"Дон Пендлтон. Renegade Agent ("Палач" #47) " - читать интересную книгу автора

achieved the American Dream, in the only country in the world where that
dream could still become reality. Then he had turned about and sold out the
country, had turned the dream into nightmare.
Damned cold-eyed thing to do, alchemy in reverse, altogether of the
devil's empire, vile, malicious.
A prophecy of terror.
"Mack." Aaron Kurtzman's voice broke in. "Communication coming, NSC.
It's Hal."
Bolan caught April Rose's gaze, and this time there was no hint of a
smile. Communications from head fed Hal Brognola near dawn on a Sunday
morning meant only one thing.
In the rare and precious moments they could snatch together, April had
made her feelings clear to him.
She acknowledged her dedication to the responsibilities that that man
had willingly taken on, and confirmed it with her own lifetime commitment to
the same cause.
And yet, as she had told Mack Bolan, she was a woman and she was human.
Every time he stepped into that arena, she felt woefully incomplete until
his safe return.
April nodded slightly, as if in response to his thoughts, and broke the
eye contact. Bolan turned to Kurtzman. "Scramble it, Aaron, SOP."
"Already done."
"Thanks. Put it upon video."
"Give me a minute, Mack." Kurtzman went back to his keyboard. There was
more to Bolan's mood than the restlessness of inactivity, plus the anger at
a man's betrayal of the country that had given him every opportunity The
brief visit to Massachusetts had awakened other memories as well, memories
that Mack Bolan the man could never banish, would never wish to banish.
They were of a time when the wrong people were winning.
Strategists used to refer to a "domino theory" in discussing the Asian
war in which Bolan had fought.
But in a town in the shadows of the Berkshire Mountains of western
Massachusetts, other dominoes had fallen.
Bolan had seen his personal domino theory quite clearly: there was
still, back then, one domino left to fall. And it was he who tipped it over,
single-handedly wiping out the gluttonous criminal vipers who had been
directly responsible for his personal tragedy.
Earlier in the siege against the bloody Cosa Nostra, Bolan had become
aware that, like Vietnam, this would be a war of attrition. The strategy was
to annihilate the enemy, first as a means of neutralization, ultimately as a
means of destruction of the criminal edifice.
Bolan understood that the war of attrition was now, for John Phoenix, a
war of containment. He had no delusions about his own capabilities; Mack
Bolan, a.k.a. John Phoenix, was one man, and no one man was going to save a
vast impersonal world. But one man, sure, could aspire to fight to keep
corners of that world free and green, could push back the corrosive advance
of those who would replace freedom with fear, democracy with domination. The
Mafia was a clear and present evil, an entity motivated solely by greed, by
the dark side of the herding instinct, in which men mobbed up to commit evil
far beyond the capacities of themselves as individuals. Among the ranks of