"Дон Пендлтон. Continental Contract ("Палач" #5) " - читать интересную книгу автора

was charged with murder and hounded as a dangerous threat to that same
society. In that other war had been respites from combat, a reasonably safe
place to lay the head and rest the soul; in this new war were no places to
pause, no zones of safety, no sanctuaries for the man whose battlefield was
the entire world and whose enemies were both infinite and often invisible.
No, Mack Bolan was no superman, and none knew this better than himself.
Bolan was perhaps a bit too modest in his assessments of self, however.
He had received the tag "The Executioner'' by virtue of his unusual military
specialty in Vietnam. A sniper team sharpshooter, the young sergeant had
repeatedly penetrated hostile territories and strongholds, often spending
many days behind enemy lines on deep-penetration strikes against Viet Cong
terrorist leaders and officials. Steely nerves, precision tactics, and
remarkable self-sufficiency had spelled the difference for sniper Bolan, the
difference which had kept him alive and functioning through two full combat
tours in Southeast Asia and earned him the respect and admiration of
superiors and peers alike. But Sgt. Bolan had been much more than a sniper.
Executing an important defector or enemy field commander on his own soil
could be a ticklish business. Merely locating and identifying the target in
unfamiliar territory was challenge enough; to then make the strike, hang
around long enough to verify the success of the mission, and then to safely
withdraw through miles of aroused hostile country required considerable
personal resources.
Bolan had obviously possessed those resources. He had been regarded as
a highly valuable weapon of the psychological warfare being waged for the
soul of Vietnam. Now it appeared that Bolan, along with legions of other
young Americans, had lost his own soul in that conflict, a point which many
homefront moralizers were hastening to make. He had been editorialized as "a
government-trained mad dog," and lamented on the floor of the U.S. Senate as
"America's military sins coming home to roost."
All this was inconsequential to Mack Bolan. He had not expected medals
for his war at home. He would admit, even, that his initial strike against
the Mafia had been largely motivated by a desire for vengeance. His parents
and teen-aged sister had died violently as a result of Mafia terrorism and
the police had seemed helpless to do anything about it. Bolan had not been
helpless, and he had done something about it. He took his pound of flesh
from the Sergio Frenchi family and his sense of personal justice was
satisfied in the lightning strikes that left that Mafia arm in shambles.
Long before that first battle had ended, however, Mack Bolan came to realize
that he had entered into another war without end. The mob would not, could
not hold still for that sort of treatment. The entire premise for their
survival was based on the idea of their invincibility and omnipresence in
the American society. They had to crush Bolan and run his head up their pole
for all to see and beware.
Bolan's war thus became a holy war, good versus evil, and he clung to
this battle philosophy as his only buttress against a disapproving society.
And as the war waged on, from front to successive front, his growing
familiarity with the syndicate served to intensify this certain feeling that
he was fighting the most vicious enemy to ever threaten his nation. The mob
was everywhere, in everything, controlling, manipulating, corrupting,
wielding an influence such as no political party had ever dared dream.