"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 290 - Death has Grey Eyes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

Timbers yielded under hacking sounds and Dick went sliding to the right
along with the caving floor, squarely into the arms of the crisp-faced doctor
and a pair of men in green. Greug's guttural exclamation carried a pleased
note
and before Dick realized it, he was being carried along a stone-walled passage
of rock.
Half-dazed by the bomb's concussion, Dick didn't hear the next blast that
must have obliterated the remainder of the building they had left. From then
on, the whole experience was a nightmare that outdid Dick's hazy recollections
of how he'd ever arrived in this vicinity.
Doctor Greug was climbing into a waiting automobile that already
contained
some occupants whose faces Dick couldn't distinguish. The car gave what looked
like a take-off as it bounded down a steep gully. From the window came Greug's
dismissing wave and the men in green started Dick along a mountain ledge that
overhung a vast ravine.
There were trees everywhere in the dusk except for jagged rocks and bare
slashes where the bombs had literally trampled down the forest. Then, reaching
a platform that overhung a precarious crag, Dick found himself being shoved
into a crazy, dangling contrivance that he mistook for one of the Ferris Wheel
cars that he remembered from Coney Island.
The men in green were with him and they were starting the thing across a
cable that faded into the blackness of a lower cliff on the other side of the
huge crevice. High above, the drone of bombing planes was dwindling into the
distance, but now Dick heard the jab of revolvers in his half-deafened
ear-drums.
As marksmen, Dick's companions were good yodelers, nothing more. Or maybe
they were shooting at an imaginary target. Certainly it was something stranger
than any human.
Following the aerial tram in its trip across the mountain gorge was a
cloaked figure, black against the grey cliff. Like a whirligig in a breeze it
was slithering down the slightly slanted cable, gripping it with upraised
hands!
In this haste for flight, Dick's companions were outdistancing this
intrepid pursuer and thereby making their bad aim worse. But there was a fresh
reason for their hurry. Toy-like bursts were punching the high rock that the
aerial tram had left; not bombs, but grenades, that sent sickening, singing
quavers along the cable. Men who formed tiny vengeful figures were throwing
them, in an effort to blast the cable from its moorings!
The car stopped with a hard jolt that pitched Dick and his hounded
bodyguards to the safety of the far platform. On his feet, Dick was being
rushed along another brink to a spot where the path turned between two
boulders.
With a last look across his shoulder, Dick sought sight of the cloaked
figure on the cable but failed to see him in the gorge's gloom. Friend or foe,
Dick hoped the amazing venturer had reached safety too. If he hadn't, he never
would, for a fierce whine from the darkness told that the cable had snapped
loose. From far away and below, came the tiny crash of the ill-fated aerial
car
as it reached wooded depths.