“Aye, aye, Skipper,” Wilson said, relieved that Cajun was back aboard.
Wilson stepped out onto the well of the catwalk ladder and looked down through the grating. Some 50 feet below, the ship made huge waves as it pushed through the Gulf of Oman. He climbed up a few steps to the starboard catwalk to assess the weather: clear, sunny, warm, gentle wind. Considering the speed the ship was making, Wilson was surprised by the wind and figured it around 20 knots… and out of the south since the ship was headed north by west. He walked aft and found the small ladder that led to the flight deck. He kept his head down, climbed the steps and crouched low in order to step over the deck edge coaming and onto the deck. Still ducking, he moved under a Hornet horizontal stabilator and moved along the aircraft, avoiding obstacles such as tie-downs, trailing edge flaps, and the external fuel tanks hanging on the wings. The engine turbine blades turned freely in the breeze. Their steady chatter created the ever-present wind chime of the flight deck.
He had eaten lunch only a short time ago, but this was the first time he had been outside that day. Across the deck he saw a squadron maintenance crew working on an aircraft; to his left a plane captain stood in a Hornet cockpit as he polished the windscreen. Dozens of joggers ran up and down the 1,000-foot flight deck as they followed a deformed racetrack pattern that avoided parked aircraft and yellow flight deck tractors. He spied Smoke and Lieutenant “Blade” Cutter, the squadron strike fighter tactics instructor, moving in long strides — down the deck and with the wind. A leisurely no-fly day on the flight deck.
He walked aft behind a Raven jet; his trained eye scanned its skin for signs of corrosion. When he found an area between two aircraft where he could stand with an unobstructed view of the horizon, he looked across the Strait of Hormuz. Miles to starboard — Wilson estimated over 20 miles — he saw the shadow of a ridgeline. Just visible in the distance. Iran.
Each time he had been to the Gulf, Wilson was struck by the desolate and forbidding landscape. To him, the entire Arabian Peninsula was simply inhospitable. Centuries of crushing heat and simoon winds had baked and eroded the land into one of the most continuous bodies of sand in the world. When he looked at the charts in the ready room, Wilson noted one could go
