At various points along the fuselage, skin-mounted sensors emerged like sluggish organs of sight and hearing. No sounds were detected from within the airframe. No hearts beat. The data were processed, and in the presidential section, twisted aluminum spars quivered.

  A rope of multicolored cables twitched, then withdrew into its aluminum housing–the twisted leg of a chair. The two broken sections groaned as the sentient metal twisted, rejoined, and healed as if by an organic process. Wires established connections like veins regenerating themselves.

  And overhead, a domelike ceiling light unscrewed itself, dropping its plastic casing, aluminum rim, and screws. The reflector and bulb dropped next, revealing a glass lens.

  The lens looked straight down, and seeing the twisted metal and chopped-up seat cushions, shifted frantically, and seeing nothing, stopped like a frozen fish eye.

  All over Air Force One, ceiling lights disassembled themselves and myriad glass eyes raked the tangled cabin for signs of life or a certain body.

  Finding nothing, relays clicked. And an electronic imperative repeated itself.

  It said: Survive...survive...must survive. Sounds approaching...aircraft overhead...survive...must survive.

  The section of seating that had sheltered the President of the United States during the crash landing of Air Force One came to life. Aluminum legs began to grope blindly. They twisted like an undersea plant in a suboceanic current, waving and wavering, shifting and combining, straining mightily.

  Floor bolts popped and an octopus tangle of aluminum legs marched into the litter-strewn aisle. Two of them flung up to form aluminum arms, and other limbs combined into a long semirigid spinal column.

  The aluminum biped stumbled blindly forward toward the electronic warfare nest aft of the compressed cockpit. As the thing hunched over the electronics, blunt wrists belled into knobs, which sprouted flat flexible fingers. It seized the radarscope, extracting it, glass and all, wires trailing like stubborn ligaments.

  The jointed prehensile metal fingers lifted the radarscope to the top of the biped’s spinal column. A nub formed and the dark glass disk settled into place with a click. Instantly the radar screen came to life, a luminous green line sweeping around the face like a radium second hand.

  Digging into the radar housing, it pulled out connectors and gold-plated microchips and began slapping them to its gleaming stick-figure form. Electronic elements melted into the accepting aluminum skin, adding bulk and function.

  All the while, a tiny element deep within the caricature of a human being repeated a single electronic concept:

  Survival...survival...survival...

  The creature moved through the cabin, salvaging other useful components. Copper piping from the galley sink. Elements from the galley microwave unit. PA speakers were ripped from over bulkhead doors and attached to either side of the radar-dish face. Sound. Hearing. The helicopter noise became audible as more than skin-sensed vibration. It was closer now.

  Must hurry. Must survive.

  In the lavatory, a shattered mirror reflected the creature’s own improbable image.

  Wrong, wrong, it thought. Not optimum survival form. Must reconfigure.

  Returning to the aisle, the thing stooped to avoid smashing its oversize pie-plate head on the overhead bins.

  It went among the bodies, searching for a certain one.

  Yes, that one, it thought. That form will assure continued survival.

  But the body it sought was not to be found within the fuselage.

  The creature swiveled its ground-glass radar face to the gaping tail section. One aluminum hoof of a foot stepped in a puddle of semiliquid organic matter, and artificial olfactory receptors immediately identified the matter as human excrement. The odor of it was leading away from the aircraft, its former host.

  Outside, there was another body. Not the one it sought, but a parasite protector, called a Secret Service agent by the meat machine known as the President of the United States.

  Sweeping the horizon with its multiple sensors, it tracked the human-excrement odor going south.

  It instantly determined to go south. After a suitable survival-assuring reconfiguration.

  Returning to the cabin, it began to dismantle the dead-meat machines, taking a portion of epidermis from the back of this one, hair from that one, slapping and stretching them over its metallic frame, adding a layer of human skin.

  Soon the nude body of a man stood in the cabin, looking pale, corpselike, and human except for the radar screen of a head.

  Humanlike arms, with aluminum bones under the cold unfeeling skin, swept up and knocked that anachronistic head off. The screen shattered on impact with the floor.

  And now-humanlike hands lifted a human head to the stump of a neck. Filament connectors entwined with spinal-cord ganglia, making connections never intended by nature.

  The dissynchronized eyes rotated in their orbits like a pinball machine gone amok. They synchronized at last, lining up to focus on the floor.

  Eyes that saw, even if they did not live.

  Teeth that smiled, even if they were rooted in metal, not bone and gum.

  The thing dressed quickly, selecting clothes at random. The helicopter sound increased in the night. Glass lenses behind the dead human corneas detected the faintness of the approaching sun.

  Must hurry. Locate the important meat machine. There is safety in the company of the one called President.

  In the bathroom, a last look into the mirror.

  The stiff face showed a flicker of disappointment.

  No. Wrong. Unfamiliar face. Must assume trusted face. Components do not match.

  The creature went back to rummage through the presidential section. There the floor was covered with pictures that had fallen off the blue cabin walls. The thing picked them off the floor, scanning them in quick microseconds, discarding them with careless glass-shattering flings.

  One photograph held its attention an immeasurable microsecond longer than the others.

  Yes, it thought. This one. He will trust this one face.

  He repeated the thought aloud, testing his mechanical voice box.

  “Yes.” The voice was a croak. Intonation was wrong. It tried again.

  “Yes. This face trust. This one. Yes.”

  Syntax wrong. Circuits not fully repaired. Self-repair diagnostics continue troubleshooting.

  It looked again at the picture of the man. It pressed one hard strong hand to its own face, pushing the cheekbones higher, pinching the chin, to add a cleft. Better. But the modified skin called hair atop the head was the wrong color. The hair color should be sandy, not black.

  The thing went among the cabin dead, looking for wheat-straw-colored hair. He found a journalist with thick hair. It was almost perfect. He tore the scalp free and chewed the hair to the correct configuration with his dead human teeth.

  The hair settled atop his shiny cranium perfectly, knitting scalp to facial skin.

  Blue eyes were plucked from a shattered skull and exchanged for the gray ones in his borrowed head. New teeth were extracted by aluminum pinchers from another dead mouth, and one by one, they were made to fit.

  Finally the manlike simulacrum examined his own reflection in the glass of the framed photograph. The features matched. All that remained was the cylindrical bag carried over the shoulder, filled with aluminum instruments. There was ample aluminum in the discarded host aircraft to fashion them from.

  The creature set to work...

  Chapter Five

  At Lima International Airport, Remo Williams got a call through to Harold Smith in Rye, New York, on his first try.

  “They are still searching for Air Force One,” Smith told Remo. His voice was tinny.

  “What’s the holdup?” Remo demanded.

  “Air Force One went down in very rugged territory,” Smith told him. “Er, there also seems to be a jurisdictional problem.”

  “Tell the Mexicans to get lost,” Remo said heatedly. “He’s our President.”

  “The Mexicans are not the problem. It’s an interagency problem. The FBI is claiming jurisdiction, but the Secret Service is insisting on leading the search. The Air Force has sent in helicopters. And then there is the National Transportation Safety Board.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Remo groaned.

  “Between these agencies and the darkness, we have nothing. It is fortunate that it is night. Easier to maintain the news blackout.”

  “Screw the news blackout,” Remo grumbled. “What do you want us to do?”

  “Go to Mexico City.”

  “And then?”

  “Check in with me.”

  “That’s all? Check in?”

  “Until we know more, I want you close enough to the situation for insertion if that’s advisable.”

  Smith hung up.

  Remo turned to Chiun. The Master of Sinanju stood resplendent in a flaming scarlet kimono. His wise face was a landscape of mummy wrinkles, like the surface of a dead yellowing planet. His eyes were a clear hazel. They were a young man’s eyes, full of fire and humor and wisdom all at once.

  Chiun was over eighty. A tendril of pale straggly hair clung to his tiny chin, passing for a beard. The puffs of hair over his ears were like frozen smoke. He was otherwise bald as an egg.

  “We’re going to Mexico City,” Remo told him.

  “Then we go to Mexico City,” said the Master of Sinanju in a mouse-squeak voice. “Has Smith taken control of the government yet?”

  “No, and he’s not going to.”

  “He is very foolish,” Chiun said as Remo hurried to the Aero Mexico counter to book the flight north. “This is his golden opportunity.”

  · · ·

  National Transportation Safety Board Investigator in Charge Bill Holland had never seen anything like it in thirteen years of investigating air crashes.

  From the air, it looked bad–real bad. Air Force One had come in on its belly, making an unusually long ground imprint. The tail had been knocked off and the nose mashed into the foot of one of the Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains. The plane looked like a graceful white Roc that had fallen from another world.

  “Looks like the flight crew got the worst of it,” the helicopter pilot told him.

  “Better that than if she hit the side of the mountain in flight,” Holland said aridly. “That’s one hell of a long imprint. Who found her first?”

  “Air Force. Spotted her at first light. Scuttlebutt is there are no survivors.”

  “There hardly ever are,” Holland said as the chopper settled on the dusty ground, throwing up billows of fine brown grit.

  A man in a conservative gray suit and polished wing-tips shielded his face against the sandy onslaught as he pushed into the rotor wash. He had FBI written all over him, Holland thought ruefully.

  The man’s first choking words confirmed that.

  “Holland? I’m Lunkin, FBI. Special agent in charge. You’ll be coordinating with me.” He looked like a desk jockey, not a brick agent.

  “What about the Secret Service?” Holland asked. “I heard they are hopping mad over this.”

  “They’re still liaising with the Air Force, trying to get on-site.”

  “Good. Maybe I can get some work done before they arrive.”

  The site was guarded by a contingent of Air Force SP’s in camouflage utilities, standing at attention, rifles at the ready. They looked to Holland as useful as balls on a ballerina.

  “I understand there are no survivors,” Holland said as the sand died down with the descending rotor whine.

  “Confirmed.”

  “Then the President is dead.”

  “Unknown. We haven’t found the body.”

  “God, I hope it didn’t fall out of the tail when she came in,” Holland moaned. “It would be a nightmare trying to find one body in these mountains.”

  “Could be,” Agent Lunkin said as they walked past the unmoving SP’s and into the open fuselage. “One body came out with the tail. The others are in rough shape. Some of the damage is pretty sickening.”

  “You get used to it,” Holland said tersely as he pushed a dangling cabin partition aside. “Did the FDR survive?”

  “What’s Roosevelt got to do with this?”

  “The flight-data recorder. It’ll be a long black-and-yellow-striped box. Should be in the tail. From the look of the nose, I’d say the cockpit voice recorder is a lost cause.”

  “We didn’t touch anything.”

  When Holland entered the presidential seating section, his tight-lipped expression tightened further. He had investigated countless air crashes, become inured to every conceivable freak of collision, from decapitated heads to side-by-side seats lying on runways, their intact passengers still calmly seated in them, holding hands in death.

  It was not a body that surprised him. It was the condition of the seat cushions. They looked as if they had been torn to shreds by some wild animal.

  “Any sign of animals when you got here?”

  “No. The Air Force had already secured the site. We just counted the bodies.”

  Holland suddenly pinched at his nose. “What’s that smell?”

  “Shit.”

  “Smells pretty bad.”

  “Looks like someone lost it during the descent. They crapped right in the middle of the aisle.”

  Bill Holland blinked. He had never heard of such a thing. If anything, the pucker factor would have prevented anyone from defecating under the stress of an emergency descent.

  “Show me,” he said quickly.

  FBI Agent Lunkin escorted Bill Holland to the press section.

  “It’s that sloppy puddle.”

  “No shit,” Holland said, kneeling beside it. He sniffed, and had to turn away. The smell was strong here amid the members of the press corps.

  Holland stood up.

  “This is weird,” he muttered. “Whoever made that mess had a bad case of the screaming shits. Montezuma’s Revenge.”

  “Well, we are in Mexico,” Lunkin pointed out.

  Bill Holland looked at FBI Agent Lunkin as if to ask: How did you get hired?

  “The plane never landed in Mexico,” Holland said edgily. “Whoever made that mess did not belong with the passengers or crew.”

  “Diarrhea is not exactly unique to Mexico,” Lunkin ventured.

  “But the bacteria that causes it are. I know that smell. I’ve had the turistas myself.”

  Bill Holland pushed on toward the plane’s nose, noting other anomalies on the way. The radar screen had been extracted from its housing and lay smashed two cabins back. Possible, but not probable. A corpse was missing its eyes. Another its teeth. Others had been skinned. No air crash Bill Holland had ever investigated, no ripping shards of glass or flying debris, could pull a man’s eyes or teeth out of his head. Or skin him like a chicken.

  “These bodies have been vandalized,” Holland told Lunkin. “No question of it.”

  “How can you tell?” Lunkin asked, looking at one mangled corpse. Its yawning mouth exposed raw, toothless gums.

  “Experience,” Holland said. “Long brutal experience. Come on. I want to see if the FDR survived.”

  Holland found it bolted to the inside of the separated tail section. He tapped it with his knuckles. The heavy steel casing appeared intact.

  “I’ll want to ship this back to Washington on my chopper,” Holland said.

  “I think we’d better check with my office before we remove any evidence,” Lunkin said cautiously.

  “Check all you want,” Holland shot back as he unbolted the FDR. “But I’m sending this thing back to Washington.”

  He lugged it back to the waiting chopper, thinking this was the damnedest crash site he’d ever seen. There were too many anomalies.

  · · ·

  On the flight to Mexico City, Remo Williams tried to explain to the Master of Sinanju, for what seemed like the zillionth time in their long association, that although Harold W. Smith, as director of CURE, wielded enormous power, he was not a secret emperor and did not covet the Oval Office, which Chiun referred to as the Eagle Throne.

  “He’s not going to seize power.” Remo insisted. “So forget it.”

  “Then he will allow the stripling President of Vice to assume the Eagle Throne without interference?” Chiun asked in disbelief.

  “I know it sounds crazy, especially in this instance, but that’s the way it works.”

  “The President’s wife,” Chiun mused. “She should be next in line. There have been many fine queens in history. Catherine the Great was an excellent ruler.”

  “Your ancestors worked for her, no doubt?” Remo said.

  “Why are you changing the subject?” Chiun wanted to know.

  “Look. If the President is dead, I got a feeling you and I are going to be pressed into overtime. It will be all Smith can do to hold things together while that airhead is in charge.”

  “I think it is a plot.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Chiun’s hazel eyes squeezed into walnut slits.

  “Last year, the Surgeon General mysteriously disappeared. One moment he was on television constantly stroking his magnificent beard and issuing proclamations. Then he was gone.” Chiun looked across the aisle for eavesdroppers. “I suspect he was done away with,” he whispered, low-voiced.

  “I think he resigned. There’s a new Surgeon General now, one that doesn’t look like a Dutch admiral.”

  “If you say so. I had thought that the Postmaster General or the Attorney General would be next, but they have continued to cling to power. Perhaps they are in league with the President of Vice.”

  “Right,” Remo said, looking out at the mountainous ground below. “That Postmaster General. He’s a pretender to the throne if one ever lived.”

  Chiun arranged his silken skirts, saying, “I am pleased you agree with me. We will bring this matter to Smith’s attention at a propitious moment. More emperors have been toppled from their thrones by military coups than popular revolts. It is an unfortunate truism of history.”

  The engine whine changed pitch and Remo felt the pressure build up in his ears. He opened his mouth slightly and his eardrums cleared instantly.