"He's Finished" — The US Captain Who Mocked the SAS Veteran Minutes Before He Turned the Battle
Chapter 14
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Vane sets the second charge on the storeroom door at 3 minutes 11. It is a smaller charge. He has, on the way through the courtyard, killed one man with the Glock 17 because his rifle had a stoppage at the moment the man appeared, and Vane, without slowing down, drew the pistol and put the man down with two rounds, and cleared the rifle stoppage while continuing to walk, and the whole sequence took on the drone feed 1.6 seconds.The second charge goes at 3 minutes 14.Inside the storeroom, there are two hostages: a Danish medic called Bruun, and a British engineer whose name the papers will eventually get right. And there are two guards. And the two guards go down at 3 minutes 15 and 3 minutes 16, respectively. And the hostages are on the floor of the storeroom with their hands over their heads, and Bruun is bleeding from a cut above one eye that she got a week ago and has been trying to stop with a piece of her own shirt.Halloran is the man who reaches her."Miss Bruun," he says, in the courteous, level voice of a man reading a shipping forecast. "We're going home now."Four minutes, nine seconds.The high-value figure Halloran marked in his notebook, the man in the green shirt with the AK-74, is on the first floor. Halloran and Prosser go up the stairs. The man in the green shirt is at the top of the stairs with the AK-74 up, and he is a competent man, and he fires first. He fires three rounds: the first passes through the wall to Halloran's left; the second passes through the ceiling above Prosser's head; the third does not leave the barrel, because Halloran, at a range of four meters, has by that point put two rounds through the man's sternum and one through the bridge of his nose. And the man in the green shirt is down before the third round in his magazine has entered the chamber.Five minutes, 48 seconds.The remaining fighters in the compound—Halloran from the notebook has counted 19 in total, of whom 11 are now down—are in the two upper rooms and the vehicle bay. They die in the order they choose. Some choose to fight. Some choose to run into a courtyard that has, for the last three minutes, been under the observation of a sniper pair. Doyle at 430 meters ends two of them across the space of 11 seconds. Vane, left-handed, ends one at the door of the vehicle bay with a single round from 20 meters.Seven minutes, 41 seconds.Merrick stops the field watch. He does not stop it dramatically; he simply looks down at it, notes the time, and writes the time in the green notebook, left-handed, in a small, neat hand. Beside it, he writes 19. Beside that, he writes 2. Beside that, he writes, in slightly smaller letters,nil.He looks up. He looks specifically at Captain Brandt Kohler standing three feet behind him in the operations room, and Merrick holds out the notebook open at the page, so that the captain can read it.