"Stone, Leslie F - Men With Wings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stone Leslie F)

So our story starts in 1945.



CHAPTER ONE
Alarming News
IT was Harry Brent who made the "scoop" and The American came out on one fine
morning with four-inch scare heads devoting their entire front page to the news
relegating the less important details of murders, robberies, gang-wars, stocks
and floods to inside pages. The Warby father-daughter murder went begging for
space. It was really hard on those concerned. Later, we reporters, condoled with
Annabel Warby because the time was inauspicious for a first-class murder.
The American flaunted its news.
NORDIC FEMALES UNSAFE IN LATIN AMERICA!
MANY OF AMERICA'S FAIREST HAVE VANISHED WITHOUT TRACE!!
New Race of Men with Wings Believed Responsible for the Strange Disappearances
of Visiting White Women!
IT IS REVEALED THAT SOUTH AMERICAN OFFICIALS HAVE PURPOSELY SUPPRESSED WORD OF
ABDUCTORS FEARING LOSS OF TOURIST TRADE!!!
The newsboys made a bedlam of the streets with their ballyhoo voices
interpreting the news as each saw it, and their papers went like hot-cakes.
In the editorial chambers of the New York News half-a-dozen or so of us
reporters sat about discussing this latest tidbit, lamenting that it was Brent
instead of us who had nosed out this delectable morsel. The wonder of it was
that he had managed so adroitly to keep it all under cover until he had
unearthed all the corresponding details and that no other paper had smelled it
out.
The accounts described the strange abductions in detail, but the signed columns
of Brent's held the meat of the whole affair.
"In searching," he said, "through the records of various South American cities I
was startled in discovering that the old files held record of many unsolved
woman-nappings as far back as two hundred years before, and that then, as today,
only women of Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Scandinavian blood appear to have been the
victims!
"That fact in itself points to at least one clue and it is evident therefore
that all these strange disappearances can be laid to one person or ring working
under one head. The South American police have naturally been baffled, for in
all these years no other clue has ever come to the surface, and all the combined
efforts of the various governments of the Latin countries have not availed in
discovering the culprits.
"What is hard to understand is how have they managed to keep these serious
matters away from the world. Of course such news would be most injurious to the
nations of South America who look forward to the in-pouring of tourists and
wealthy visitors. In Brazil the Argentine, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia,
Colombia and in fact every country where white women have visited the toll has
been taken. How many more than the four hundred and thirty-five recorded
kidnappings have taken place, we have no way of telling. And perhaps our South
American friends might have continued to hide the truth had not the abductors
themselves become so careless in their actions as to give away more clues,
forced themselves, in fact, on public attention, so that our friends below the