"Wil
l you help us?" asked Hagen.
Pitt looked at Clark. "How much time is left?"
"Roughly sixteen hours."
Pitt rose from his chair and began pacing the floor, his instincts beginning to sift through the maze of information. After a minute of silence as Hagen and Clark watched him expectantly, he suddenly leaned across the table and said, "I need a map of the dock area."
One of Clark's staff quickly produced one.
Pitt smoothed it out on the table and peered at it. "You say you can't alert the Cubans?" he asked as he studied the docking facilities of the bay.
"No," Hagen replied. "Their government is riddled with Soviet agents. If we were to warn them, they'd ignore it and squelch our search operation."
"What about Castro?"
Penetrating his security and warning him is my job," said Hagen.
"And the United States receives the blame."
"Soviet disinformation will see to that."
"May I have a pencil, please?"
Clark obliged and sat back quietly while Pitt made a circle on the map.
"My guess is the ship with the bomb is docked in the Antares Inlet."
Clark's eyebrows raised. "How could you know that?"
"The obvious place for an explosion to cause the most damage. The inlet cuts almost into the heart of the city."
"Good thinking," said Clark. "Two of the suspected ships are docked there. The other is across the bay."
"Give me a rundown on the vessels?"
Clark examined the page of the document pertaining to the ship arrivals. "Two belong to the Soviet Union merchant fleet. The third sails under Panamanian registry and is owned by a corporation run by Cuban anti-Castro exiles."
"The last is a phony front set up by the KGB," said Hagen. "They'll claim the Cuban exiles are an arm of the CIA, making us the villains of the destruction. There won't be a nation in the world who will believe our noninvolvement."
"A sound plan," said Clark. "They'd hardly use one of their own vessels to carry the bomb."
"Yes, but why destroy two ships and their cargoes for no purpose?" asked Pitt.
"I admit it doesn't add up."
"Ships' names and cargoes?"
Clark extracted another page from the document and quoted from it. "The Ozero Zaysan, Soviet cargo ship carrying military supplies and equipment. The Ozero Baykai, a 200,000-ton oil tanker. The bogus Cuban-operated ship is the Amy Bigalow, bulk carrier with a cargo of 25,000 tons of ammonium nitrate."
Pitt stared at the ceiling as if mesmerized. "The oil tanker, is she the one moored across the bay?"
"Yes, at the oil refinery."
"Have any of the cargoes been unloaded?"
Clark shook his head. "There has been no activity around the two cargo carriers, and the tanker still sits low in the water."