Thunder Running
The Homefront Trilogy
Rebecca Crowley
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by Rebecca Crowley
Opening Sample of Boots on the Ground
One
“I need to see your ID, ma’am.”
“Oh. Okay.” Tara had to unbuckle her seatbelt to grab her purse from where it’d fallen off the passenger seat. She dug past three mostly empty tubes of lip gloss, two boxes of Tic Tacs, several hair elastics and one tampon to retrieve her wallet. She plucked out her driver’s license and passed it to the Fort Preston gate guard through the Malibu’s open window.
He glanced at her license and didn’t hand it back. “What’s the purpose of your visit today, Miss Lambert?”
“I’m here to see Chance McKinley.”
“Who?”
“Chance McKinley,” she repeated, clamping down on the impatience that’d built up over the day’s long drive. “I think he’s a sergeant. He’s a medic with one of the units here—the one that came back from Afghanistan last month. Around the first week of September.”
One of the guard’s brows appeared above his aviator lenses. “We don’t have any admission authorizations from Sergeant McKinley on today’s list. Is he expecting you?”
“Sort of. I mean, he didn’t know I was coming today, but—”
“Then I’m afraid I can’t let you on post, ma’am.”
Tara’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel as she fought to keep a smile on her face. “Can’t you call him to ask? He knows who I am, I swear.”
“No, ma’am, but if you want, you can pull in right over there and call him yourself. Ask him to phone the post guard to let you in.”
“Great.” Shit. “Actually, I think he’s changed his number since he got home from Afghanistan. You can’t look up his new one for me, can you?”
The guard glanced at his colleague in the gatehouse, then passed her license back through the window. “Fort Preston is at FPCON Bravo today, ma’am. No unaccompanied civilians allowed on post. I’m gonna have to ask you to turn around.”
“Hang on,” she stalled, racking her brain for another way to get in. “Wait, forget Sergeant McKinley, I’m here to go to the, uh…” What was that weird thing she’d seen on the post website? “…the infantry museum. You know, the one with all the weapons and old uniforms?”
“Closed.” He drew a circle in the air. “Turn around.”
She crossed her arms. “This is government property, funded by my taxes. I paid for this gate, and I want to go through it.”
“This is a military installation with the right to restrict access. Now you turn this car around and drive away, and I won’t tell Sergeant McKinley’s commander that his girlfriend is causing trouble at the gate. Deal?”
“I’m not his girlfriend,” Tara muttered but turned the key in the ignition and put the Malibu into reverse. That she’d be denied entry to Fort Preston hadn’t occurred to her on the drive from Kansas City, but this was no time to be daunted. She’d drive back to Meridian and ask around. There couldn’t be more than one Chance McKinley in the state of Kansas, could there?
“I mean, who names their kid Chance?” she joked to the elderly woman behind the Registry of Deeds desk at the county courthouse forty minutes later, pleased with herself for rebounding from her denial at the fort and for the bright idea to try the public records office. “After all, Chance is a possibility, not a person, right?”
“I don’t rightly know,” the septuagenarian answered diplomatically. “The problem here is it’s quick to find the owner of an address but slow to find the address of a tenant. The search methods are different.”
“How long will it take?”
“Ten to fifteen working days.”
