"Perhaps we can assist each other in our mutual goal, O strange statue."
"Explain."
"Take me to the President, and I will conduct him to his home. He will be safe with me, and you will be relieved of your burden."
"No."
"Why not?"
"I must accompany the President wherever he goes."
"Why is this necessary if I give you my word that he will be safe?"
"Because I do not trust your word. And I must be with the President at all times ."
"Why?"
"I am safe with him. He is well-protected. The meat machines work very hard to ensure his survival. All persons and machines around him are ensured of their survival. My survival will therefore be assured so long as we are inseparable."
"Well-spoken," said Chiun. "But you are not with him now."
"This is a temporary necessity," Josip Broz Tito grated. "Evil meat machines are attempting to terminate him. Until I have devised a safe method to return him to his habitation, I have placed him in a secure place.
"Where, O statue?"
"I will not tell you. You may mean harm to him. I cannot allow that, for it threatens my survival."
"I understand perfectly, O mysterious statue whose true nature is unknown to me," Chiun said broadly. "Perhaps I can help you in your plight."
"Explain."
"What are you doing?" Lupe demanded. "You cannot bargain with a statue. It does not live."
" I will offer you safe passage back to America," Chiun went on, ignoring the outburst, "you and the true President, where you will be safe."
The statue hesitated. Its mouth stood open, but no grinding words issued forth.
"More information," it said at last.
"I work for the President's government," the Master of Sinanju said proudly. "I cannot tell you how, for it is a secret. But I will report to my emperor, and tender to him any offer you wish to make. I am certain he will barter your survival for the President's safety. "
"This would solve my dilemma," the statue said rackingly.
"If you will remain here, I will make contact with my emperor," said Chiun.
A bronze arm lifted in warning. "No. I do not trust you. We will meet in another place."
Chiun nodded. "Where?"
"I do not know the names of places in this city."
The statue's head swiveled like a football on a bronze spit. It groaned horribly.
Guadalupe Mazatl recoiled from the statue's inhuman regard.
"You, indigenous female meat machine. Name a place where there are no others like you in great numbers."
"Teotihuacan," Lupe sputtered. "It is a ruined city. To the north. Very large. Very empty. That would be a place such as you wish."
"In three hours," the statue intoned, "I will await you in Teotihaucun."
"Done," said the Master of Sinanju, executing a quick bow.
And then the Master of Sinanju beheld a sight such as he had never before seen in his many decades in the West.
The bronze statue lifted one foot. One bronze boot wrenched free of its base, leaving a shiny irregular patch. The other foot snapped loose.
Then, arms creaking, legs bending to the tortured shriek and snarl of bronze, the statue of Josip Broz Tito walked off its pedestal and marched away, stiff and ungainly as an old stop-motion mechanical man.
It stamped up the Paseo de la Reforma back in the direction of the Hotel Nikko.
"Increible!" Guadalupe said hoarsely. She made a slow sign of the cross, but the words she muttered were ancient Nauatl, and the gods she invoked were of old Mexico, not the East.
The Master of Sinanju watched as the bronze figure, its head jerking right, then left, then right again as it walked, went to the waiting helicopter and climbed aboard.
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.