"ArkCovenantPart1" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacClure Victor)

I had a large-sized affection for my sometimes irascible sire, and I turned my
attention to getting all I could out of the old bus for him. We flattened out to
a nifty two hundred and fifty kilometres the hour.
I hadn't wasted any of the old man's time by asking him questions, but I'll
confess that the robbery of the bank had roused in me a lively curiosity. The
roar of the unsilenced engine put all conversation clean out of possibility, and
I did not want to have him unwrap in that cold rush of air to put on the
headpiece of the phone. So I had to keep mumchance and speculate about the
affair.
There was enough material for speculation. The premises of the National
Metallurgical, of which my father was president, were generally believed to be
absolutely burglar-proof. The building on Broadway was comparatively new. Its
safes and strongrooms were supposed to be the last word in appliances for the
thwarting of cracksmen, and the president was immensely proud of them.
Altogether, I came to the conclusion that this sudden flight towards the Battery
and Wall Street was the result of some swindle by a forger or by a dishonest
official, rather than of burglary. I knew it must have been something big to put
the old man in such a hurry, but I was far from realizing then, with the old
Sieve flattened out and roaring above the misty trees of Long Island, just how
big a thing I was headed for. My father has since admitted that at the time his
conception, too, of what the future held, came little nearer the truth than my
own.
I must explain at this point in my story that what I write in the following
pages can only be a personal version of a bewildering run of events that have
since become history. I had the luck to be close to many of these happenings
from the start--as the world saw it--and also to be in at the death. This must
be my excuse, if any is needed, for trying to put together a connected story of
what befell in a quick-moving and epoch-making period of six months. Nobody will
deny that for this space the world was badly scared, and, now that the terror is
past, and everybody breathes freely again, I can do no harm by telling what I
know.
I may even do a little good. The flight with my father that chilly Monday
morning in March was the beginning of my participation in a conflict that for
clash of intellect, mystery, romance. and far-reaching consequences has made the
World War of 1914-18 look by comparison like a rough-and-tumble in a back
street.
As we droned along above the island, I had little but my thoughts to occupy me.
The seaplane was behaving splendidly, and I had none of the trouble I had
expected with her if I leave out a little manoeuvering that came when we hit a
pocket in the air. In about twenty-five minutes the Woolworth Building loomed up
on the horizon, dead ahead, and I swung a point or two south, so that its shape
fell on the starboard bow. Next minute I had circled and was dropping northerly
into the upper New York Bay, with Battery Park in front. Under forty minutes
after my father had wakened me I was landing with him at the seaplane jetty west
of the park.
There was quite a fleet of planes round the landing-stage, mostly the
bronze-painted machines of the water division of the Air Police; speedy,
sinister things they were, but trim enough to make my old boat look more like
her nickname than ever. I had never seen so many police machines together at the
Battery landing stage before, but I imagined they were there merely upon their