"Дон Пендлтон. Caribbean Kill ("Палач" #10) " - читать интересную книгу автора

Glass Bay would be no paradise for Mack Bolan. Nor, from this moment
on, for his enemies. A weird set of circumstances had brought Bolan to this
unlikely battleground of his war with the Mafia. The distance separating Las
Vegas and Puerto Rico had to be expressed in something more than mere
mileage; for most people, an entire world of ideas and purposes would be
required to bridge that distance. Bolan, however, had made the leap while
riding one idea and a single purpose.
The idea told it like it was: the mob is everywhere, into everything -
squeezing, gouging, clawing, manipulating and controlling wherever bucks
flowed freely - and, like it was , Puerto Rico and all the Caribbean
playlands were identical peas in the same pod that housed Las Vegas.
The single purpose of Mack Bolan's life was to stop the Mafia wherever
he found their leeching tentacles of influence - to jar their omnipotence,
to confound their brilliance at organization, and to rid the earth of their
oppressive weight. Others had failed in that purpose. The combined talents
of law-enforcement agencies the world over had been f ailing for longer than
Mack Bolan had been alive. Competitive syndicates and rival gangs had arisen
to challenge the awesome power of La Cosa Nostra , only to be immediately
snuffed out or absorbed by the invisible empire.
So what made a lone man, totally unsupported by anything other than his
own wits and will, think that he could succeed where so many others had
failed? Bolan himself did not consider such questions. In his own
understanding, he was technically dead already - a man doomed by his own
actions, by his own character. Victory meant living for one more day, and
carrying his war to the enemy one more time. There could be no personal
victory for Mack Bolan; this also he understood. His war with the Mafia had
been declared on such an unpromising note, and each battle of that conflict
was regarded as merely another step along his final mile of life.
It had all begun with five blasts of a Marlin .444, fired from an
office building onto the streets of the eastern U.S. city of Pittsfield, in
the ambush-execution of five local gangland figures.
Police authorities who investigated the slayings at first attributed
the deaths to an underworld purge. It was not unusual for competitive
criminal elements to engage in territorial disputes; the mass murder bore
all the earmarks of a gang war.
But then the physical evidence began forming an entirely different
picture. A local sports shop had been "burglarized" a few nights prior to
the killings. A Marlin big-game rifle and a deluxe scope were missing, along
with a supply of ammunition and a package of targets. A sum of money
sufficient to cover the unorthodox purchase was left behind, and the
shopkeeper had no complaints. He reported the incident to the police purely
"for the record."
On the day following, the watchman at an inactive rock quarry just
outside the city observed a tall young man in the act of test-firing and
adjusting "a big game rifle." The man was apparently "sighting-in" the
weapon and preparing trajectory graphs. The watchman saw no harm in these
activities and did not report the matter until news of the slayings had been
released.
The detective in charge of the homicide investigation recalled that a
young soldier on emergency furlough from Vietnam had, some days earlier,