"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 049 - The Mental Wizard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

The plane, thought O’Neel, would make a swell get-away vehicle when the going got too tough.

O’Neel’s patriots waved their arms as if their lives depended upon it. They were all for their chief, who
was as swell a general as they had ever had. Of course, he flew into a rage and shot somebody now and
then. But jungle life was cheap, and El Liberator O’Neel was a lad who raided where the raiding was
good.

The patriots were a scurvy-looking bunch. Some were natives, jungle savages who looked as if they
would be more at home drying human heads. Indeed, they had dried a few.

There were a couple of bums from up Nicaragua way, a bit of scum from Panama, Colombian riffraff.
But no whites. O’Neel was white, and he didn’t like more of his own color. Sometimes a white man
objected to some of the things O’Neel did.

But El Liberator Amber O’Neel’s rabble patriots were better trained than they looked. Six of them,
indeed, were good military aviators, trained by Colombia and other South American republics at some
expense.

They all waved their arms vigorously at the plane cruising overhead.



THE plane was a model ten years old, and not a pilot in a thousand would have cared about being in it
while it was over this kind of jungle. The ship had been flying north, so it must have left behind an
unexplored stretch of jungle where, for all any one knew, landing grounds might be a hundred miles
between. No place, certainly, for a bus as old as this one.

The pilot flew like a war-time kiwi—a kiwi being a bird with wings that can’t fly. He was going to land.
He wabbled down. He tried to skid air speed away, narrowly missed scraping a wing, came down hard,
bounced twenty feet straight up, came down on one wing, and the plane began to fall to pieces.

O’Neel cursed wildly. "Looks like that pilot deliberately wrecked his wagon!"

The propeller tied itself into a strange knot. The plane—what was left of it—turned over on its back, and
a cloud of splinters and bits of fabric settled on it, and the episode was over. That plane would never
take to the air again.

Amber O’Neel produced two long-barreled, small-bore pistols from holsters next to his sides, and he
handled them as if each of his hands was a right hand. In fact, that was how Amber O’Neel had gotten
one of his nicknames.

He was ambidextrous, could use both hands with equal ease. He boasted about his being ambidextrous.
Men who couldn’t pronounce that word had taken to calling him "Amber."

Amber O’Neel ran toward the plane. He planned to shoot the occupants, if still alive, and take whatever
they had. He poked his head and his guns into the interior of the ship.

For some time, he remained in exactly that position.