Title: Of Our Own Device
Author: M.K. South
Publisher: BookBaby
Release Date: March 2017
Length: 874 pages
Genre: Thriller/Suspense, Historical spy thriller
Add to Goodreads
Synopsis
What do you do when you realize that the American Dream you’ve been working for so hard is not enough if it will be yours and yours alone? And that what you’re told to do will destroy the only true friend you’ve ever had?
Summer of 1985. Jack Smith is a rookie CIA case officer posted at the American Embassy in Moscow. Despite his gregarious nature, Jack is a lonely man: not only is he a reluctant spy, he is also gay. When he meets Eton Volkonsky, a talented nuclear physics student, Jack’s bosses instruct him to develop the Russian as a future agent. Their friendship deepens, and Jack is torn between his suspicion that Eton and friends are with the KGB and his attraction to the man. But he continues telling himself and his bosses that he is just doing his job, developing his agent. Only when he leaves Russia does Jack admit that he has been fooling himself all the while. He takes on assignments in various countries, with a hope that eventually they will get him back to Moscow.
As introspection and growing doubts about what he does for living torment Jack, the world is buffeted by a whirlwind of dramatic events – diplomatic and spy wars, the rise of AIDS, the Chernobyl catastrophe, the war in Afghanistan and the disintegration of the communist bloc.
They meet again and Jack is given a second chance. Will he make the right decision this time round?
Hello! It’s me, MK South, again. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to stop by and share yet another excerpt from my novel Of Our Own Device. This one takes place in East Berlin on the 40th anniversary of German Democratic Republic and everything you’ll read here is factually accurate – well, everything besides our protagonist, Jack Smith, being there and then and what happened to him on that day… But then who knows, maybe he was there. (Btw, you can tell the same thing about the whole book – you can check up on any event on any day by just googling it 😉)
Hope you’ll enjoy this fragment of the story and will decide that you want to read the rest of it 😊.
Enjoy!
The hazards of the craft.
The crackdown came without warning. Within minutes, the column of demonstrators was rounded up by throngs of Volkspolizei linking arms, cutting off both ends of the wide avenue. Then police trucks moved in, some of them with oversized mesh screens in front painted in red and white chevrons—to herd crowds off the way, as it turned out later. Troops of uniformed police barged into the procession, driving it against the buildings on one side of the street. Plain-clothed men began grabbing and pulling those walking at the front towards the trucks with now opened tailgates. The crowd first pushed back, shouting “Vopos out! Stasi out!”, then fought back, and before long, the street erupted in violence.
Jack dodged the first wave of Vopos and started retreating towards Marienkirche, the shutter of his camera firing like a machine gun. It wasn’t probably such a good idea, because when he reached the old church, three young men in black leather jackets stepped out of the dark. They look no different from the young demonstrators Jack had talked to earlier, but he recognized one of them. Black haired and mustached, he was one of Jack’s regular tails in Leipzig and Dresden. He was carrying a baton.
Jack stopped and raised his hands, palms forward, smiling amiably. “Kameraden, I’m a foreign journalist,” he said in German and raised his correspondent tag. “Here’s my ID.”
The three plain-clothes continue closing in on him silently, spanning out, surrounding him as they got nearer.
Shit, this was not good. You didn’t want to be caught alone in this sort of situation, every reporter knew that. Now he regretted not accepting Paul’s invitation to join him and his friend from The Daily Telegraph.
“I’m an American journalist, guys,” he said in English, then repeated it louder, in German, glancing quickly around. There was no one else nearby. He began backing off toward the main street. “Guys, guys, let’s be civilized, okay? I give you my camera and we part ways amiably. Okay?” Jack took the camera off his neck and offered it to the Stasis.
His Leipzig minder reached him first. Without preamble, he struck at the camera with the baton, kicking it out of Jack’s hands, smashing it to pieces. Another one grabbed at Jack’s tag, snatched it and hurled it into the melee on the street.
The attack threw Jack completely off guard. He had assumed they had seen him shooting the crackdown and were after his camera, that they would only frisk him, rough him up a little. But not this. This was totally—
The blow would have caught Jack on the side of his head, hadn’t his trained instincts kicked in. He ducked, raised both arms to cover his head, and the baton struck his shoulder. “Ow! What are you doing?!” he yelled. “You have no right! I’m an American citizen and I didn’t break any law!”
They had obviously known that already. Two of the attackers grabbed Jack by the arms, holding him in place, while the third relieved him of his wallet, his swatch, his backpack and sent them flying into the middle of the crowd that was scuffling with the police. Now Jack had nothing on him to prove he was an American journalist.
They began to hit him.
He could easily wrestle out of their hands and even rough the three of them up in return. But by doing so he would have revealed his combat skills and raise questions about him. So he let them topple him to the ground, trying his best to protect his head and front from their vicious blows.
However, when they lifted him up and manhandled him towards the truck, Jack panicked.
Fuck, no! They could beat him all they wanted but they mustn’t detain him! Even if they didn’t know he was a CIA officer, if he spent even an hour at the Stasi’s quarters, the Company would recall him, and God knew how long the post-arrest debrief at HQ would last. He couldn’t let it happen. Not now!
Jack wrenched off the hands of the two Stasis holding him, shoved them aside and set off towards the river. But he hadn’t made half a dozen steps when something hit him on the back. He blacked out for a second, then fell heavily on the ground, stunned and disoriented, all his muscles contracting wildly.
The next thing he knew he was being shoved into the back of a police truck together with several demonstrators. The Germans watched him sprawling on the bed of the truck, their eyes sympathetic, but nobody dared to help.
Jack dragged himself up and slumped at the end of the bench near the tailgate, his hands and legs still shaking uncontrollably. “How could this happen? How could you let this happen, Smith?!” was all his brain could muster up.
As the truck took off along Spandauer Strasse, Jack caught the eyes of a man under a street lamp behind the police cordon. He was smartly dressed, his hair neatly combed and shining, as though heading to Palast of Republik for the party. His mind still hazy, Jack mechanically registered that the man held his eyes and nodded to him furtively. When he came to senses from what he suspected had been an electroshock, he prayed to all gods that the man was his surveillance detection support.
Purchase at Amazon
M.K. South has worked in international finance and development for over 25 years, living in or traveling to many countries including the ones featured in this debut novel. Currently, M.K. works in Ukraine and continues globetrotting, for work and to experience the world.
“I was born a vagabond,” says M.K., “in a snow-clad little place thousands miles way from the sun-drenched city on the Black Sea my mother called home. I then lived, studied and worked in other countries, poor, aspiring and rich. I’ve experienced poverty and war, as well as peace and prosperity, and I’ve learned that you don’t fully appreciate the latter, unless you’ve known the former. Today, I’m still living in a foreign country, working in several others in the region, and traveling yet to others because… I just can’t get wanderlust out of my DNA.”
Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads | eMail
11/1 Valerie Ullmer | Romance Author
11/2 I Love Books and Stuff Blog
11/3 Dog-Eared Daydreams
11/4 Diverse Reader
11/5 BFD Book Blog
11/6 Love Bytes
11/7 MM Good Book Reviews
11/9 Bayou Book Junkie
11/10 Books, Tattoos and Tea
11/11 Joyfully Jay
