Doom Prophecy. Don Pendleton

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      PROLOGUE

      The bridge was quiet and dark, in sharp contrast to the glittering San Francisco skyline to the south, reflecting off the Pacific Ocean like an orgy of fireflies. Cara Duong wasn’t afraid of the dark, or what lurked in it, not with the reassuring weight of the Colt 1911 in the waistband of her skirt. Her trench coat was drawn tightly around her as the chill breeze cut over the railroad trestle.

      The smell of the ocean was strong, but another scent dominated her memories. It was the scent of fresh blood, still vivid after decades. The unmistakable image of her mother’s bare white ribs sticking through her blood-spattered chest stabbed into Cara Duong’s gut and twisted like a murderer’s knife. She had been only nine years old, but already she’d known pain and loss.

      When she was only five, her father and teenage brother were slain during the 1968 Tet Offensive, killed in pitched battle against the American forces who sought to crush the Vietnamese dreams of independence and freedom from western oppression. Her mother told her constantly about the wretched whites and blacks who violated their country, who raped women and children and burned villages, deforesting jungles, turning paddies to poisoned muck with the corpses of their slain countrymen.

      Cara Duong hated Americans as a child, but that was because she had a good teacher. Her mother was as much a warrior as her father was. Mama Duong was ageless, able to look as old or young as she wanted to with only a little change of clothing and makeup. She snuck into the cities when she could, slaying American soldiers on leave who looked for a little “brown nookie.”

      Even today, the term filled her mouth with the acid taste of hateful bile. Duong trembled with rage, more than from the coolness of the northern California night.

      Her mother had taught her well, how to hate, how to despise. At age eight, Duong learned to shoot her first gun, a captured Colt 1911 just like the one she stuffed down into her skirt. It was locked and cocked, meaning that the hammer was all the way back, ready to fire, but the safety was on, keeping it from going off accidentally. Her mother was good with guns, but even better with knives.

      But all the skill in the world didn’t make a difference. Not with a dozen armed soldiers stalking through their village at night, hunting for insurgents. Mama Duong roused her fellow fighters to make a defense, laying a trap for the hunters.

      Cara Duong didn’t know if it was an itchy trigger finger, a frightened reflex, or plain impatience that fired the first shot, spoiling the ambush. All she knew was that when the first bullet exploded, the Americans returned fire.

      No. They returned more than fire. They returned the full unleashed wrath of hell. Grenades detonated and ripped huts asunder. Antitank rockets plowed through homes and reduced them to fluttering pieces of burning paper, everyone inside slaughtered and vaporized by the unholy fury of their blasts. Heavy machine guns ripped through the night, grunting like a herd of giant pigs, except these war pigs stampeded and churned human beings asunder.

      Mama Duong brought up her AK-47 and blasted three of the Americans before they could react. She kept her head and raced with her daughter around the back of the unit of soldiers. A single man spun and fired back, blazing away with a grenade launcher that threw Cara’s limp form to the ground, her flesh charred by the heat of the explosion. Her mother avoided most of the blast, and she opened fire on the man with the grenade launcher.

      Her shots had no effect. The man spun under the impact of a bullet through his upper arm, but he still held up his Colt Commando and blasted with his other hand.

      Cara, her back and shoulders burning, saw the face of the soldier who killed her mother, his features illuminated by the blazing fireball of the muzzle of his short-barreled assault rifle.

      That face was burned into her memory, the searing image forever tied to the state of her mother’s body, ripped apart and ruined by a hose of 5.56 mm slugs chopping into defenseless flesh. Unconsciousness claimed Cara moments after her mother flopped to the ground, her last thought being of a vow to kill the American who took away the last of her family.

      Headlights flashed at the other end of the trestle. Cara tensed, her eyes narrowing with concentration.

      He was coming.

      Cara Duong never thought she’d ever see the man again, but to have not known Lieutenant Governor Riddley Mott, the crusading politician who took California by storm, she’d need to have had her head buried in the ground like an ostrich. Riddley Mott, Vietnam veteran, war hero, Purple Heart recipient.

      Her mother’s murderer.

      The living symbol of the American forces who slaughtered her father and older brother.

      The man who destroyed the huts of the village of Troui, laying waste to her home, the home of her childhood friends.

      The medical men who treated her upon awakening said that she was one of eight survivors from the battle of Troui. It was a complete slaughter, with the Vietnamese fighters being killed to a man, the cross fire laying waste to entire families. Tears came to Cara’s eyes, but something darker came into her life, wrapping around the base of her heart, coiling black bloodlust, a desire for vengeance that roosted in her breast like a cancer.

      Now she had her chance. She was in spitting distance. Riddley Mott, the crusading politician, war hero, golden son of the California senatorial race, was no saint. With her computer skills, she’d managed to trace his bank account records, and found interesting sources of contributions, both public and private. Very few of them were a matter of record, and more than one of his contributors was listed under FBI surveillance.

      But the FBI didn’t know that these corruptors had their fingers in Mott’s pocket. They knew that money was being laundered somewhere, but only Duong had been able to track the cash through СКАЧАТЬ