Headed for Trouble - By Suzanne Brockmann Page 0,79

the reality of a war that was being fought on the other side of the world.

Arlene picked up her carry-on bag, but then she dropped it so that she could hug Jules, and then Jack, and then Maggie one more time.

And then Jules was holding out her bag for her. She slipped its strap over her shoulder as she gave her boarding pass to the woman and started down the ramp. But she turned as she walked, to look back, one last time.

Jack had his arm around Maggie, and Jules was standing solidly on her other side. “We’ll keep the home fires burning,” Jack called.

She nodded. “See you soon,” she said, and got on the plane.

EPILOGUE

Sgt. Arlene Schroeder Lloyd received an honorable discharge from the Army in February 2009. She, Jack, Maggie, and three-year-old Ian live in Needham, Massachusetts, in a small house where they are joined several times a year by Jack’s sons Luke and Joey.

Jack recently sold his first novel, and has found some significant acclaim as a political blogger for a popular online news site. Arlene works part-time at a little bookstore five minutes from their home.

They are happy, but life is not without turmoil. Especially ever since Mike Milton joined the Marines.

He currently serves in Afghanistan.

And Maggie emails him every day, without fail.

A SEAL AND THREE BABIES

March 2009

This story takes place several weeks after Hot Pursuit, and a month or so before Breaking the Rules.

CHAPTER ONE

The tiny country of Tarafashir

A narrow portable stairway had been pushed up against the commercial airliner, and the metal pinged and shuddered under Sam Starrett’s boots as he squeezed his way down to the airport runway. He had his son, Ash, in one arm, Ash’s diaper bag over his shoulder, and not just one but two car seats in the other hand.

They were bulky and awkward, and it was all about getting a good grip—and having large enough hands.

Robin and Jules Cassidy were right behind him, wrestling with the third car seat along with a variety of the group’s carry-on bags. Then Sam’s wife, Alyssa, muscled down the two strollers they’d need for this months-long adventure, followed by Max and Gina Bhagat, who carried their freakishly polite three-year-old daughter, and their eight-month-old high-decibel soliloquist son, who was still bewailing the entire traveling team’s frustration, discomfort, and bitter disappointment.

This little multifamily outing had quickly turned into a misadventure when their first flight was delayed—nearly six hours at the gate, and well over two on the tarmac, at J-Effing-K. As a result, they’d arrived in London at WTF o’clock, having missed their connecting flight, an event that had dominoed and created a need to take this latest several-hours-delayed flight which in turn had had a mild midair emergency with the electrical system, requiring that they land here, in the tiny country of Tarafashir, still a four-hour crapfest from their final destination.

Sam was well aware that there were definitely worse places to make an unplanned landing—Libya, Pakistan, Kazbekistan, to name a few. At least T-fashir was U.S.-friendly and safe, although mostly piss-poor. The government was a monarchy, and their leader a king who had, at one point, not just been a monk, but, according to legend, a stoner monk.

The country’s major exports in past decades had been marijuana and opium. And although there was a vaguely successful program in place in which farmers who replaced their crops with soybeans received sufficient food and medical care for their villages, it was clear to Sam, just from looking at the badly patched and pitted runway, that the also-promised modernization of the Tarafashir infrastructure had again been delayed.

Possibly because the entire country still had a raging case of the munchies.

“They’re holding our flight to Kabul. Gate one. It’s on the other side of the terminal,” Max Bhagat announced as he ended his phone call and slipped his cell into the pocket of his jeans before helping Gina juggle their two kids. Mikey, the eight-month-old, was usually as goofily, droolfully cheerful as Sam’s son, Ash.

Usually.

Today Mike had fussed and worried his way through the seemingly endless flight, needing all four parental hands to cope. His sister, Emma—age three-going-on-forty—had been safely tucked in between her Uncle Robin and Uncle Jules. Emma had played for a while with one-year-old Ash—who’d gone into pissed mode, no doubt at Mikey’s stellar example, and who had decided he wouldn’t even think about napping unless he sat on Uncle Robin’s lap—until he’d finally fallen unconscious. Ash, that is, not Robin. At which point Em