"He's Finished" — The US Captain Who Mocked the SAS Veteran Minutes Before He Turned the Battle
Chapter 16
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Prosser was next. The Housman was still in his belt kit. He was 23 years old, and he had killed a man behind a fig tree at nine meters that morning, and he would read the Housman on the aircraft on the way back. And the captain, watching him walk past, understood without being able to say it that he had, at some point in the last four hours, become an older man than Wynne Prosser, without any of the accompanying seniority.Vane walked past with the Glock on his thigh, and the rifle across his chest, and a length of unused detonation cord still looped through a keeper on his belt kit. He looked at the captain exactly once, for less than a second, and looked away—and it was not a hostile look. It was worse: an incurious one.Doyle came off the ridge later, alone, with the L115A3 across his back, and the corner of his lower lip red where he had been chewing it. He did not walk past the airstrip; he did not need to. His audience for the day was three men on a wall at 430 meters, and they were all four of them, including the fourth one he had ended at 11:49, dead.The two hostages were the last across the airstrip. Bruun, the Danish medic, walked past the captain with the cut above her eye now dressed, and her right hand on the shoulder of the British engineer, who was younger than she was and shaking slightly. And she said to Halloran, and not to Kohler, in English, "Thank you."Halloran said, "Ma'am."The captain was standing at the edge of the airstrip. He had, at some point in the last 30 seconds, taken the folded yellow chamois out of his breast pocket. He was holding it in his right hand. He was not, this time, cleaning his glasses with it; he was, in fact, looking at it as if he had forgotten what it was for. Then he folded it once and put it back in his pocket.Spate, ten meters away, walked over to him. He walked the way an old sergeant walks up to a young officer who has just learned something. He stopped one pace short of the captain. He did not put a hand on his shoulder—he would not do that.He said quietly, "He's finished you, sir."That was the sentence. That was the one Spate had been holding since the tent. He did not clarify who he was. He did not need to. The captain knew.Kohler said, "Yes."He did not say anything else; there was nothing else to say.The Chinook at the far end of the strip was running its rotors up, and the men Brandt Kohler had called amateurs at 9:13 that morning were walking on board it in single file, and he was standing at the edge of the strip watching them, and the number in Merrick's green notebook was not one he could argue with, and he did not try.