The Violent Streets (te-4) by Don Pendleton

Author:Don Pendleton [Pendleton, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: det_action
ISBN: 0373610416
Publisher: Gold Eagle
Published: 1982-03-19T05:00:00+00:00

12

From the journal of John Phoenix:

We live in a cyclical universe. It seems that everything repeats itself, and comes full circle given time. I know that to be true of life and death, love and hate. I am finding out that it is also true of war. Nothing stays the same in life or war, but in the end, nothing changes.

At one time, during one existence, the Mafia was my enemy and primary 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.

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