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. Selfrepair 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 5
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."