"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 072 - The Yellow Cloud" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

mount.

It had peeled hides, had that congressional investigation. It had wanted to know why there were only half a dozen or
so antiaircraft guns available to protect New York City, although there were plenty of soldiers riding around on horses,
the way King Arthur rode around in the fifth century.

England had multi-barreled anti-aircraft guns capable of firing several thousand shells a minuteтАФand England had
almost as many of those guns as the U.S.A. had soldiers.

America wasnтАЩt going to fight England, of course, in fact, it looked as if she was figuring on England to protect her. Or
figuring on somebody. It certainly didnтАЩt appear that she was thinking much about protecting herself.

Army, you better do something, was the word.

Europe was full of men who were trying to be Napoleon. There were even some in South America. The only thing that
impressed these burglars was the fact that you wore a pistol.

So the army wasnтАЩt fooling. For once, actually, it wasnтАЩt. It had even fired its publicity men, the boys who could take
two crack-pot tanks produced by a nut inventor, and send out enough pictures and ballyhoo baloney that some of the
U. S. A. really thought it had a mechanized army.

Army wasnтАЩt fooling, and it was testing the new X-ship, the new X-ship being a plane that was actually the kind of
plane they had been saying the previous ones were. It was a supership which could outfight and outfly by fifty per
cent the best plane of any other army in the world, and this was no press-agent slop.

To test-fly the X-ship, the army had called upon the greatest engineer in the army reserveтАФa man who was probably
also the second greatest engineer in the world.

Colonel John Renwick was this engineerтАФRenny Renwick, the man with the fists, and the IтАЩm-on-my-way-to-a-funeral
face.

The man who was associated with Doc Savage.



THE stage had been nicely set for a devil of a mystery, only nobody knew that as yet.

The X-ship was so good that the army really wanted to keep its performance a secret; so precautions had been taken.
The test was being held from a deserted sand-dune island on the North Carolina coast, and the one bridge leading to
the island was watched; while a motorboat floated around and around the island loaded with army officers dressed like
local fishermen.

It was to be a night hop.

The new X-ship was there, sitting on the hard sand beach, a creation of camouflaged metal that looked as stocky as a
bulldog and as vicious as a yellow hornet.

The snouts of nine machine guns poked out of various streamlined ports, her innards were full of racks for bombs, and
there was a high-powered a├лrial camera and a gigantic photo-flash contraption, so that the plane could take a night
picture of many square miles of enemy territory.