"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 005 - Pirate of the Pacific" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

Both men snored as though asleep.

Doc retreated noiselessly down the second-floor corridor.
Liang-Sun droned words up from below. Receiving no answer from his two men, he mounted the stairs,
flanked by three guardsmen and a machine gunner.

The outburst of cries as the two unconscious men were found sounded like the clamor that comes when a
hawk flies into a flock of guineas.

A whispered consultation followed. Doc could not catch the words. The Orientals retreated to the lower
floor, apparently to consider the situation.

"What manner of thing could have overcome our brothers?" Liang-Sun repeated over and over.

Suddenly, at the opposite end of the house, came a terrific uproar. Furniture overturned. Men gasped,
cackled profanity.

"The bronze devil! He is here!" a man sang excitedly.

There was a loud clatter as the Mongols made for the noise.

Doc was puzzled. But it was too good a chance to pass up. He eased down a rear stairway, intent on
quitting the place.

The stairs he chose let him into the lower floor library, a room walled with bookcases and floored with
rich rugs.

The moment he stepped into it, he knew he had made a mistake. A dozen shadowy, slant-eyed men flung
upon him.

THE noise at the other end of the house had been a trick to draw him down from upstairs.

The first leaping Mongol seemed to meet a bronze wall in mid-air. He was hurled back, and was impaled
on the blunt sword of one who followed.

A second slant-eyed man got an open-handed slap that turned him over in the air like a Fourth-of-July
pinwheel. Another found himself grasped about the chest. He shrieked, and the piercing shrillness of his
voice was punctuated with the dull crack of breaking ribs.

The Mongols had not expected an easy fight. But they had not dreamed it would be like this. The giant
bronze man moved with a speed that defied the eye. Sword slashes, delivered point-blank, sliced thin air.
And when they did lay their hands on him, it was as if they had grasped living steel.

"He is not human!" wailed the man who had had his ribs broken.

More Orientals joined the fray. They blocked the doors. Flashlights came on. Time after time, light
beams found the bronze giant, only to lose him.

A machine gun opened up, making a deafening gobble of sound in the room.