"He's Finished" — The US Captain Who Mocked the SAS Veteran Minutes Before He Turned the Battle
Chapter 7
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At 10:34, the patrol called phase line Green, which was the top of the eastern slope—meaning they had crossed 250 meters of loose scree, the kind of scree that will roll under a boot and send a stone chattering down a slope for 30 seconds, without the captain, watching through a heavy Austrian optic on a stable roof at a range of 400 meters, being able to find them.He said at 10:35, "Fuck."He said it quietly. He said it, in fact, mostly to himself. But Spate heard him, and Hobley heard him. And Spate, who had in 2007 watched a similar thing happen from a similar rooftop with a similar Austrian optic, did the thing he had not done in the tent: he took the Swarovski gently from the captain's hands, set it on its own tripod, adjusted the focus by a hair, and said, "Sir, look at the fig tree. Three fingers left, halfway up."The captain looked. He saw, first, nothing. Then he saw a shape that was not a rock, and the shape was Halloran, prone at the top of the eastern slope in a fold of the ground that the captain had walked his scope across four times in the last half hour. Halloran was not moving. Halloran had, in fact, been not moving for approximately 11 minutes. Behind him, in a line that the captain could now, having found the first shape, resolve into three more shapes, were Prosser, Vane, and the signaler—each of them in a fold of the ground, each of them entirely still, and each of them exactly where the briefed route said they would be.They had crossed 250 meters of scree. The captain had not heard a stone move. The captain had not seen a man move. The patrol had done in 32 minutes what he had privately estimated they would need two and a half hours to do badly, and they had done it in front of him, at 400 meters, on a slope that would have betrayed a domestic cat.Kohler took the Swarovski back from Spate. He looked through it for another minute. He said nothing.Spate said, without looking at him, "The tea, sir. It's the tea that does it."He said it flat. He did not smile. He said it the way a man says a thing that is technically a joke, but is not in the moment being offered as one. And Hobley, standing on the captain's other side, made a sound that was not quite a cough.The captain heard the sound. He did not turn his head. He reached, without thinking about it, for the folded yellow chamois in his breast pocket, and he took his Oakleys off, and he cleaned them in slow, deliberate circles, and he set them back on his nose. His hands, Spate noticed, were not entirely steady.