The rotors started turning. The engines whined.
And then the helicopter lifted free and flew north.
"What was it?" asked Guadalupe Mazatl when she found her voice again.
"It is an evil thing I had thought long dead," intoned the Master of Sinanju bitterly. He watched the bright dragonfly that was the late Comandante Odio's helicopter disappear beyond the drab gray slab of new brutalism architecture that was the Hotel Nikko.
Chapter 20
Bill Holland listened mesmerized to the cockpit voice recorder.
It was, first of all, amazing that the CVR had even survived the crash. Air Force One's wreckage had been extracted from the sierra by helicopter skycrane and taken to a warehouse in Tampico for preliminary analysis and final extraction of the flight crew, who were inextricably mingled with the compacted cockpit.
It was in the course of that messy task that the CVR was uncovered, dented, but its tape loop intact.
Bill Holland personally flew it back to Washington for analysis.
He hit the rewind button and settled back in the cherrywood conference room at the National Transportation Safety Board headquarters in Washington.
"It doesn't make sense," a voice was saying. It was the human-factors expert.
"We can account for it," Holland said in a testy voice. "Let's just listen again."
He found the point on the tape just before impact and let the tape run.
The voices of the flight crew were tense. The pilot was saying, "It's like she's trying to save herself."
The copilot's voice came on then, controlled, only slightly warped by concern. It might have been a defect in the tape and not his voice. They were a professional crew.
"We've lost the other engines."
"We're going in. Dump the fuel."
"Oh, my God. Look. She's already dumping! It's like she can read our minds."
"That explains why there was no fire," the human-factors expert said.
Then it came. The long scream of metal as the underbelly was ripped along the desert floor. A pop. A hissing as the air rushed out of the still-pressurized cabin. Familiar sounds.
The sound of impact, when it came, was terrible. It was like a trash compactor crushing apple crates. It went on for a long time and Holland's mind flashed back to his first aerial view of that long imprint in the desert. He shivered.
It ended with a crump of a sound that mingled with the crunching of the windscreen against the base of the mountain.
Then silence.
Normally the tape would stop with the disruption of electrical power. But somehow this tape jerked on.
And somewhere in the cockpit, the crushed cockpit containing what was later determined to be completely dismembered bodies, a high metallic voice squealed: "Survive . . . survive . . . survive . . . must survive."
"It doesn't sound human," the human-factors guy said.
"It's definitely a voice," Holland retorted. He took a sip of his coffee. Stone cold. He finished it anyway.
"Transmission?" a voice offered.
"The radio was destroyed upon impact," Holland said. "That was a member of the flight crew. Who else could it have been?"
No one knew. And so they listened to the tape once again, and on into the afternoon, attempting to explain the inexplicable.
Finally they decided that it was a freak of electronics. The CVR tape overwrote the loop every thirty minutes. The squealing voice repeating "survive" had not been recorded after impact, but was the garbled residue of previously overwritten recording.
"Are we all agreed on this?" Bill Holland asked wearily.
Heads nodded. But no face bore a look of conviction. But in the face of the impossible, it was the best explanation they had. There were already too many other anomalies. The gunshot wounds. The eyeless, toothless skull. The missing heads. The still-missing presidential body. No one wanted to add more to the list.
"Then that's it," Holland said. "Let's move on."
The official NTSB preliminary report on SAM 2700 was rushed through channels. Within an hour, it had been messengered to the FBI, the State Department, and the White House. Not everyone who read this "For Your Eyes Only" copy knew that SAM 2700 was the official designation for Air Force One.
One person who did not know was an FBI file clerk named Fred Skilicorn. A copy of the file ended up in his hands after it had been received at FBI headquarters in Washington. He had it for only ten minutes. That was enough time for him to skim it and, after delivering it to his superior, make a surreptitious phone call.
Fred Skilicorn officially worked for the FBI. But the extra check that landed in his post-office box every month bore the CIA shield. The CIA knew nothing about the check, however. It was drawn off a secret CURE payroll. Many people worked for CURE. Most of them-like Fred Skilicorn-never knew it.
It was Fred Skilicorn's job to leak sensitive FBI intelligence to the rival CIA. Or so he thought.
The number he called was a recorded message identified only by its phone number. Skilicorn whispered a quick gist of the NTSB report and hung up.
Within seconds the audio recording was electronically converted into print copy and squirted over the telephone lines to a very active computer at Folcroft Sanitarium, where Dr. Harold W. Smith was doggedly tracking all message traffic in and out of Washington, D.C. The town was like a pressure cooker about to blow its lid. Rumors were flying. The president was overdue in Bogota. The press were told his plane had laid over in Acapulco. Authorities in Acapulco denied the story. The story was hastily revised to a Panama layover. U. S. occupation forces in Panama City issued a clipped "No comment" to every media inquiry and the media was momentarily stymied.
Smith detected only a feeling of unease. There were reports of a major speech to be delivered by the Vice-President. Officially, it was tied in with the President's trip. Unofficially, there were a thousand unconfirmable rumors. Smith was picking up anonymous tips that it was much more than that.
He sweated as he scanned these rumors reaching him. They ran the gamut from the Vice-President's intended divorce to his impending resignation for medical reasons. The resignation story was the one most rife. And it was coming from credible sources at State, from Treasury, and out of the White House itself.
Nothing was breaking in the media. The noon news broadcasts had come and gone, but the evening newscasts were being prepared. And there was no story to report. No arrival of Air Force One. Reporters were burning up the phone lines with questions.
And there were no answers.
A blinking screen light warned Smith of an informant's tip emanating from Washington. Smith keyed into it. The gist was brief. Smith absorbed it at a glance.
It was an NTSB preliminary report. He almost dismissed it. What had happened to Air Force One would be a matter for tomorrow. The President's fate was today's crisis.
And then Smith saw the remarks about the cockpit voice recorder's final recording. A strange voice that said over and over: "Survive . . . survive . . . must survive."
And Dr. Harold W. Smith's grayish visage paled three times, each time losing another shade of gray.
He sat at his terminal, white as the proverbial ghost. Because what he was reading told him that a ghost from CURE's past had returned-a ghost of plastic and aluminum and fiber optics.