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

brave philosophy. Its application had not changed in the intervening two
hundred years. Mack Bolan did not seek war, but like for certain being fired
upon, along with every other man and woman who cherished the freedoms that
those soldiers of the long ago had fought to establish. The enemy then was
the British Redcoats, whose ideologies were nationalism and empire. Today
the enemy was the international terror-mongers, incomparably worse, whose
ideologies, indefensible and altogether from another age, from now, were
enslavement, torture, death. In front of Bolan, the narrow deck of the old
North Bridge reached across the river. Here it had begun.
Here, on April 19, 1775, four hundred Minutemen had faced and repulsed
the hated Lobsterbacks. Dispirited, discouraged, hurting, the British
retreated toward the safety of Boston.
By the time they reached Meriam's Corner, a mile east of Concord, they
believed they had made it.
They sighed their relief, and thinking themselves secure once more,
marched on.
Instead they walked into a hellground.
Without warning the woods exploded. The flash of primer, heavy reports
of musketfire, made dense clouds of black powder smoke that drifted on the
still midday air.
Heavy .75-caliber lead balls tore through Redcoat flesh. White with
fear, hovering on the brink of wild-eyed panic, the British tried to return
fire but there was nothing to shoot at. The Minutemen had melted back into
the forest like specters.
Mack Bolan smiled grimly in the darkness.
He heard the boom of gunfire, saw the soldiers marching on through the
countryside, their red wool uniforms drenched with sweat despite the spring
coolness, terror marching at each man's right hand.
A tree, a house, a stone wall anything big enough to hide a man and a
musket could spell death.
Yeah, the Redcoats had learned the same lesson that Mack Bolan was
teaching the human predators of the twentieth century: how the icy touch of
dread really felt when the oppressor turned into the oppressed. The feel of
that bony finger along the spine.
And so began the American Revolution. In its parts it was a war like
any other war in warrior mankind's history, filled with pain and death,
heartache and futility. Yet from it arose a greater nation than had ever
before existed.
Those "embattled farmers" of the past, those citizen-soldiers, had not
asked for war. But when it became the only way to stand up for tneir rights
as free men, they did what must be done.
Mack Bolan could do no less than fight to preserve that same nation,
that idea, that kind of war.
He stood upon the hallowed ground and listened to the night-voices
speak of goodness and truth and independence, and he felt a kinship with the
past.
A night-voice whispered: "Good hunting, Brother." Bolan turned and
looked up to the Minuteman on his pedestal. Then he turned again and slipped
into the shadows, drawing the night around him like a protective cloak.
Also "Clear," Bolan said in a low voice.