For more than a week, the 576 passengers aboard the Soviet cruise liner Maxim % Gorky had been sailing through the North Atlantic near Iceland, marveling at the dramatic Arctic scenery. Just after midnight on their ninth day out -- it was foggy, yet still light in the land of the midnight sun -- the 25,000-ton ship struck a partly submerged ice floe. Three gashes opened in the starboard forward hull below the waterline, one of them 18 ft. long.
At impact there was a thundering shudder, followed by the wail of the ship's siren. In one of the Maxim Gorky's...
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