Dragon (Dirk Pitt 10)

"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 offer

ed 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.

Pitt found Yaeger at his desk, which sat on a raised stage and revolved in the center of the vast room.

Yaeger had it specially constructed so he could keep an all-seeing eye on his billion dollar domain. He was eating a pizza and drinking a nonalcoholic beer when he spied Pitt and jerked to his feet with a broad smile.

"Dirk, you're back."

Pitt climbed the stairs to Yaeger's altar, as his staff called it behind his back, and they shook hands warmly. "Hello, Hiram."

"Sorry to hear about Soggy Acres," Yaeger said seriously, what I'm real happy to see you're still among the living. God, you look like a felon just out of solitary. Sit down and rest yourself."

Pitt gazed longingly at the pizza. "You couldn't spare a slice, could you?"

"You bet. Help yourself. I'll send out for another. Like a fake beer to wash it down? Sorry I can't give you the real stuff, but you know the rules."

Pitt sat and put away a large pizza plus two slices from Yaeger's, and three beers without alcohol the computer genius kept in a small refrigerator built into his desk. Between bites, Pitt filled Yaeger in on the events leading up to his rescue, stopping short of his flight to Hawaii.

Yaeger listened with interest and then smiled like a skeptical judge on a divorce trial. "Made a quick trip home, I see."

"Something's come up."

Yaeger laughed. "Here we go. You didn't rush back to eat my pizza. What's swirling in that evil mind of yours?"

"I'm expecting a relative of mine, Dr. Percy Nash, to arrive in a few minutes. Percy was one of the scientists on the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bomb. A former director on the Atomic Energy Commission, now retired. Together with your supercomputer intelligence and Percy's knowledge of nuclear weaponry, I want to create a scenario."

"A conceptualization."

"A rose, et cetera."

"Involving what?"

"A smuggling operation."

"What are we smuggling?"