“Yes…” Pitt said slowly. “Thank you, Mr. Jordan. I get the picture.”
“Now will you officially join the team?”
Pitt rose, and to the astonishment of everyone present except Giordino and Sandecker, he said, “I’ll think it over.”
And then he left the room.
As he walked down the steps into the alley beside the squalid old building, Pitt turned and gazed up at the dingy walls and boarded windows. He shook his head in wonderment, then looked down at the security guard in the ragged clothes sprawled on the steps and muttered to himself, “So that’s the eyes and ears of the great republic.”
Jordan and Sandecker remained in the conference room after the others had filed out.
The crusty little admiral looked at Jordan and smiled faintly. “Do you mind my cigar?”
Jordan made a look of distaste. “A little late in asking, aren’t you, Jim?”
“Nasty habit.” Sandecker nodded. “But I don’t mind blowing smoke on someone, especially when they hard-ass my people. And that’s exactly what you were doing, Ray, hard-assing Pitt and Giordino.”
“You know damn well we’re in a state of crisis,” said Jordan seriously. “We don’t have time to cater to prima donnas.”
Sandecker’s face clouded. He pointed to Pitt’s packet that was on the top of the stack before Jordan. “You didn’t do your homework, or you’d know that Dirk Pitt is a bigger patriot than you and I put together. Few men have accomplished more for their country. There are few of his breed left. He still whistles ‘Yankee Doodle’ in the shower and believes a handshake is a contract and man’s word is his bond. He can also be devious as the devil if he thinks he’s helping preserve the Stars and Stripes, the American family, and baseball.”
“If he knows the urgency of the situation,” said Jordan, puzzled, “why did he stall and cut out?”
Sandecker looked at him, then looked at the organization chart on the backlit screen where Kern had written in “Tea Stutz.”
“You badly underestimated Dirk,” he said almost sadly. “You don’t know, you couldn’t know, he’s probably brewing up scheme to reinforce your operation this minute.”
22
PITT DID NOT GO directly to the old aircraft hangar on the edge of Washington’s International Airport that he called home. He gave Giordino a set of instructions and sent him off in a cab.
He walked up Constitution Avenue until he came to a Japanese restaurant. He asked for a quiet booth in the corner, sat down, and ordered. Between the clear clam soup and a medley of sashimi raw fish, he left the table and walked to a pay phone outside the rest rooms.
He took a small address book from his wallet and flipped through the phone numbers until he found the one he was looking for, Dr. Percival Nash (Payload Percy), Chevy Chase, Maryland. Nash was Pitt’s uncle on his mother’s side. The family character, Nash often bragged how he used to spike Dirk’s baby formula with sherry. Pitt inserted the change and dialed the number under the name.
He waited patiently through six rings, hoping Nash was in. He was, answering half a second before Pitt was about to hang up.
“Dr. Nash here,” came a youthful resonant voice (he was crowding eighty-two).
“Uncle Percy, this is Dirk.”
“Oh, my goodness, Dirk. About time I heard your voice. You haven’t called your old uncle in five months.”
“Four,” Pitt corrected him. “I’ve been on an overseas project.”
“How’s my beautiful sister and that dirty old politician she married? They never call me either.”
“I haven’t been over to the house yet, but judging from their letters, Mom and the senator are as testy as ever.”
“What about you, nephew? Are you in good health?”
“Fit and ready to race you around Marinda Park.”
“You remember that, do you? You couldn’t have been much older than six at the time.”
“How could I forget? Every time I’d try and pass, you’d throw me in the bushes.”
Nash laughed like the jolly man that he was. “Never try to better your elders. We like to think we’re smarter than you kids.”
“That’s why I need your help, and was wondering if you could meet me at the NUMA Building. I need to pick your brain.”
“On what subject?”
“Nuclear reactors for race cars.”
Nash knew instantly Pitt was dodging the real issue over the telephone. “When?” he asked without hesitation.
“As soon as convenient.”
“An hour okay?”
“An hour will be fine,” said Pitt.
“Where are you now?”
“Eating Japanese sashimi.”
Nash groaned. “Ghastly stuff. God only knows what pollutants and chemicals fish swim through.”
“Tastes good, though.”
“I’m going to speak to your mother. She didn’t raise y right.”
“See you in an hour, Percy.”
Pitt hung up and went back to his table. Hungry as he was, he barely touched the sashimi. He idly wondered if one of the smuggled bombs might be buried under the floor of the restaurant.
Pitt took a cab to the ten-story NUMA Building. He paid the driver and gazed briefly up at the emerald-green solar glass that covered the walls and ended in a curving pyramidal spire at the top. No lover of the classical look of the capital’s government buildings, Admiral Sandecker wanted a sleek contemporary look, and he got it. The lobby was an atrium surrounded by waterfalls and aquariums filled with exotic sea life. A huge globe rose from off the center of the sea-green marble floor, contoured with the geological furrows and ridges of every sea, large lake, and primary river on the earth.
Pitt entered an empty elevator and pressed the button marked 10. He skipped his fourth-floor office and rode up to the communications and information network on the top level. Here was the brain center of NUMA, a storehouse of every scrap of information ever recorded on the oceans—scientific, historical, fiction, or nonfiction. It was in this vast room of computers and memory cores where Sandecker spent a goodly percentage of NUMA’s budget, a constant source of criticism from a small company of his enemies in Congress. Yet this great electronic library had saved enormous sums of money on hundreds of projects, led the way to numerous important discoveries, and helped avert several national disasters that were never reported in the news media.
The man behind this formidable data supermarket was Hiram Yaeger.
“Brilliant” was the compliment most often paid to Yaeger’s mind, while “rumpled” distinguished his appearance. With his graying blond hair tied in a long ponytail, a braided beard, granny spectacles, and frayed, patched Levi’s, Yaeger exuded the aura of a hippie relic. Strangely, he had never been one. He was a decorated, three-tour Vietnam veteran who served as a Navy SEAL. If he had remained in computer design in California and launched his own company, he might have eventually headed a booming corporation and become a very wealthy man. But Yaeger cared nothing for being an entrepreneur. He was a class-act paradox, and one of Pitt’s favorite people.
When Admiral Sandecker offered him the job of command over NUMA’s vast computer data complex with nearly unlimited funding, Yaeger took it, moved his family to a small farm in Sharpsburg, Maryland, and set up shop all within eight days. He put in long hours, running the data systems twenty-four hours a clay, using three shifts of technicians to accumulate and disperse ocean data to and from ongoing American and foreign expeditions around the earth.