"Дон Пендлтон. California Hit ("Палач" #11) " - читать интересную книгу автора

tent settlement of fortune hunters which was formally incorporated as the
city and county of San Francisco in 1850. From this unlikely collection of
miners, sailors, merchants, profiteers and prostitutes arose the queen city
of the American West, cultural and financial center of the Pacific Coast,
the grand old city beside the Golden Gate which now serves a metropolitan
area of more than three million people, annually moving five billion tons of
cargo through her seaport and fifteen million travelers through her
airspace.
Most of the city's blueblooded families would prefer to forget the wild
origins of the civic phenomena, once the port of entry for thousands of
Chinese coolies who were imported as virtual slaves to mine the precious
minerals and build the rail networks of the booming west; the bloody Barbary
Coast where the iron men from wooden ships buried their months of
ocean-going loneliness in a variety of pleasures. But hundreds of thousands
of World War II servicemen would forever remember that same Barbary Coast
with its roaring attractions of booze, broads, and brawls.
Less than a decade later, this same cultural spawning ground had become
the womb of another original American creation, the Beat Generation - and
the beatniks had hardly faded from view when a successive subculture, the
hippies, appeared on the scene and established their unofficial headquarters
in the big bawdy city at the Gate. And just across the bay, in Berkeley, the
political revolution of American youth was born, to be spilled out and
amplified in shock waves reaching throughout the nation.
And there was more to San Francisco. It was the city where the toughest
cops in the world had been forced to barricade themselves inside their own
police stations. It was the city where the most active hotbeds of Communism
outside the Iron Curtains tensely coexisted with the western U.S. seat of
Capitalism; the city where students wore crash helmets into classrooms; it
was the western capital of homosexuality as well as the cradle of
emancipated female eroticism - and it was still a city where a cabbie's
first question was never "where to?" but always "wanta get laid, buddy?"
Yeah, Bolan knew San Francisco.
It was a city of natural beauty, sure - what was it the moviemakers
called it? - the most photogenic city in the world? The fabulous hills and
vertical streets and spectacular bay views were a cinematographer's dream
come true. But there were "underground" views of equal interest to another
rapidly emerging variety of moviemaker - San Francisco was also the porno
movie capital of the country.
A city of interesting paradoxes, yes - and not the least of them was
its newest ingredient: Mack Bolan.
Educated to kill and trained to survive the savageries of jungle
combat, this American GI had returned from war to bury his own beloved
dead - the victims of another sort of savagery at home - and to declare a
war to the death upon "the greater enemy."
Bolan had earned fame in Southeast Asia as the Executioner. As a
penetration team specialist and sniper, he had been officially credited with
ninety-seven kills of enemy high-rankers, and he had been described by his
commanding officer as "a self-propelled combat machine, and a formidable
weapon of psychological warfare."
But in that same war zone, the young soldier was also known as