Nightstalkers (36 page)

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.

As Mac and Kirk went out the back golf cart garage, the rest of the team went out the front door.

Roland carried the football as he went to the middle of the road with Nada, Eagle, Moms, Emily, Scout, and Doc.

“Go for a long one,” Roland told Eagle.

Nada saw that the camera in the nearest corner of the house was panning over them, and as Eagle ran down the street, the one on the other corner tracked him. Roland let loose with a tight spiral and Eagle caught it.

“Traffic,” Moms called out.

The same BMW came rolling down the street and slowed, window rolling down.

“Hey, Doctor Carruthers!” Scout called out.

“Hey,” Roland waved. “Good to see you again.”

“Yeah.” Carruthers was looking at Nada and Eagle and Doc and it was just one ethnic group too many for him, here in Senators Club. “More relatives, Greer?”

“Oh, no,” Scout said. “My uncle George here is a football coach and these guys played for him years ago. They’re having a reunion.”

Carruthers focused on Roland as he heaved another bomb to Eagle.

“I’d take the over on my uncle George,” Scout said.

Carruthers nodded. “Hell of an arm.”

“The over?” Moms asked.

“Hey, Aunt Betty,” Carruthers said. He laughed. “Greer, have you been talking out of house about my hobby?”

Scout grinned mischievously. “My uncle might want to place some action with you later, if you’re up for it.”

Carruthers nodded. “As long as you vouch for him.”

He spotted Emily. “I know you, don’t I?”

“Not really,” Emily said. “But I’m around.”

A woman’s voice echoed down the street from three houses away. “Everything all right there?”

Carruthers leaned his head out the window. “Friends of Greer’s, Mrs. Jordanson. Everything’s fine.”

Mrs. Jordanson looked a bit doubtful, but went back into her house.

Roland walked over to the car and started talking football with Carruthers while Nada took a pass from Eagle. His earpiece crackled with Kirk’s voice.

“We’re in the tunnel.”

Mac led the way, searching for booby traps and trying to shake the sand out of his gear. The lights were off in the tunnel and he had his night-vision goggles on. His backpack was loaded with charges and Kirk brought up the rear, carrying the rest.

Twenty feet in, Mac halted. The tunnel might not be booby-trapped, but Forrenzo wasn’t stupid. Mac could see the unblinking red light of a video camera about forty feet ahead and a motion detector ten feet in front of it.

“We set that off,” Mac was pointing, “the lights go, and the camera sees us.”

“What do we do?” Kirk asked.

“I’ll disable it. You wait here.”

Mac put his pack down carefully, then went belly down on the floor of the tunnel and ever so slowly crept up on the motion detector.

Carruthers drove off, convinced he had Uncle George as another sucker willing to hand him money.

“Emily, take Scout inside and stay there. Things could get messy soon.”

Emily and Scout went back into the Winslow house, but took up positions near the front window, watching. The four Nightstalkers looked very out of place tossing a football around, but the cameras were watching them.

“You like Mac?” Scout asked.

“He’s nice,” Emily said.

Scout looked at Emily. “He’s cute.”

“He’s not what you think,” Emily said. “He pretends real well. No one else on the team sees it. And that matters not in the slightest. He’s a soldier. And he’s putting his life on the line.”

Scout nodded sagely. “They’re very good at what they do, but in terms of the things they don’t do, they’re not the sharpest knives in the drawers.”

Mac had the motion detector off-line in twelve seconds. It was hard working at close quarters using night-vision goggles and depth perception was off a bit, but he got it done. He walked back to Kirk and shrugged his backpack full of explosives back on. They moved down the tunnel, past the camera.