Giordino did as he was instructed and jockeyed the joystick, moving the Sea Sleuth on a parallel path with the hull. In another two hundred feet, they came on a second, even larger, hole. This one also indicated an interior blast that had ripped the hull plates outward.

"The section inside the hole is where the air-conditioning equipment was housed," Misty informed them. She examined the deck plans closely. "I see nothing here that would cause such damage."

"Nor I," Pitt agreed.

Giordino steered Sea Sleuth upward slightly until the boat deck came into view. Several of the burned lifeboats had been torn out of their davits during the plunge to the bottom. The rest that remained with the ship were burned and melted beyond description. It didn't seem possible that the most technically advanced ship on the seas could have had all her boats rendered useless in so short a time.

The AUV then passed around the devastated part of the hull that had broken away from the rest of the ship. Pipes, twisted beams, shattered deck plating spread from the aft end like the remains of a burned-out oil refinery. It looked as though the Emerald Dolphin had been wrenched apart by some gargantuan force.

The amidships section was totally unrecognizable as part of a ship. It was nothing but a huge pile of blackened, twisted rubble. The abhorrent sight was left behind as the AUV passed over the bleak ocean landscape again.

"What course to the stern section?" Giordino asked Burch.

The captain examined the digital numbers on the bottom of his guidance monitor. "You should find it three hundred yards on a ninety-degree course west."

"Turning ninety degrees west," Giordino echoed.

Here, the bottom was littered with all kinds of debris, most of it burned beyond recognition. Only scattered heaps of ceramic seemed to have survived. Dishes, bowls and cups, many still in stacks unfolded in the silt like a deck of cards spread across a gray felt table. To the observers in the command center, it seemed macabre that objects so fragile had endured the terrible fire and a drop of almost twenty thousand feet into the abyss without being shattered into thousands of shards.

"Stern coming up," Giordino alerted them, as the debris field was left in the wake of the thrusters, and the final section of the sunken ship began to materialize under the AUV's penetrating lights. Now the horrible nightmare truly came home, as the men and women who had worked so courageously to rescue the passengers and crew from the burning wreck found themselves staring once again at the stern decks where survivors had abandoned the ship down the ropes or jumped into the sea before they were taken aboard the Deep Encounter.

"I never thought I'd have to look at that again," murmured one of the women.

"It's not something easily forgotten," said Pitt. "Come around to the forward section where it separated from amidships."

"Coming around."

"Descend down to five feet above the silt. I want to get a look at her keel."