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immune to loud noise, unlike the sonar systems, though the gravimeter couldn’t detect moving objects.
    Jeffrey next called up a copy of the main sonar waterfall displays. Lighter solid streaks marked man-made contacts; aircraft could be detected if they came close enough, from their engine sounds passing down through the water. Intermittent bright spots, or a series of dots, indicated whale calls: humpbacks and grays were especially common, feeding on the plankton blooms that nourished these waters at this time of year.
    Last, he added to his crowded screens the pictures from the ship’s hull-mounted photonic sensors, set in passive image-intensification mode. The ocean outside Challenger was murky, due to the rich biologics and their organic waste, and because of erosion silt from heavy runoff as snow and ice melted on the watersheds of the continents looming to both sides.
    He was satisfied for now. These readouts gave him the best possible overall situational awareness as the ship approached the Russian channel through the Bering Strait.
    Bell strode into the control room, nodding to his commodore as he passed. “Officer of the Deck, I have the deck and the conn.”
    “Captain has the deck and the conn, aye-aye.” All the watchstanders acknowledged, too.
    “Chief of the Watch,” Bell ordered, “on the sound-powered phones, rig for ultraquiet and go to silent battle stations.” The shipwide public-address system, the 1MC, was much too noisy.
    In moments, people began dashing into Control, relieving those at some positions. The chief of the boat came in, a salty bulldog of a master chief, Latino, from Jersey City, in his early forties the oldest man aboard. Everyone called him “COB”—like the word “cob,” not an acronym—as if that was his only name. He took over as battle stations chief of the watch, at the two-man ship control station at the front end of the space. The helmsman on watch next to him didn’t move; Lieutenant (j.g.) Radesh Patel, from Engineering, was the newly designated battle stations helmsman. A former Western Conference football linebacker and physics major, even seated he was a head taller than COB. Normally jovial, and a wicked chess player, Patel had gone from damage control assistant to a very different sort of responsibility—one that would be like doing football, chess, and physics all at once.
    Bell took the left seat of the two-man desk-high command console at the center of Control. Sessions assumed the right seat. Metallic snicks sounded throughout the space, men buckling their seat belts, which reminded Jeffrey to do the same.
    He set up one more small window on his lower screen, so he could instant-message with Meltzer through the LAN. This way they could converse, commodore and executive assistant, without distracting Bell and Sessions as they fought the ship.
    Lieutenant Torelli hurried in and stood in the aisle overseeing his first team at the four target tracking and weapons consoles that lined Control’s starboard bulkhead. A nondescript lieutenant (j.g.), the new sonar officer—Alan Finch, from Peoria, Illinois—stood in the opposite aisle. The forwardmost of his seven consoles, lining the port bulkhead, was taken by the most seasoned sonar supervisor, Senior Chief Brendan O’Hanlon.
    Meltzer entered and stood at the navigation plotting table with the assistant navigator and several of their people.
    The phone talker, wearing his heavy sound-powered intercom rig, listened on his big headphones. He answered on the bulky mike that made its own electricity from the vibrations as he spoke, then looked up. “Captain, Phone Talker. All compartments report manned and ready.”
    “Very well, Phone Talker,” Bell said. “Chief of the Watch, rig ship for red.”
    COB acknowledged. The lighting switched from bright white to a subdued ruby glow. It gave the control room an intimate feel, and helped remind people in some other spaces to maintain ultraquiet. Men blinked to