"Evan Innes - America 2040 03 - City In The Mist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Innes Evan)

Jennie Hamilton had become a morning person since having left the turmoil and daily crises of her role as
AmericaтАЩs First Lady. Living now with her husband, ex-President Dexter Hamilton, in western North
Carolina, she liked to watch her peaceful, private world brighten before the sun burst over the mountain
to the east. On a morning when spring had definitely established itself against any vagrant urge by winter
to make one final assault, she clasped her coffee mug in both hands, sat sidesaddle on the railing of the
eastern balcony of a house she had come to love, and watched the glory of rhododendron blooms
emerge from the predawn darkness.

The house had been built by an industrialist of the old school, and it was shamefully extravagant in an age
when rat-pack cities sprinkled the nation like algae on a stagnant pond, ever growing. Behind her was
one of the few remaining wilderness areas and to the east an unbuildable, steep, seemingly bottomless
chasm and a sheer mountain. At night, however, the glow of light from the metro sprawl of Asheville
dimmed the stars.

Jennie did her best thinking in the early morning. The habit had grown from an inability to sleep, and then
it had become a curative process, which over a period of months began to soothe her resentment and
frustration about the way the so-called pundits and political writers had handled the retrospective
assessment of her husbandтАЩs presidency. It had all been rather terrible.

They were calling Dexter HamiltonтАЩs two terms in the White House the most disastrous eight years in
American history. Republicrats were blaming the growing isolation of the United States on Dexter, but in
view of recent events, more and more people were beginning to question the RepublicratsтАЩ attempt to
blame their failures on DexterтАЩs Conservative administration.

More and more common people in the overpopulated cities were beginning to remember that Dexter
Hamilton had at least made a stand. He had fought the Russians in South America, and he had destroyed
Soviet power in the Western Hemisphere, even if the victory had been pyrrhic, with crippling losses to
AmericaтАЩs air and sea power.

The people of the United States were frightened. The country was becoming an isolated island of
democracy in a hostile world. One by one the smaller nations of South and Central America had
deserted their alliances with the United States to cast their lot with fascist BrazilтАФa political giant equal to
the Soviet Union and the United States, with a nuclear arsenal comparable in destructive power to that of
either of the aging superpowers and a space program second to none.

For the first time in modern history, the United States was fighting a border war. Mexico was in turmoil,
torn between the last-surviving Communist party in the Americas and the Brazilian-backed nationalists.
The civil war spilled over the border with both right-wing and left-wing guerrilla groups bringing death
and terror from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific.

That situation could not be blamed on Dexter Hamilton. In a recent interview, he had stated, тАЬIt is time
for the Republicrat administration to mobilize the reserves and to establish law and order on our southern
border, even if it means we have to march all the way to Mexico City.тАЭ

Jennie and a precious few others knew that it was unfair to blame the uncontested, swift, and devastating
Russian conquest of Europe on the Hamilton administration, but the political writers were all in agreement
that if Hamilton had not forced the showdown in South America with the Russians, they would have been
content to leave Western Europe nominally freeтАж although the Western European countries had long