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."

The Sea Sleuth followed Giordino's commands and crawled around the bottom of the stern that sat nearly upright. Very cautiously, inching over and around debris, Giordino stopped the vehicle and hovered it at a point where the ship's stern section was ripped open. The massive steel keel was free of the silt. They could all plainly see that it was warped and curled downward where it had been torn in half.

"Only explosives could have done that," Pitt commented.

"It's beginning to look like her bottom was blasted out," said Giordino. "Her internal structure, weakened by the fire and the blast, broke apart from the increasing water pressure during her fall to the bottom."

"That would explain her abrupt sinking," added Burch. "According to the tugboat captain, she went down so fast she almost took his boat with it."

"Which leads to the conclusion that someone had a motive for setting the ship afire and then sinking her in the deepest part of the ocean so her wreckage couldn't be examined."

"A sound theory," said Jim Jakubek, the team's hydrographer. "But where is the hard evidence? How can it be proven in court?"

Pitt shrugged. "The simple answer is, it can't."

"So where does that leave us?" asked Misty.