"He's Finished" — The US Captain Who Mocked the SAS Veteran Minutes Before He Turned the Battle
Chapter 6
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At the far end of the courtyard, Halloran finished the rifle. He racked the working parts once, dry, listened to the sound they made, and set the weapon down across his knees. He looked up for the first time that morning, and his eyes went across the courtyard and found the captain in the gate, and stayed there for perhaps two seconds.The captain, who had shot men in the Korengal and who was not a coward, felt something happen in the small of his back that he did not have a word for. Halloran did not smile. He did not frown. He looked at the captain the way a farrier looks at a hoof he is about to trim—which is to say, with a professional interest that contained no personal component whatsoever—and then he looked away.The gun was loaded. It had been loaded since 9:13. The captain simply had not heard the bolt go home.The first blow landed at 10:41 in the morning, 72 minutes after the tea line, and it landed on a patch of loose gray scree on the eastern slope of the wadi that ran north from the forward operating base towards the compound.The plan, as briefed on the sand table, gave B Squadron four hours to move a four-man reconnaissance patrol from the base to an observation post 600 meters southeast of the compound wall. Kohler, whose task force was providing outer cordon and airstrip security, had convinced himself that four hours was, in his phrase, "generous." He had privately assessed that his own Rangers could have done it in two and a half, and he had said so to Hobley over coffee, and Hobley had said nothing.The patrol was Halloran, Prosser, Vane on his second job as a breacher, and a signaler whose name is not important. They stepped out of the wire at 10:09, went down into the wadi, and disappeared.The captain and Hobley, with Spate beside them, were up on the roof of the operations building with a pair of Swarovski spotting scopes and a good line of sight over the whole of the wadi's eastern slope. Kohler had positioned himself there specifically to watch the British move, because he wanted, he had told Hobley, to see how they did it.For the next 32 minutes, he saw nothing. He saw the wadi. He saw the scree. He saw a black kite riding a thermal above the ridgeline. He did not see four men.At 10:26, he asked Hobley, quite reasonably, whether the patrol had perhaps taken a different route. Hobley on the radio checked with the operations room and reported back that no, the patrol was on the briefed route and had just called in phase line Yellow—which was the base of the eastern slope, 400 meters away and directly in the captain's line of sight.The captain looked at the eastern slope. He put the Swarovski to his eye. He walked the scope from the base to the ridgeline in slow, disciplined sweeps. He did not see four men.