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  "No, I do not," Abu Al-Kalbin said flatly. "Everyone knows that in an emergency, it is the nose of the plane which first strikes the ground. The safest place is in the tail section. Here. He must be here."

  They looked around the tangled compartment, taking care not to step on the brown mess that had pooled over the floor over the Presidential Seal.

  "Yes," Jalid said. "This is where his guards are."

  Walid picked up a shattered photograph that crunched under his boot. He lifted it.

  "Who is this man?" he asked Abu Al-Kalbin. "A reporter? He looks like a reporter. "

  Jalid peered over Walid's shoulder. "No, it is the famous American actor Robert Redford."

  Abu Al-Kalbin took up the photograph. He looked at the ripped photograph. It showed a sandy-haired young man with a strange cumbersome round bag slung over one shoulder and an odd club in his right hand.

  "No," he said. "This is the Vice-President."

  "No longer." Jalid sneered. "He will be thrown out of power now that his President is dead. Perhaps executed."

  Abu Al-Kalbin shook his head. "That is not the way America works. This man will be made President, but that is not our problem. We must find that body. Look harder, both of you!"

  They fell to ripping the cabin apart. The President was not under the tangled cushions, or in a long shallow closet where spare clothing was kept.

  "Could he have escaped into the night?" Walid asked in confusion.

  "Do not be ignorant," Abu Al-Kalbin snapped. "No one else survived."

  "Except for that one," Walid said, pointing to the body of the Secret Service guard Abu Al-Kalbin had shot earlier. He was still sprawled protectively over a cluster of compressed seats.

  "Hmmm," he mused. "Those seats. Look at them."

  Walid and Jalid looked. They saw nothing. "So?" Jalid said.

  "They are smashed together very tightly," Abu Al-Kalbin explained. "But it is not the case on the other side of the aisle. Those seats are ripped up from the floor. What caused these seats to come together as they have?"

  Walid and Jalid muttered that they did not know.

  "Remove that corpse," Abu Al-Kalbin ordered.

  Dropping their camera equipment, the two men did as they were told. The Secret Service agent's body was pulled off the tangle of seats and unceremoniously flung out the gaping tail section.

  When Walid and Jalid returned, they found Abu Al-Kalbin in a frenzy, pulling at the seat cushions with his bare hands. Fabric tore under his fingernails, disgorging white polyester stuffing.

  "Do not stand there!" Abu Al-Kalbin said urgently. "Help me!"

  Walid and Jalid fell to. Together, all three men took hold of a cushion wedged between two others and began straining. It came loose slowly, reluctantly. When it finally jerked free, they fell back with it, landing together in a heap.

  Abu Al-Kalbin pushed the others aside and scrambled to his feet. Enraged, he attacked the tangle of seats. Where the cushion had come loose was another cushion. It was wedged under an aluminum chair support twisted in a peculiar way, as if subjected to a convulsive strain, not a crash impact.

  "This is wrong," Abu Al-Kalbin muttered. "This leg should not be bent this way. It makes no sense." He took hold of it and pulled. It would not budge.

  Feverishly he turned to his men.

  "Find an ax. I need an ax. Do this now."

  Walid and Jalid stumbled to their feet and went in opposite directions. Walid came back with a fire ax and presented it to his leader.

  The ax flew out of his hands and, guided by Abu Al-Kalbin's wiry arms, started to chop at the aluminum leg. It cracked open, spilling multicolored wiring.

  Seeing the wires, Abu Al-Kalbin stopped. His nightblack eyes narrowed. He reached out and took the frayed wires in his grimy fingers.

  "Be careful," Walid said. "They may be electrified."

  "No," Abu Al-Kalbin said, touching the wire. "They are dead." As proof, he pulled out a handful. They came and came, until finally they were trailing around Abu Al-Kalbin's feet like plastic spaghetti. And still there was more. He gave up.

  "These wires should not be in a chair leg," he complained. "There is no purpose to them."

  Walid and Jalid looked at one another and shrugged their shoulders. Walid spoke up quietly.

  "Abu, why are you behaving this way? Metal bends as it will, and wires are where one finds them. Who is to say these things are not ordained by Allah?"

  "While you two were disposing of the American," Abu Al-Kalbin said without looking away from the mashed conglomeration of seats, " I heard the groan of a living man." He pointed. "From within this mass. "

  "Who could have survived being crushed within so much metal and cushion?" Jalid asked reasonably.

  "That is what I would learn." Abu Al-Kalbin picked up the ax again, this time chopping away the seat covers. The ax bounced off the cushions at first, but finding hidden metal under them, he used that as a target. Methodically he chopped the cushion into segments as Walid and Jalid risked their fingers to pull the fragments away. He wielded the ax carefully, pausing often to feel under the tightly packed cushions with his hands.

  After several hard minutes of this, they exposed the back of a human head.

  Abu Al-Kalbin lowered his ax and touched the back of the man's neck with trembling fingertips.

  "Warm," he whispered.

  He reached down under the throat, feeling the steady pulse of the carotid artery.

  "Alive," he added.

  He dug further, taking the man's Adam's apple in his hand. It felt hard under the warm throat.

  Taking a deep breath, Abu Al-Kalbin pulled the man's head back.

  The angular face of the President of the United States lolled back in the harsh Mexican moonlight coming through the porthole glass. His glasses were askew. Miraculously, the lenses were unbroken.

  No one said anything for a long time. Then Walid went away. He came back with his AK-47 and offered it to Abu Al-Kalbin in a hoarse voice.

  "You deserve the honor of finishing the hated one."

  Abu Al-Kalbin slapped the weapon away.

  "Fool!" he snarled. "Fate has handed us something greater than the Qaddafi Peace Prize, which is unquestionably ours anyway. Do you realize how much this man is worth alive?"

  "How much?"

  "Millions. The Colombians, the Iranians, the Libyans-any of them will pay millions for this man."

  "How many millions?" asked Walid.

  "As many millions as there are stars in the night sky," Abu Al-Kalbin assured them.

  "I have an idea," said Jalid, who quickly counted seven stars through one porthole alone. "Why do we not cut him up? Perhaps each of them will pay much for an arm or a leg. "

  "Yes," Walid put in. "But we should be certain to keep the head for Brother Qaddafi. Surely he would want to have the head."

  "Sons of camels!" Abu Al-Kalbin spat. "Dead, he is worth nothing. Alive, he is a prize beyond measure. Come, help me extricate him. And carefully. Do not break anything. He may be injured. I want no further damage."

  It took two hours of hard work with ax and gun butts to hack and pry the insensate President of the United States from his cocoon of crushed seats. They felt the bones of his arms for fractures and found none.

  They pulled him out then, hoping that his feet and legs were not broken, and laid him on the pile of seat cushions.

  "Do you see any blood on his legs?" Abu Al-Kalbin demanded with concern.

  "No, Abu," Walid said as Jalid felt the President's legs. "His trousers are not even torn. It is as if the crushed seats respected his limbs and harmed him not."

  "It is as if they gathered around him like a mother's arms," Abu Al-Kalbin agreed, nudging the rope of wires on the floor. They twitched spasmodically, but he failed to notice this phenomenon.

  Walid and Jalid looked up at him in doubt. Their expressions were stiff, but their eyes said: Is he mad?

  "No, I am not mad," Abu Al-Kalbin retorted, reading t
heir thoughts. "Find a sheet. We will carry him to the safe house in a sheet."

  It turned out that Walid and Jalid were to do the carrying as well as the loading of the sleeping form onto a sheet stripped off the on-board presidential bed. Knotting the sheet at either end, they used these knots as handles to hoist their captive up and out to the chill of the Mexican night.

  Abu Al-Kalbin was the last to emerge. He carried his AK-47 slung over his shoulder as he recorded the capture of the President of the United States by his loyal Krez soldiers.

  "Do not be silent on this historical occasion," he complained as they struggled to keep the hammocklike carrying sheet steady. "Say something immortal."

  "How about Bismillahi Rrahmani Rrahim?" Walid offered.

  "Yes. Yes. Good. Shout it."

  "Bismillahi Rrahmani Rrahim!" Walid and Jalid shouted in unison.

  "Stop!" Abu Ali-Kalbin said suddenly, his face going slack.

  "What?" They looked at their leader in horror, fearing the worst.

  Abu Al-Kalbin said nothing. He hurried back into the shattered tail of Air Force One, and Walid and Jalid hastily lowered their burden so they could hold their kaffiyehs closer to their nostrils as the unmistakable sounds of their leader in intestinal distress floated out.

  When Abu Al-Kalbin finally rejoined them, he had only one thing to say.

  "What is good for this miserable curse?"

  "Rice," said Walid.

  "Yes. Eat much rice," added Jalid.

  "I hate rice," Abu Al-Kalbin said morosely.

  Chapter 4

  In the Peruvian hotel he had nicknamed "La Cucaracha Grande," Remo Williams sat stone-faced on a striped sofa, his dark eyes on the telephone as if willing it to ring.

  "Tended water boils slowly," the Master of Sinanju called from his reed mat in front of the television set.

  "And a watched pot never boils," Remo said morosely.

  "That is an impossibility," Chiun squeaked.

  "It's the American version."

  "Americans are impossible. And why do you not call Emperor Smith again if you cannot wait?"

  "Because I can't get through this frigging antiquated phone system," Remo said peevishly. "Smith should get my telegram any second now. He can get through to me. It's better than ending up on the line with Tibet, which is what happened last time. How the hell can these operators get Tibet when they can't connect to America?"

  "Perhaps they are watching the famous American pot that never boils," Chiun sniffed.

  Remo frowned. But his eyes were sunken with worry. He had been sent to Peru to head off a plot on the President's life. If Chiun had gotten Smith's message correctly-not a sure thing-then they had blown it. Or Smith had blown it. The President was dead. Remo wondered what Smith would say. No President had ever died on Smith's watch-not while he had Remo and Chiun working for him. Remo worried that Smith had suffered a heart attack. It was the only thing that could keep him from getting back to him.

  Remo's eyes narrowed. He was actually concerned about Smith. He was barely speaking to the old SOB these days, the result of a complicated situation in which Remo had been "retired" to death row and nearly executed all over again as a result of a CURE operation that was triggered when Smith fell gravely ill.

  It had been Smith who originally selected Remo, then a young Newark patrolman, to become the enforcement arm of CURE. Framed and sent to the electric chair for a murder he never committed, Remo had been revived with a new face and identity. A dead man. CURE's dead man. Placed in the hands of Chiun, the last Master of Sinanju-a legendary Korean house of assassins- Remo had developed into what he was now. A finely tuned human killing machine.

  Remo had long ago gotten over Smith's manipulation of his destiny. But the recent near-brush with the electric chair had reopened old wounds.

  Remo shook off the bad memories. He wondered what he would do with his life if Smith truly did die. He didn't know. He put the thought out of his mind. If the President had been assassinated, it would be up to him to assassinate the assassins.

  It was an irony not lost to Remo Williams. CURE had originally been created by a young President who had later been assassinated after only one thousand days in office. Remo hadn't been part of CURE then. And Chiun, heir to the five-thousand-year-old tradition of Sinanju, sun source of the martial arts, then dwelt forgotten in North Korea. So much had changed since then. Remo was now an assassin-America's secret assassin-and he had grown proud of it.

  The phone rang. Remo bounced out of the sofa as if a spring had burst through the colorful threadbare fabric.

  He scooped up the receiver.

  "Smitty?"

  "Remo?" Dr. Harold W. Smith's lemony voice asked. "I received your telegram. I was just about to call you again."

  "How bad is it?"

  "Bad. Air Force One went down over the Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains. A National Air Transport Safety go-team is en route by helicopter, along with Secret Service and FBI forensic teams." Smith paused. "We do not expect survivors."

  Remo's voice was hoarse when he found it. "What do you want Chiun and me to do?"

  "What have you learned down there?"

  "The Maoist crazies claim they were approached by the Colombians, but the deal didn't go through. I wasted them anyway. I didn't agree with their voting habits. "

  "Then the Colombians are our prime suspects," Smith said. "I am booking you on an Aero-Peru flight to Lima. Call me when you get there. I should have specific instructions for you by then."

  "Right. What's happening in Washington?"

  "Controlled chaos. The news is being suppressed until we have confirmation of fatalities. The Vice-President doesn't even know."

  "The Vice-President," Remo said suddenly. "Oh, my God, I forgot all about him. What are they going to do? I hear he can't find a lit bulb in a dark room."

  "Press exaggerations," Smith said flatly-but the worry in his voice was unmistakable.

  "I read that he thinks there are canals on Mars, filled with water."

  "Apocryphal. "

  "His wife can't even spell."

  "A slip of the pen."

  "He collects anatomically explicit dolls."

  "A souvenir ."

  "He has the IQ of a geranium."

  "He may also be our next President," Smith said flatly.

  "Let's pray for a miracle," Remo said fervently.

  "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 t
wisted, 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: