"Doc Savage Adventure 1945-03 The Ten Ton Snakes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doc Savage Collection)
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
(Originally published in "Doc Savage Magazine" for March 1945. Bantam Books reprint December 1982.)
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BACK COVER
A war hero running for his life and a mysteriously heavy cargo of exotic snake skins send Doc and his crew racing into the steaming jungles of Brazil. There, the Man of Bronze unearths a bizarre secret buried for centuries - and battles a sinister force that marks him for instant execution!
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I
YOU ought to know about ribbons. The yellow one with the two red stripes is for China Service. The red ribbon with the pair of triple white stripe, good conduct. Purple with white ends, Purple Heart. Blue, red and white stripes, Distinguished Service Cross. Blue, yellow and red bands, the Yangtze Medal.
The years and the terrors of a man's life worn over his heart. This boy had all of these ribbons. Except the good-conduct one. He didn't have that one.
He was wearing them, too. They looked like a flag on his chest. Normally he didn't wear them; he carried them in his pocket, in a little teakwood velvet-lined case wonderfully made for him by a Karen in Burma. The boy felt very deeply about them, but he wouldn't have admitted it for anything. However, he wasn't exactly a boy.
He was over twenty-eight. Not old enough for that gray to belong in his hair. He was leathery and rangy and long-nosed and blue-eyed and he looked at you as if he owned you. That is a thing American soldiers are beginning to do, look at you as if they own you. And they do, in a way.
And now they were trying to kill him.
He was walking down Fifth Avenue. Looking. Looking at everything gladly and hungrily, as if he wanted to eat it. Looking at the legs of the girls walking on Fifth Avenue. Ogling the plaster-of-paris legs of the mannikins in the store windows. Going "woo-woo" at the girls walking by him on the street. He wanted to jump over the buildings, you could tell. He would get up on his toes and dance a step or two, and whirl completely around. Like a ballet dancer. As if God had given him wings.
MURDER.
It was a very carefully planned thing, this project of sudden death. It was getting the care that a murder deserves. The boy with the ribbons, the boy who was so glad that he was almost sick at his stomach, was going to be slain in cold blood. Cold blood - if anyone knows why they call it that.
It was hard to be sure how many men were going to help do it to him. Thousands of people were on Fifth Avenue, probably no more nor less than are there any days. The murderers were of the crowd, and like the crowd. Pointing them out would have been as difficult as picking four maggots who had had catfish for dinner from a basketful of other maggots who had had sunfish for dinner. Very difficult. They weren't doing anything to get fingers pointed at them.
Keeping track of the boy, was all. Waiting. But waiting has its end. Suspense can draw out just about so far, and then something must happen.
So one of the men walked up behind the boy with a long knife and started to put the blade in between the boy's third and fourth ribs where it would reach the boy's happy heart.
IT was a walk-up-and-stab murder, but the sun was shining gaily, making shadows. The sun made the shadow of the man with the knife on the sidewalk, and it looked like exactly what it was, a man with a knife. This the soldier saw.
The soldier did more than dodge. The army had spent a lot in time and patience teaching him what to do when someone tried to shoot, club or stab him. He did it. He did it so fast you could hardly see it.
Slam, slam. Too fast to follow, but the knife was spinning in the air and he who'd held it was on his back with teeth loose in his mouth and an awful feeling where he'd been kicked in the belly. It was an army bellykick, Commando stuff, intended to gut a man if possible. It was no fooling.
The man fell on the sidewalk. He might as well have been dead. He was noisy and he was hurting, but otherwise he might as well have been dead.
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