"Go to Lima, Remo," Smith said coldly, and the line abruptly disconnected.
Thousands of miles to the north, helicopter sounds bounced off the high ramparts of the Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains in the predawn darkness. Fingers of intense white light combed the cracked desiccated ground, creating shape-shifting halos of light.
There was no moon. Starlight was plentiful. The helicopters crisscrossed methodically, twice narrowly impaling the burst airframe of Air Force One.
As the dawn approached, only the distorted doppler sound of rotors disturbed the eerie coffin that had been the presidential aircraft. A tiny flame burned within the surviving starboard engine, shielded by the shattered nacelle cowling.
And deep within the airframe, circuits and microchips that had not been installed by the manufacturer came to life, beginning to process information.
Injured . . .
Diagnostics began to run. Messages came back to a central processor in the crushed cockpit.
Tail shattered. Wires severed. Fiberoptic cables sheared at critical junctures.
A tiny flame in the inner engine nacelle was sensed and a C02 bottle was triggered, extinguishing it with a jet of foam.
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.