Emily looked worried. “You aren’t putting Greer in danger, are you? She’s a good kid, and there’s not many around here I can say that about.”
“Scout’s fine,” Moms said.
“She’s part of the team,” Roland added, which caused everyone, especially Mac, to look at him in surprise.
Roland held his hands up. “She’s, like, you know, uh, a mini-Moms.”
“Not sure I like that,” Moms said.
Nada brought them back to point. “What do you think, Mac?”
“Have you cut power to the house yet?” Mac asked.
Moms and Nada exchanged a glance. Moms looked at Kirk. “Get me Support.”
Three minutes later, power was off to the house. They waited for a bit, and then as a car rolled down the street, a camera followed it.
“Firefly,” Nada said.
“Or a generator,” Mac said. “They cut in automatically. Still, though, I go with Firefly.”
“Boots on the ground,” Nada said. “We have to go in.”
“It’s always boots on the ground,” Roland said, still excited about the idea of seeing the inside of an arms dealer’s house. Sort of like a gingerbread house to him.
Moms was looking back at her computer. “The owner, Forrenzo, has been on Interpol’s radar for a while. He was working out of Spain, but bolted before they could get to him. Three Interpol agents died getting into his house there and he wasn’t even around. And there was no Firefly involved. He went off the grid for eighteen months.”
“While his house got built here,” Nada said.
“Apparently,” Moms said.
“If the Firefly is in there,” Kirk said, “what do you think has happened to Forrenzo?”
“Let’s hope something very bad,” Moms said.
“I could HALO onto the roof,” Roland suggested. “Blast through, work my way down.”
“You always want to land on roofs,” Mac said. “Got a secret Santa fetish?”
Kirk was standing by the window, peering through his binoculars at the target. “You could die.”
“How so?” Nada asked, joining Kirk.
“See the chimney?” Kirk asked. “It’s not real. If this guy is that badass, he’s looking in every direction, including up. Professionals know to look up.”
“He had a Russian antiaircraft gun with a targeting radar on his roof in Spain,” Moms said, looking at the screen.
“Man, that’s cool,” Roland said, ignoring the fact that it would have killed him if he’d gotten his way.
“What?” Scout was way behind on the conversation, with her bag full of Creamsicles. She passed them out. Emily was standing in the background, just watching.
“A Firefly is in that house somewhere, and a Russian arms dealer with an Italian cover name built it and lives there,” Eagle summarized.
“I knew Bluebeard was weird,” Scout said.
“Use the FedEx truck,” Eagle suggested. “Pull right up, past the Claymores to the garage door. Ram through.”
“What if it’s rigged to blow?” Nada said.
Moms nodded. “Biggest worry ST-6 had taking down Bin Laden was whether he had a dead man’s switch on him. After all, he sent plenty of other people out there to suicide themselves while taking out others.”
“They’re homicide bombers,” Eagle said. “I hate when they call them suicide bombers. If they were suicide bombers, they’d go out into the middle of the desert and blow themselves up. Don’t take others with you.”
“We hit it from several directions at the same time,” Nada said, nodding at Eagle’s statement, but getting the team back on task. “Kirk takes out the chimney from here with a Javelin, while Roland does come in from above. Eagle in the FedEx truck through the garage with Mac in the rear with charges to destroy the house. I’ll come through the back. Kirk, you follow up Eagle once he secures the—”
“You could use the tunnel,” Scout said.
“—fuses for the Claymo—” Nada ground to a halt. “What tunnel?”
“Told you,” Scout said. She nibbled a piece off the end of her Creamsicle and made a face. “Ow. That hurts my head. Don’t know how you can do it,” she said to Moms.
“Told me what?” Nada said.
“This guy, Forrenzo, he’s, like, the, what do you call them, the meerkats? He built a getaway tunnel, so if someone comes in the roof or the garage or the front door, or all of the above, he can get out. I saw them build most of it one night. They put a tunnel in.” She walked over to the window and pointed. “The rear right corner. He has a golf course lot, like my folks do. The tunnel runs from that corner to the sand trap just short of the eighteenth hole.”
Everyone stared at her. “You saw them build this?” Mom asked. “How could he get away with it?”
“How did you get away with blowing up the eighth hole?” Scout asked. “I bet he paid off a lot more people than you guys are.”
“He wouldn’t booby-trap his escape route,” Nada said. “He’d have to get out fast.”
“So we can get in fast,” Kirk said.
Moms turned to Mac. “We can’t blow it up into a thousand pieces, because we won’t know exactly what piece the Firefly is in. Besides, it would muck up our concealment.”
“Implosion,” Mac said, staring at the house.
“How are we going to implode it?” Nada asked.
“Like they take down old skyscrapers and stadiums,” Mac said. “Blow up the internal support so it falls into itself. Also keeps dust and debris to a minimum so we can spot the Firefly dissipating.” He nodded at Scout. “I go in via the tunnel. Plant the charges and rig them in sequence.”
“No,” Moms said.
“It’s the last Firefly,” Mac said. He looked past them at Emily. “We take it out, we empty your golf cart. Party like it’s 1948.”
Emily was shaking her head, having no idea what they were talking about, but not buying into it for a moment.
“We’ve got containment,” Nada said. “Concealment, we do our best at. Mac’s right.”
“Mac’s wounded,” Moms said.
“I’m wounded,” Kirk said. “So I go with him. We’re expendable.”
“No one is expendable,” Moms said.
Ms. Jones’s voice came over the radio and Moms glared at Kirk, realizing he’d opened the channel back to the Ranch.
“Do not be angry with Mister Kirk,” Ms. Jones said. “You violated Protocol and I told him to keep the channel open. It seems the rules are changing. That is not necessarily a bad thing. I agree with Mister Mac. You will use the rest of the team to provide a diversion while they take down this last target.”
Moms opened her mouth to speak, but the click indicated the channel was closed at Ms. Jones’s end.
“All right,” Nada said. “The rest of us have to provide a diversion.”
“For a Firefly?” Eagle asked.
“It’s been watching us,” Nada said. “It’ll be diverted.” He looked at Moms. “What do you have in mind?”
Everyone turned to Moms, who regrouped quickly. “Football. I saw one in the garage.”
“No one plays football in the streets here,” Scout said.
“Exactly.”
Mac turned to Emily. “May we borrow your cart to get to the sand trap? Ours got busted up.”
She said nothing, but stood out of the entry to the mudroom and, beyond it, the garage. The rest of the team prepped their weapons and put them right inside the front double doors of the Winslow house. They changed into shorts and T-shirts. Mac and Kirk prepared the charges.
Moms got on the radio and, just in case, had the howitzer ready, loaded with an Excalibur round and five more on call. She called Support and made sure they had taken over the local fire department. Gas leak was going to be the reason Forrenzo’s house imploded. It wouldn’t pass muster with an expert, but Support had replaced all the experts.
Kirk went upstairs and propped the laser designator up and turned it on, aiming at the center of the house. Mac set up a Javelin in the garage behind one of the doors and gave Nada the remote for both the door and the Javelin.