Three men lay more than a hundred yards from the thick torn metal that once covered the top forward ballast tank, they were dead.

In the gathering darkness, in the roughening seas around the ship, the bodies of four other men were being carried away on the current, three of them never to be found. Inside the gray powder-coated ballast tank, burned and injured one man lived. He would not survive his injuries.

The last sound he heard, if he heard it, before the massive explosion may have been the quiet pop of a light-bulb breaking...