"I don't follow you."

"The same question that's on all our minds," explained Burch. "What motive would a madman have for murdering twenty-five hundred helpless men, women and children?"

"As soon as she's towed into Sydney Harbor, an army of marine fire insurance company investigators will sift through the ashes and find the answers."

"They won't find much to sift."

"Don't underestimate them," said Burch. "Those guys are good. If anyone can ferret out the cause, they can."

Pitt turned and smiled at Burch. "I hope you're right, Skipper. I'm just glad it's not on my shoulders."

By the end of the week, Pitt would be proved wrong. Never would he have predicted that he would be the one called upon to solve the mystery.

The first tug to reach the Emerald Dolphin was the Quest Marine Offshore Company's Audacious. At 190 feet in length, with a beam of 58 feet, she was one of the largest tugs in the world. Her twin Hunnewell diesel engines provided a total of 9,800 horsepower to drive her propulsion units. Since she'd had the advantage of being stationed in Wellington, the closest port, she had beat out two other big tugs from Brisbane.

The Audacious' master had run her hard, like an overweight greyhound after the rabbit, homing in on the position updates provided by the Aussie missile cruiser. He'd kept radio silence during the race across the South Pacific, a routine ploy among tugboat captains racing toward the same wreck, because the winner received the Lloyds Open Form for salvage and 25 percent of the stricken vessel's value.

Now that Captain Jock McDermott was in sight of the smoldering cruise liner and the Australian guided-missile cruiser, he opened contact with the Blue Seas Cruise Lines officials, who after half an hour of bargaining accepted the "no cure, no pay" contract, naming Quest Marine as the principal salvage contractor for what was left of the Emerald Dolphin.

Closing on the liner that still glowed red, McDermott and his crew were stunned at the devastation. A pile of incinerated rubble floating on a restless turquoise sea was all that was left of the once-beautiful cruise liner. She looked like a photo of Hiroshima after the horrendous firestorm from the atomic bomb: blackened, misshapen and shriveled.

"She ain't worth nothin' more than scrap," spat the Audacious's first officer, Herm Brown, a former professional rugby player who'd gone to sea when his knees gave out. He stood under a shaggy mane of blond hair, his beefy legs showing under his shorts and a hairy chest visible through the unbuttoned shirt pulled taut by his shoulders.

McDermott pulled his spectacles down over his nose and peered over the lenses. A sandy-haired Scotsman with a narrow beaklike nose and hazy green eyes, he had spent twenty years in oceangoing tugs. But for the jutting jaw, and eyes that seemed to focus like light beams, he might have passed for Bob Cratchit, Scrooge's bookkeeper. "The directors of the company won't be happy with this job, that's for sure. I never thought a ship that big could burn itself into nothing more than a heap of soot."