After the Rain

Headlights off, a panel truck drives by moonlight across an open field, following tracks that have been there for decades ... Nina Pryce and her husband, Phil Broker, couldn't have more opposite views of the military. Broker's loyalty to the men he served with in Vietnam is matched only by his certainty that they shouldn't have been there in the first place. Nina, though, is a new breed, a decorated and ambitious vet of the first Gulf War. As Nina proceeds along her chosen career path, Broker -- until his recent "retirement," Minnesota's most effective, unorthodox, and controversial undercover cop -- finds himself struggling in the role of patient military spouse. The driver is a local entrepreneur taking advantage of a decades-old tradition of smuggling and bootlegging by crossing a border too vast and undermanned to be effectively patrolled ... Incommunicado for months as part of a top-secret Delta anti-terrorist operation, Nina, with daughter Kit in tow, suddenly emerges in Langdon, North Dakota, a town in the heart of the Cold War Minuteman II missile belt. When Broker arrives to take Kit back home, he realizes that the legacy of those warheads still casts a sinister shadow across the desolate north border country, in the person of a damaged psychopath. Somewhere in the middle of this empty field he will cross, undetected, from one side of the U.S.-Canada divide to the other. He and his cargo -- illegal cigars, whiskey, machine parts, or something much more terrifying -- thus slip undetected across the longest undefended border in the world. Broker discovers he's been drawn into an elaborate con within a con, made an unwitting participant in a black-bag anti-terrorist detail. But his anger toward Nina for involving him and putting their daughter at risk quickly fades as a larger, more deadly reality becomes evident. With time running out, husband and wife unite with local North Dakota law enforcement to form a last line of defense against a brilliantly simple act of espionage with potentially catastrophic consequences.Logan, Chuck is the author of 'After the Rain', published 2004 under ISBN 9780060570187 and ISBN 0060570180.