The death watch was almost over.

The last survivors had been taken off the ship in the pinkish

light of dawn. The captain and a standby crew stayed on the ship until the last minute to keep the liner from being claimed as salvage. Now they, too, slid down ropes into lifeboats.

As the warm morning sun climbed into a cloudless sky, the ship’s list became ever sharper. By 9:50 A.M. she lay on her starboard side at a fortyfivedegree angle. The bow was partially submerged.

The Stockholm hove to about three miles away, her prow a twisted mass of metal. Debris littered the oily water. Two destroyer escorts and four Coast Guard cutters stood by Planes and helicopters circled overhead.

The end came around ten o’clock. Eleven hours after the collision, the Doria rolled completely onto her right side. The empty lifeboats that had defied all the crew’s efforts to launch them floated away on their free of their davits at last. Foamy geysers exploded around the perimeter of the ship as air trapped in the hull blew out under pressure through the portholes.

Sunlight glinted on the huge rudder and the wet blades of the twin nineteenfoot propellers that had sent her steaming proudly across the ocean. Within minutes water engulfed the bow, the stern lifted at a steep angle, and the ship slid beneath the sea as if she’d been sucked under by the powerful tentacles of a gigantic sea monster.

As she sank, more seawater rushed into the hull and. filled compartments and staterooms. The pressure tearing apart metal and rivets produced that spooky, almost human moaning that used to send chills up the spines of submariners who had just sunk a ship.

The ship plunged toward the bottom in almost the same angle and position at which she sank. Two hundred twentyfive feet below, she came to a jarring stop, then settled levelly onto her sandy bier on her starboard side. Bubbles seething from hundreds of openings transformed the normally dark water around the wreck to a light blue.

Rubbish whirled around a tremendous vortex for at least fifteenteen minutes. As the water returned to normal, a Coast Guard boat moved in and dropped a marker buoy where the ship had been.

Gone from the world’s sight was the twomilliondollar cargo of wines, fine fabrics, furniture, and olive oil.

Gone, too, was the incredible artworkthe murals and tapestries, the bronze statue of the old admiral.

And locked deep in the ship’s interior was the black armored truck with the bulletriddled bodies and the deadly secret they had died for.

The tall blond man came .down the gangplank of the Ile de France onto Pier 84 and made his way to the customs shed. Wearing a black wool sailor’s cap and a long overcoat, he was indistinguishable from the hundreds of passengers who swarmed onto the deck .