Instead of stepping out of the shadows and into his backyard, he turned away and moved deeper into the woods, cloaking himself in the darkness. With the clouds from the approaching front, even NVGs wouldn’t help the enemy if he concealed himself and waited for them to come to him. Unless they have thermals, in which case you’re screwed. Fuck it. You only live once. That’s what the kids say, right? If Steph heard him think like that, she’d be furious. There was life before Steph and the kids, and there was life with Steph and the kids. Fortunately for her, she had only been exposed to a glimpse of the former.

But his mindset was still the right one. He had to focus on the job at hand, not his family. It reminded him of a conversation he’d once had with a former Navy SEAL, a chief petty officer who’d retired after twenty years of service, the last fifteen with SEAL Team Four on the East Coast. They’d had dinner in DC—two former warriors exchanging stories over steaks, the rest of the diners unaware of the heroes in their midst. The conversation had turned to mental toughness, and his friend, Patrick, had put it in simple terms: “It’s really easy. We have a job. We train for it each and every day. And when we go out on a mission, that’s how we think of it—you just go and do your job. Pure and simple. You might get killed, you might get wounded, but all that matters is that you do your job, because you know your teammates are going to do theirs.”

If Patrick had been with him as he stalked through the trees, he would’ve said the same thing he had at dinner. Some truths never die.

Zack stopped moving and used the night-vision monocular, spotting the area he needed ten feet in front of him—a fallen tree that lay horizontally across the floor of the woods. Its three-foot-wide trunk had been shattered at the base by a bolt of lightning, and the tree had collapsed to the ground, where it lay dead, waiting for the forest to one day reclaim it with undergrowth and decay. But before that time arrived, it was the perfect place for a hide site where Zack could engage his enemy before being detected.

Halfway along the enormous tree lay a gap between the ground and the bottom of the trunk, elevated by a few microterrain features. Less than twelve inches high, the gap was enough for him to lie prone and observe the woods and his backyard, which gradually sloped down from him more than one hundred feet away. A slightly elevated position was better than no elevation at all.