"He's Finished" — The US Captain Who Mocked the SAS Veteran Minutes Before He Turned the Battle
Chapter 4
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What he was in fact looking at was a courtyard in which 22 men were preparing for a hostage rescue in near-total silence.Halloran was sitting on an ammunition crate at the far end, stripping and reassembling the working parts of an L119A2—of the Regiment's variant of the Diemaco C8 rifle—without looking at what his hands were doing. He had done it perhaps 40,000 times. His hands moved the way another man's hands move on the steering wheel of a car he has driven for 20 years, with the specific, uninterested competence of a task that had ceased long ago to require thought. On the crate next to him was a suppressor, matte black, the paint worn silver along one edge. On the crate next to that was a Glock 17, decocked, magazine out, laid parallel to the rifle with the muzzle pointed at the wall. Everything on Halloran's crate was pointed at the wall; if you had put a level across it, it would have read true.Prosser, the 23-year-old trooper, was doing something the captain had literally never seen an American soldier do in a pre-mission window: he was reading a paperback. He was reading, specifically, a Penguin edition of A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman. And he was doing it because Halloran had told him four years earlier that if you could not sit with a poem for ten minutes before a job, then you were going to be no use to anyone in the first ten minutes on target. Prosser was on the poem about the lads that will die old, and his lips were not moving. His rifle was between his knees, muzzle down, one hand resting on the pistol grip in the way a father rests his hand on a child's shoulder.Doyle, the sniper pair lead, was on the roof of the vehicle bay with a spotter. Doyle was chewing the corner of his lower lip and reading the wind off a length of hessian tape someone had tied to the antenna of a Land Rover 15 meters away. He did the arithmetic in his head; he wrote nothing down. He would do the arithmetic again at 400 meters in three hours' time, and it would be right, and the round that came out of his rifle then would arrive at the sentry's temple at a velocity slightly below the speed of sound—because Doyle had chosen the load with that specific outcome in mind, so that the sentry's colleagues, 12 meters away in the courtyard of the compound, would not hear the report of the shot until well after they had failed to notice that the sentry had stopped standing.