The Last Assignment

Jack Lasky is a smart young Montana engineer who out of curiosity begins a job for the FBI in New York City. He meets a beautiful Arizona transplant physician, Miranda Laughlin and convenes her to marry him. Tired of chasing after corrupt New York City officials he gets the opportunity to move away from the city to an offshore paradise. He works undercover doing boat deliveries and helps his wife with her catering business flying her plane from the mainland to wealthy island clients delivering for holidays, fancy house parties and the occasional threatening weather scares. When a storm drives Lasky off course and lands him at the wrong end of a drug lord's island, he disappears. Miranda who has been trained to never ask about his assignments has no idea who controls Sevilla. But after a month and no word she is frantic with worry and accepts a catering job on the same island where her husband was last seen.
She enlists the help of a local bartender to fly with her to Emilio Segura's daughter's house party where unknowingly she flies them into a drug underworld.

When the Turks invaded the island of Cyprus, ABC News Network out of Peter Jenning's Beirut bureau in Lebanon, sent Reed and her husband, formerly the New York Times bureau chief for the Middle East to deliver a Russian television crew from Beirut to Cyprus. The Turkish Navy had surrounded Cyprus, so the size of the boat needed to pass under the radar of the blockade. Because the Turks had burned all the boats in the Cypriot Greek shipwright's yard, (including Reed and her husband's 38 foot wooden yawl) yacht owners in Beirut were concerned about leasing their boats for fear of the war ravaging their property. The only available boat was a risky motor sailor(sail and power). Leaving at night and once at sea, the old boat required 106 handpumps every half hour just to stay afloat. They sailed under the Turkish radar and successfully made landfall at Larnaca, Cyprus. The British were ferrying their own people off Cyprus despite their constitutional contract to the Cypriots, leaving the Cypriot islanders to their fate.
During the years of sailing seven oceans together on their 41 foot, 38-year old wooden yawl, Reed and her husband helped other small boat owners transit the Panama Canal. On blue water trips in the Caribbean their boat was boarded by Pirates, weathered hurricanes, rescued people and animals at sea.
Reed learned to supply and cook onboard for nine young international sailors crossing from the Mediterranean sea to Antiqua for the winter charter season. They sailed aboard Stormvogel a 76' fiberglass South African owned yacht that had recently won every major ocean race. Although Reed was not onboard for the racing, she continued ocean crossings with her husband on their own boat with only a small ice chest and sixty gallons of gas. (for use only in emergencies when being blown onto a rocky shore)
Reed conducted investigative research for authors and journalists, interviewed such luminaries as Ronald Reagan, the chief judge of Lebanon, Emil Abu Keir, and Muhammed Ali for three hours in Cairo for ABC radio. She anchored a television news show on camera for a CBS outstation in Monterey California. During the pandemic she ran a catering business for elderly Santa Feans.
She has written short stories, a play, a novel and is currently finishing a biography on Anna Ella Carroll, the silent member of Lincoln's cabinet. After seven months of failed victories for the north, Carroll was the first United States citizen to devise and deliver the Tennessee River campaign Plan to President Abraham Lincoln. Attorney General Bates and War Secretary Stanton both realized and encouraged the President to implement Carroll's complete war plan but the jealous generals warring against each other for credit, delayed all but the most rudimentary principals and barely winning the first major victories for the North. Their rivalry and greed for credit extended the Civil War by two years.
Although women were unable to become fully recognized lawyers in the early and mid 19c. century, Carroll was considered by the great minds of the cabinet, a constitutional scholar who also wrote books and newspaper articles under a man's name. After Lincoln and Attorney General Bates commissioned 50,000 copies of Carroll's Reply to the traitorous young southern Senator, Robert C. Breckenridge's departing speech in the Senate, she was then commissioned by the White House to write a pamphlet on the Powers of the President during wartime. To this day only two Civil War scholars have acknowledged Carroll's Plan that "broke the back" of the southern Confederacy.
Once an avid dressage rider, Reed plays lots of tennis and walks her pack of dogs in the beautiful mountains of Santa Fe, New Mexico