Bohemian Meadows
by
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Chapter 1
Alan tripped on something and pitched headlong, thrusting out his freezing hands, but it was too late.
Now he was face down in the shocking snow.
Shivering.
He shivered partly from the cold, but mostly from fear. Through a dervish flurry and white haze he saw a familiar huge electric fence, only a few yards from where he lay in the middle of a ridiculous international obscenity.
He was in the middle of a mine field.
He momentarily realized it. Lost in his own thoughts, he had left the Christmas party and stumbled across the Iron Curtain into communist
Nevertheless, he had done it. He had drunk too many Steinhagers. Being a little gin-foggy and bored, he had wandered out the door — to clear his head, he had said — and filled with private thoughts he had gone south, instead of north into town, and had all but delivered himself into the cold hands of an unforgiving enemy.
For some reason the wire he had tripped over did not ignite a rocket that would illuminate him nor a “Bouncing Betty” that would rip him apart.
He didn’t dare move. The slightest movement might send him into the next world. Besides, trying to retrace his steps would expose him and risk his being shot or captured.
In civilian clothes and unarmed — as U.S. Army intelligence agents must dress in this peace-time Cold War world — he would be taken for a spy. Interrogation was certain, torture and execution a possibility.
The Geneva Convention for the treatment of prisoners was reserved for soldiers. He didn’t look very soldierly in his civilian clothes.
He controlled his nerves and took measure of the situation.
The 20-foot, high-voltage barrier paralleled the border some 400 to 500 yards back from the border stones. It was the international burner on which so many had fried themselves while trying to flee the bleak eastern bloc. The fence, along with intermittent barbed wire, searchlights, and machine gun towers, marked
The exact line in the immediate area was a small stream, along which the border stones were planted. The sapling-dotted meadow between it and the fence, as well as the towers, was snow covered, hiding deadly mines.
As he hugged the undulating white ground, his white-flecked form still partially visible in falling snow, another terror surfaced. Coming from his left was a Czech patrol, moving along the far side of the fence line.
His spirit was in tatters and his stomach wrenching. He was teetering on the brink of panic. He risked burrowing into a snowy divot and tried to hug the sod beneath. He was as flat as he could get.
He waited, terrified.
Maybe if I stay motionless... maybe they won’t see me....
Alan was convinced his time had come. Then a vision of loveliness floated to him across the snow, through the swirling silver crystalline flakes. The face was not of his wife, but one that exuded radiance. It was a vision of his old girl friend, Sally, a devout Christian whom he now was convinced he was meant to marry.
She seemed to speak: Alan, I am with you. I will love you forever.
It was like a gift from heaven, a love so powerful it threatened his very existence. His hopes skyrocketed. What could the enemy do to him in the face of this?
Minutes passed — eons — but somehow, like forest ghosts, the snow-flecked brown phalanx of soldiers crunched past and were gone.
Alan looked about. He could faintly make out his footprints. Although the Czechs move them from time to time, the mines were still in place, as far as he knew. He needed to retrace his own steps exactly. One misstep and a mine could make him a human rocket.
No, he thought. Better wait until dark. Then those searchlights would come on, sweeping the area and increasing contrast and defining the prints more clearly.
However, by then the falling show might have obliterated the depressions completely. Moreover, there would be soldiers in the towers. He would be illuminated like a clay bird on a firing range.
No. He would move now.
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About the Book
After two years of military intelligence work, Alan Kopek had brought back the notion that his counterparts on the other side of the electric fence were not necessarily the enemy.
This shocking revelation came after a dozen strange adventures and encounters and just before he was to rotate home. In a West German-Czech border village Kopek met face to face a Communist agent who said not all Reds were barbarians. He judged that he and enemy agents were working to the same end.
This disquieting notion exacerbated his depression when he came home to find his marriage over, and the Christian woman he believed he was meant to marry dead.
Living in a small town on the rainy
That’s what Alan Kopek was entertaining when he was near alcoholic oblivion and applied to serve as a Christian missionary.
His proposed venture was outrageous. It wasn’t rational.
True, it would be a Christian mission, but almost suicidal – right into the viscera of the alleged Cold War enemy.
About the Author
Web Ruble – a retired newspaper reporter of some 40 years, book author, and church leader -- was serving in military intelligence in Europe in the late 1950s when he developed a shocking view: Agents, “on the other side” of the West German-Czech electric fence were working to the same end he was.
Exhausted by war and its aftermath, both sides similarly sought a peaceful society in which folk would be free to pursue their dreams. He decided the two sides simply had different approaches to achieving the same goal and that Red agents were not all uncaring savages.
After returning home to
Now much of his writing tries to recapture some of that wisdom he learned so long ago. Elements of it ebb freely from this book, Bohemian Meadows. It’s fiction but it incorporates some facets of Ruble’s life in
Web lives with is wife, Norma, in