Survival Course td-82

by Warren Murphy

  "This is a dirty place," he said, giving his opinion of Mexico City to the Mexican woman named Guadalupe. "It is no wonder that my ancestors had nothing to do with the Aztecs."

  "Were I in your country, I would not criticize it," Guadalupe said sullenly.

  "You would not like my country. The air is breathable."

  They came to a red-brick park on the corner of Reforma and Calzada Mahatma Gandhi. There stood a more-than-lifesize bronze statue of a man, hands clasped behind his back, on a dais. The edge of the dais bore a name: JOSIP BROZ TITO.

  Chiun walked past the statue of the unimportant non-Korean and through the park, where stylized grasshoppers perched on stone hieroglyphs.

  Something silvery gleamed in the bushes directly behind the bronze statue. The Master of Sinanju abruptly swerved toward that unexpected gleam.

  "What are you doing?" Guadalupe asked as the Master of Sinanju bent at the waist and reached into the bushes.

  He stood up, frowning at the sand wedge in his hand.

  "What?" Lupe gasped.

  "The bag and remaining clubs are also here," Chiun said solemnly.

  Guadalupe joined him. "He must have cast them aside," she ventured.

  Ignoring her, Chiun looked around the park.

  "His clothes are also here," Guadalupe said. "Why would he discard his clothes?" she asked in puzzlement, holding up a brown jacket by its collar.

  The Master of Sinanju did not reply. He had found the shoes and socks that had been discarded behind a tree. Shoes did not always leave imprints, but bare feet did-even on brick, the outline of perspiration could be seen by eyes that had been sharpened by Sinanju training.

  The Master of Sinanju did not find any perspiration imprints when he examined the brick sidewalk, however. He floated back to the bushes, where the Mexican woman stood, a befuddled expression on her impassive brown face.

  There were heavy footprints in the soft dirt, he saw. They led directly to the statue's austere dark bronze back.

  His facial wrinkles multiplying in thought, Chiun went around to the front. He looked up. His eyes narrowed. It was merely a statue, its eyes lifted skyward.

  Chiun looked down. Flecks of dirt collected at the statue's booted feet. No crumbs of soil lay outside the circumference of the dais, however. And no perspiration imprints were visible on it.

  Guadalupe joined him, regarding the statue. They stood in silence for many moments, Chiun's hands withdrawing into his sleeves, which joined over his stomach.

  Finally the Master of Sinanju put a question to her.

  "How long has this statue been at this spot?" he asked softly, not taking his eyes off its metallic face.

  "I do not know," Lupe admitted. "I am in Mexico City only from time to time. Why?"

  "Have you seen it here before?"

  "Si. It has been here several years, in recognition of the close ties between my government and this man, who formerly headed Yugoslavia."

  Chiun stepped up to the dais. One fingernail lifted cautiously. He tapped the bronze once. It rang faintly-a solidly metallic ring. The true and correct ring of bronze.

  "What do you do?" Guadalupe asked slowly.

  "Hush," Chiun admonished. He brushed a cloud of hair away from one delicate ear and placed it to the statue's stomach, the highest point he could monitor without lifting up on tiptoe.

  Guadalupe watched him with growing concern. She had heard of tourists fainting in the thin air, who had to be hospitalized during the winter months, when the natural bowl that was Mexico City trapped inversions along with the terrible pollution.

  But she had never before heard of a gringo who had become crazed by the bad air. And this old one was not even, strictly speaking, a gringo.

  As she watched, the Master of Sinanju's brow crinkled. His parchment face gathered like drying papier-mache. His tiny mouth popped open suddenly.

  He stepped back abruptly. "I hear sounds," he whispered in a surprised voice.

  "What kind of sounds?"

  "Metal sounds."

  "It is made of bronce," Lupe said reasonably. "Of course you would hear metal sounds."

  "Not like these," Chiun said, regarding the statue with suspicious eyes. "These are clicks and hums, the sounds of gears and other machine workings."

  "But it is a statue. It is hollow."

  "It is not hollow, although it may be a statue."

  At the sound of those words, the statue, whose head had been tilted slightly upward toward the brownish sky, suddenly looked down. Its bronze neck creaked with the impossible movement.

  "Dios!" Guadalupe gasped. She stepped back without thinking, her hand reaching for her pistol.

  The eyes of the statue, with its hollow shadowed pupils, moved, showing a sudden dark gleam, like obsidian lenses. And the sculptured mouth dropped open.

  The statue spoke, evoking a shriek from Guadalupe Mazatl.

  "Why do you pursue me?" Josip Broz Tito asked, his voice a conglomeration of raspy metallic vowels and consonants, like dozens of hasps and files sawing one another, trying to make articulate music.

  "It speaks!" Lupe gasped. "The statue is speaking!"

  "Because you are the Vice-President, statue," the Master of Sinanju said in a reasonable tone. He did not understand what would possess a statue to talk, but he knew that when faced with the unknown, a wise assassin did not show fear. He repressed it.

  "I am not the Vice-President now," the statue of Josip Broz Tito said through gnashing teeth.

  "True," returned the Master of Sinanju carefully. His eyes narrowed. There was something familiar about the way this statue spoke. Not the tortured metallic voice, but the too-simple manner of phrasing. He pressed on.

  "There is another reason I pursue you," Chiun added firmly.

  "I would like to know that reason."

  "Why?"

  "It is important to me."

  "Why is it important to you, O statue?" the Master of Sinanju asked carefully.

  " It is important to my survival."

  "Ahhh," said the Master of Sinanju, and he knew what the statue truly was.

  But knowing the truth and admitting it were different matters. The Master of Sinanju preferred not to let the statue know that he knew what he knew.

  "It is important to me to know that the President is safe," Chiun said simply.

  "He is safe," the statue said.

  "How do I know this?"

  "Because I am not lying," said the statue with invincible logic.

  " I see," mused the Master of Sinanju. "It is also important that I see this for myself. It is my responsibility to see that the President is returned to his own country in safety. He has many enemies in this land."

  "This is important to me as well, meat machine."

  The Master of Sinanju let the odd description pass. It only confirmed what he already knew.

  "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.

  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.

  A ghost named Mr. Cordons.

  Smith reached for the telephone and began dialing Mexico City. His fingers kept hitting the wrong buttons. He hung up, took a deep breath, and tried again.

  Chapter 21

  Remo Williams began to appreciate the size of Chapultepec Park after he had been walking along a winding pathway between bands of ancient cypress trees for twenty minutes and saw no sign of the other side.