"Дон Пендлтон. Doomsday Disciples ("Палач" #49) " - читать интересную книгу автора

Hands were clutching, struggling to pin her arms, but she squirmed free
and raked her nails across a cheek, plowing bloody furrows. Her assailant
cursed bitterly, backing off a step. Suddenly a scarred fist blocked her
vision.
Pain and colored lights exploded in her skull. Amy felt her mouth
filling with salty blood as her legs turned to rubber. She fell, hard
linoleum rushed to meet her.
Drifting in and out of focus, floating in a painful darkness with a
ringing in her ears, Amy heard muffled, distant voices.
"Jesus, Benny... I think you mighta busted something."
"Tough. Look what she did to me."
"Hey, what the hell was she saying, anyway?"
"I dunno. Sounded like Daddy."
Cold, malicious laughter carried her into the darkness.

* * *

From Mack Bolan's journal:
I've heard it said that the more things change, the more they remain
the same. It is strange how endings and beginnings turn themselves around,
exchanging places, losing their distinctions. One door opens and another
closes.
When I left Vietnam, it was the closing of a chapter in my life, but
the story goes on. Instead of merely coming home, I found yet another front
in the war I had been fighting all along. Names changed, faces, too, and the
hellgrounds have a different set of longitudes and latitudes, but the
mission has not changed at all. It feels as if I never left the jungle.
It's like they say: you can take the savage out of the jungle, but you
can't take the jungle mentality out of the savage. You cannot reeducate a
cannibal to change his diet.
Times and people move on, but the basic motivations do not vary. Love,
hate, fear, greed, the hunger for power over other lives. Whatever may be
said about a new morality, the ageless standards of good and evil apply
today as ever. You do not erase the rules of play simply by changing the
name of the game
And the war I fight today in San Francisco is an ancient one, with its
roots in those Asian jungles half a world away. War Everlasting, right. Call
him Charlie or the Cong, or simply a red-cell reverend - the enemy has never
changed his stripes. His tactics and his goals are still the same, carved in
dung. He is a torturer and a corrupter, bent on savaging the meek before the
meek can come into their inheritance. The only answer to his damned
challenge is the same today as it was in that other chapter of the war: fire
and steel.
The Universal Devotees itself is traceable to Vietnam, not only through
Minh's presence and his leadership, but in the very atmosphere that gave it
life. The "Reverend" recruits his followers from a generation raised on
dissension and unanswered questions. The Haight was the cradle of a movement
to withdraw our troops from Nam at any price, a movement that began in
earnest and degenerated into anarchy. It is hard to fault that original
idealism, springing out of naive youth, but its culmination was a tragedy on