"Дон Пендлтон. The Violent Streets ("Палач" #41) " - читать интересную книгу автора

target. I believed that the disruption and destruction of their
cannibalistic operations was the highest goal I could aspire to. With time,
the "unwinnable" conflict resolved itself into something else, and I began
to see a dim light at the end of the tunnel. And there was a victory of
sorts, however temporary, but not before my war against the Mafia had gone
full circle and returned to the city, to the ground where it had begun.
This is a new war, against new enemies, but I cannot escape a sense of
deja vu. The circles keep on turning, and in time all the faces of the
predators and victims take on a similarity that is inescapable. I begin to
feel that I am fighting the old war all over again, this time dressed up in
a new disguise. The names of the enemies have changed, their addresses have
shifted, but down deep, where the soul rot takes root and consumes healthy
tissue, they remain the same.
Terrorism is the target this time out. But was it ever any different?
At its most basic, stripped of all the political and religious
window-dressing, terrorism is nothing more than a frontal assault upon the
safety and security of the individual, or of society. It violates with a
vengeance the most basic human rights of all: the rights to life and
personal security. In the final analysis, it matters little if the victims
of terrorism are held hostage in a foreign embassy, or cornered individually
in the darkness of an underground garage. The end result, the violation of
the person, is exactly the same.
It is that violation, that rape of the body and spirit, which we fight
against. The enemy is always the same. Only the battlefield changes.
Terrorism is a time-honored concept, employed in one way or another
since primal man learned to hide in the dark and leap out at unwary
neighbors with his club. It would be fundamentally inaccurate to think that
only certain groups, or particular segments of our population, perpetrate
the crime. Terror has no color, language or religion; it is a universal
constant, the writhing of a soul in fear and torment. At the bottom line,
terrorism can only exist at an individual level, one-on-one.
The Mafia was expert at this kind of personal, one-on-one terrorism
before its founding fathers stepped onto the dock at Ellis Island.
Generations before the Palestinians or South Moluccans turned to violence in
their different causes, homegrown terrorists were bleeding immigrant ghettos
in America and sending out their tentacles into the everyday world of
business and commerce. That terrorism was no less real, no less lethal, for
being stripped of pseudo-idealistic songs and slogans. The victims were
real, and the cost to America, in dollars and bloodshed, is undeniable by
any thinking being.
It was that local terrorism that I set out to combat in the old war. I
find now that I was only scratching at the surface, picking at a blemish
while the cancer grew in size and strength just below the surface.
And things do come full circle. Wherever I go, however far I range away
from the original battlefields of my own private war, the echoes of that
struggle call me back. The Mafia is like a fabled serpent, headless now, and
hacked into pieces, but like the Hydra, each piece seems determined to grow
a new head and put down deadly roots of its own. I expected that much when I
charted my last mile against the Outfit, but I had hoped that it would take
some time for the lethal new weeds to flower.