"Дон Пендлтон. California Hit ("Палач" #11) " - читать интересную книгу автора

So, she'd taken off.
So, what the hell, it was her right. She owed Mack Bolan nothing, he
owed her nothing, and the quiet disappearance did not necessarily classify
her as one of the enemy.
Of course, though, it could.
A whole host of threatening possibilities were standing there at the
edge of Bolan's mind... Mary Ching could very well turn into the greatest
threat San Francisco had to offer him.
The only thing that he was certain of was that she had left of her own
will. She had not been dragged out of there. She had simply released the
safety chain, opened the door, and walked away. All the signs attested to
that.
But... had she left there as friend or enemy?
Either way, there was no good reason why he should continue his
residency of that Russian Hill apartment. It had served all his purposes,
and now it had quite suddenly become more of an ominous liability than an
asset.
And, as suddenly, Bolan was very tired. It was a weariness not of the
flesh, but of the inner man - and the inner man had just about had it.
It was that special brand of weariness often known by a man who is
called upon to stand too tall, for too long a time, and too utterly alone.
If there had just been someone else - anyone else - to whom he could
say, "Okay, that's it I've had it for now. You take over for awhile."
There was no one like that.
There was no hole deep enough to hide him for more than a brief moment,
no sanctuary to embrace him in safety from the largest manhunt in history -
there was no God damned place to go, except out to fight.
And Bolan was sick of the sight and smell of blood.
He was wearied with worrying about all the incidental non-combatants
who straggled across his battlefield.
And he was fed up with looking at every other human being as a
potential jackal who might rip the flesh off of him.
He was tired of mistrust and suspicion - humbled by the reminder that
he was just a man, after all - and thoroughly shaken by the idea that he had
an entire city to conquer... and not just any city but this particular city.
So... what the hell. It was just another jungle, after all, San
Francisco was.
The same rules applied in every jungle.
Kill that enemy son of a bitch, kill him now before he has a chance to
do it to you.
Bolan's stomach rolled, and he instinctively understood what was
happening to him. It was one of those defense mechanisms of the soul, one of
those alert little angels of the inner being that kept sounding the alarms
whenever the animal in there became too large, too strong, and too difficult
to handle.
It had happened before.
It would happen again... if he lived that long.
It was a point of crisis, he understood that, a crisis of the inner
man. But it wasn't a matter of fear or cowardice; it was simply a deep, deep