"L'Amour, Louis - Last_of_the_Breed24" - читать интересную книгу автора (L'Amour Louis)

He was alone, and he was tired. Not physically tired, but tired of running, tired of hiding. The sky was a pale blue, the spruce a dark fringe, almost black against that sky. He stood, looking about him, wondering if it was here, in this far land, where he was to die.
What was he, anyway? Was he an Indian or a white man? And what difference did it make? His blood was Indian blood, but the world in which he lived was that of all men, having nothing to do with race or color. To exist is to adapt, and if one could not adapt, one died and made room for those who could. It was as simple as that. Beating one's fists against the walls did no good. It was an exercise in futility.
The terrorist lives for terror, not for the change he tells himself he wants. He masks his desire to kill and destroy behind the curtain of a cause. It is destruction he wants, not creation.
A political revolution always destroys more than it creates. It had taken the Soviet Union thirty years to rebuild what the revolution had destroyed, and the government that had resulted was no different. Only the names had changed, the names of the people as well as the institutions.
He was a Sioux, and for the Sioux as for most Indians war had been a way of life. More than one Indian had said that without war they could not exist. But it had been the same for the Vikings, whose very name stood for raiding and robbery. It had been no different for the Crusaders, who masked their lust for war under the banner of a holy cause.
When the Sioux had first encountered the white man, the white man was despised. He was a trader for fur. If he was any kind of man, why did he not trap his own fur?
His people had no way of gauging the power behind the westward movement or the white man's drive to own land, to live on the land. Only the first white men to come had been free rovers like the Indian; the rest had been settlers who came and built cabins, who plowed up the grass and planted corn.
Not until too late did the Indian realize what was happening to his country. He and many of the white men, too, bewailed the killing of the vast herds of buffalo, but where millions of buffalo roamed there were now farms that could feed half the world; there were hospitals, universities, and the homes of men.
He was a warrior of the old school. It was the life he had always wanted, the life he knew best, but he could still appreciate the changes that had taken place. Nothing ever remained the same; the one inexorable law was change.
Major Joseph Makatozi, once an athlete and flyer known as Joe Mack, walked down into the forest again, an Indian.
Thinking of what was to be or what should have been did no good now. To exist, to survive, to escape, these must be all his thought, all his wish, his only need.
This was not a war between the United States and the Soviet Union; it was a war between Colonel Arkady Zamatev and himself.
It was also a war with Alekhin, out there somewhere, searching for him and someday, somewhere, finding him.