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

two fronts. Misguided youngsters learned the craft of terror from
accomplished masters, and in the end they helped to stop us short of victory
abroad while wasting lives at home.
Most of the self-styled "urban guerillas" are gone now, tucked away in
prisons or sacrificed in the name of a cause they never really understood,
but a few of the survivors are still hanging in there, nurturing their
hatred, looking for an opportunity to turn it loose again. They can still
find their tutors and financiers among the savages.
Nguyen Van Minh provides them with an opportunity, and worse, he opens
up the door for a whole new generation of misguided terrorists. Appealing to
the homeless and the hopeless, plying them with drugs and revelations of a
false messiah, he has built himself a following with awesome destructive
potential. They are a time bomb ticking silently away, buried in the heart
of the society that nurtured them from birth.
And it could be the Vietcong all over again, sure. The jungle alone has
been changed, one battlefield exchanged for another - and the new one is
potentially more explosive than the last.
If the enemy is still the same, unchanging, so is the war.
Transplanted, certainly, but losing none of its destructiveness in transit.
If anything, the stakes are higher now than they were in Asia, the time
factor more compelling. The savages have found their beachhead and they are
among us now, not just sniping at our outposts halfway around the world.
There is no way to ignore them now in our land, no safety in sitting back
and hoping they will go away.
Ironically, it is the Bill of Rights that sheltered those dissenters at
the start, and that provides a cloak for Minh today. The document conceived
in war, designed for the perpetuation of our freedoms, has become a shield
for traitors and subversive wolves among the fold. There seems to be nothing
the authorities can do.
But there is something that I can do.
Only cleansing fire can reach the seed-germ of the plague and blot it
out; only 1 can purify the ground where poison drops and spreads.
We fight a holy war today. No matter what its name or theater of
action, at issue is the future of mankind. There is no ground for
compromise, no DMZ or sanctuaries for the enemy this time. Wherever he may
burrow in, it is our task to root him out, exterminate him like the savage
vermin that he is.
There is yet time for dedicated men to change the way things have
become, to snatch the victory away from tainted bloody hands. It will not be
a pretty job, or easy, but success at any cost is imperative if we are to
survive.
And there is no middle ground this time, no fence to straddle. The
surest victims of the terrorists are those who turn their backs and walk
away, refusing to recognize the threat.
Today, the war has brought me to the City by the Bay. For two bad
yesterdays, the war scene festered in far-off Libya. Tomorrow it will be
another battlefield, perhaps a thousand miles from either America or North
Africa. But home is where I make it, and before another battlefield, before
another enemy can be confronted, it is necessary to achieve the victory
here, now, in this place today, where Vietnam is still claiming its