"Дон Пендлтон. The Violent Streets ("Палач" #41) " - читать интересную книгу автора

enshrined as "the American way": a blueprint for life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness in a fair society.
Mack Bolan knew, however, that some Americans regarded this blueprint
cynically and selfishly, as a "free ride," an avenue toward their own evil
goals unhampered by official restraints - as a "picnic" where every lust is
easily sated, every desire freely fulfilled. For many people - even, sadly,
for some Americans - "freedom" means only that liberty found in jungle law.
From Bolan's journal: "These violent streets are not part of the
America envisioned by Jefferson and his colleagues. Those men saw government
as the largest potential threat to freedom. But how hollow is a freedom that
cannot guarantee our wives and mothers and daughters freedom from sexual
assault, that will not enforce the sanctity of the home and the protection
of hard-earned property? What comfort, then, is freedom - on savagely
violent streets? It's jungle comfort, John, and that's a hell of a bitter
epitaph for the home of the brave."
The last line in that quote was directed at himself - in his new
identity as John Phoenix, head of the government's covert-operations group.
One may only guess at the line of thought that prompted that cryptic
communique to the self. It was a line of thought born of the almost
unbearable stresses of his personal campaign against the Mafia, a campaign
itself born of his terrible years of war, and of his absence then from his
homeland while the country endured stresses of its own - the stresses of
great change and of renewed exposure to the predators of our jungle cities.
Mack Bolan, aka John Phoenix, has been at war now for years, but
freedom has not been secured. It would be foolish, insane, to imagine that
it could be otherwise. But certain freedoms, certain inviolable rights of
safety, should be possible and given at whatever the level of society, and
when it is those very basic rights that are violated - and violated upon the
person of Bolan's closest kin, or the kin of his closest friends and
allies - then the war takes on new heat new force, new dimensions of
strength, resilience... and attack.
Mack Bolan returned from Turkey seriously exhausted by the demands of
defending and maintaining personal freedom. But nothing, no possible
restriction of body and mind, could halt him in his response to a plea from
his friend Rosario Blancanales. It is in this response that the jungle
predators meet their match and comfort is at last taken from the criminal
and given back to its rightful recipient, the free citizen. Even Mack Bolan
knows, as well as his enemies, that in these times there is absolutely no
avoiding the Executioner.

1

The sleek Lear jet touched down lightly on the east-west runway of
Holman Field in St. Paul. Wind-blown rain streaked the plexiglas window
beside the single passenger, turning the world outside the aircraft into a
dark blur speckled with runway lights. Interior lighting reflected his frown
in the oval pane.
They had approached from the east, descending through one of those
Minnesota thunderstorms that always seem to reserve themselves for summer
and then invariably strike around midnight. It was after midnight now, and