August Pearl
by
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CHAPTER 1
In the spring of 1968 two men walking across the campus of the
The two trench coat-clad men announced their representation of the government as loudly as if they were using bullhorns. Nevertheless, they kept walking in a determined manner along a popular student pathway leading from the main campus, past Observatory Hill, and in the direction of the student dormitories. At three in the afternoon this part of the campus was busy with students coming and going between classes. The two men in their late thirties contrasted vividly with the younger longhaired and unkemptly dressed students. They shrugged off the occasional sneer with an attitude of professional indifference.
I was one of the students who noticed the mysterious duo. I was walking in the same general direction on another pathway about forty yards to their right en route to my dorm after completing my last class of the day, physical geography. In another seventy-five yards or so their path and mine would merge before going through a wooded area just before the men’s dorms.
Only a few minutes earlier, before these two aliens from another galaxy caught my eye, I was casually strolling along thinking about graduation that was now only five weeks away. It had been a difficult four years of studying, but now it all seemed worthwhile. At twenty-two years old I would be graduating from college with a degree in psychology. But before seriously testing the job market or considering graduate school, I was going to reward myself by traveling in
I rationalized I had earned such an extravagant gift, not only by studying hard enough to graduate with honors and be on the Dean’s List, but also because I had worked full time the last three summers at a local paint factory in Madison, and then at another part time job during the school year delivering pizzas several nights a week. A nice, although frugal, vacation to
I increased my gait, wanting to be in front of the men before the two pathways merged in the event something happened, like them being hassled by a group of students or vice-versa. I had only a short time to get to my dorm, drop of my books and then catch a bus downtown for my pizza delivery job on
Even though geometry was a weak subject for me, my planned angle and speed along the converging paths worked. I was able to get a few yards in front of the two men when entering the same path leading to the wooded area. Now I could forget them as a distraction continue my more blissful daydreaming about graduation and the excitement of the planned trip to Europe as I walked the final quarter mile to Kronshage Hall.
I could see the front entrance to my dormitory, a stoic old stone building resembling a mutation between and ivy-league dorm and an asylum.
My roommate, Ken Waters, was just exiting the dorm and heading towards me with a bag of books over his shoulder. He was an engineering major and I knew he was off to the main library for an evening of statistics and logarithms. Not only did Ken like those kinds of things, but he took a certain sadistic comfort in knowing he would probably make a lot more money than me someday because of the long nights he spent memorizing formulas and charts. But he was a good friend and had been since we attended the dame high school together in upstate
As he approached Ken called out, “Hey Tim, are you working tonight?”
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About the Book
The world held its breath at the height of the Cold War in August of 1968 while the Soviets crossed into
At the same time the people of Czechoslovakia were beginning to see a glimmer of reform to a more democratic society, Tim Ryerson was also seeing his own personal freedom taking shape. He was about to graduate from the
During that same spring of 1968, amid campus demonstrations against the war in Vietnam and anything else that symbolized the “establishment,” Tim was openly approached by trench-coated government agents and recruited to perform a clandestine job for them during his planned travel in Europe. The mastermind for Tim’s involvement for the “routine” courier job turned out to be his mysterious uncle who Tim discovered was the CIA station chief in
The assignment was to be relatively simple: cross the guarded Czech border from
About the Author
Tom Reilly is one of those unique authors with the talent to write both fiction and nonfiction. Over the past thirty years he has been fortunate enough to gain rich experiences by traveling and working in over two dozen countries. His first-person writing style draws from his own true-life experiences, which makes his characters and settings come alive on the pages. August Pearl reads like an adventurous travelogue through Europe as his main character moves through country after country in a well choreographed series of clandestine meetings leading up to his involvement in a major international incident during the Cold War.
Reilly’s first book, Next of Kin: A Brother’s Journey to Wartime Vietnam (Potomac Books), a memoir about his quest to obtain answers surrounding his older brother’s death in