You’ve got to be kidding. I’ll give him credit for that, Zack thought. Before the man could go any farther, Zack leapt forward and launched himself into the air. As he passed over the wounded gunman, who was now on his hands and knees, Zack slipped his left arm under the man’s chin and around his neck. His right hand locked under his left wrist as it crossed in front of the man’s neck, and Zack pulled hard. His momentum and strength yanked the man off his hands and knees, and Zack landed on the ground with the man lying on top of him, staring up at the black sky.

Zack locked his legs around his waist, immobilized him, and pulled his left arm tighter, ensuring his arm constricted on the man’s carotid artery. The man tried to struggle, but his efforts were weak, and within fifteen seconds, he was unconscious in Zack’s arms. Night night, sweetheart.

Zack pushed him off, and the man fell onto his face in the grass. Zack pulled out another zip-tie he’d taken from Jimmy, grabbed the man’s arms, and put them behind him. Within seconds, he had his opponent incapacitated and secured. At least you didn’t kill him, not that you didn’t try.

Zack was comfortable with the body count he’d inflicted on the enemy force that had invaded his neighborhood and murdered an elderly man. Whoever Barrett Connolly was working for hadn’t done their homework or they’d have realized that Zack Chambers was a resident. And then, well, they might have acted differently, at least removing him from the playing field before they started. But they hadn’t, and Zack was showing them that, as throughout history, one well-trained individual with enough resources and willpower could shape an entire battlefield. He thought of Vasily Zaitsev, the legendary Russian sniper who killed more than three hundred Nazis at the Battle of Stalingrad. More recently, there’d been the Marine Corps legend Carlos Hathcock in Vietnam and Chris Kyle, the murdered Navy SEAL, in Iraq. While they were long-range gunmen, it was the psychological damage that they had inflicted on the enemy that was valuable in war. And while Zack wasn’t a schoolhouse-trained scout sniper in the military, he was waging a personal war and removing enemy combatants from the suburban battlefield one at a time. If he kept it up and didn’t get himself killed, the enemy would have to consider abandoning their plans. I guess they forgot that a hostile force requires a seven-to-one ratio when trying to take an urban area. While he wasn’t a math genius, he was fairly certain that ratio no longer held. There wasn’t an endless supply of former military contract killers, even in Virginia.