrick has a stopwatch. It is a plain steel field watch with a second hand painted black, and he starts it at the word go. The second hand is at the 12. The room watching the plot is quiet enough that you can hear the hum of the radios, and once a chair scraped somewhere behind Spate.Halloran is at the eastern wall. The distance from the form-up point to the wall was 300 meters. It has been covered by the assault force of 12 men, in two four-man teams, in one minute and 11 seconds. The captain, watching the plot, does not know how. There is no video; the drone feed is on the compound courtyard, not on the ground between the wadi and the wall. What Kohler knows is that a minute and 11 seconds ago, the assault force was at the form-up point, and now is at the eastern wall—because Halloran is calling it on the net, and Halloran does not lie about where he is.Vane sets the frame charge against the eastern wall at 1 minute 49. It is the charge he built on the groundsheet in the courtyard, and it is set left-handed against a mud-brick wall in a country that is not Britain, at a time chosen by a major writing left-handed in a green notebook four kilometers away, and it goes off at 1 minute 52.You do not hear it from the operations room. You hear faintly over the drone feed's microphone a sound like a heavy book being dropped on a table.Through the wall, there is now a door-shaped hole.Halloran goes through the hole first. He goes through it with the L119 up, the suppressor black in the shadow, and the first man he sees is standing eight meters inside the courtyard with an AK-47 half-raised. And Halloran shoots him twice in the upper chest and once, as the man goes down, in the head, in the classical Regiment sequence, and the man is dead before his rifle hits the ground.Halloran does not stop moving. Prosser is on his shoulder.The second man in the courtyard is behind a fig tree—one of the fig trees against the north wall, the ones Halloran had noted in his little waterproof notebook. And Prosser, 23 years old, four years in the Regiment, kills him with a single round through the trunk of the tree at a range of nine meters, because Prosser has spent four years learning that a fig tree is not, from the ballistic point of view of a 5.56 round, a fig tree.Two minutes, 31 seconds.The main building, ground floor, the storeroom. Merrick in the operations room is not saying anything. He is looking at the second hand of the field watch, and he is listening to the net. The net is, in fact, quieter than the courtyard has been in six weeks, because everyone in the courtyard who was going to shout is either dead or being killed, and the men who are killing them are not shouting, because they never do.