Kevin Miller - Raven One

Wilson opened his eyes wide and realized he was inhaling and exhaling long and deep through his nose, his neck bathed in sweat. He rolled over and looked at the time on the digital clock: 4:37. Light streamed through small openings in the passageway bulkhead, and he heard footsteps walking past his stateroom door. Weed snored in his rack. The air conditioning blower thrummed as normal.

A nightmare. He had fought Hariri and lost — again. Gunned! A tracking guns kill! But worse than that, worse than the image of tumbling to his death, was the fact that he had given up . Jim Wilson did not give up, had never quit anything in his life. It was part of the fighter pilot creed: Never give up . You never give up on the count, never give up on a putt, never give up in a guns defense situation. That he gave up in his dreams scared Wilson, and as he lay in bed slowing his breathing, he thought about the implications. Was he afraid? The OPSO of VFA-64? The Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor who taught half the guys in the air wing about basic fighter maneuvers, about the importance of keeping sight, about last-ditch maneuvers to defeat a guns attack? Who was better than Flip Wilson in a 1v1? Hariri? The combat-proven Iranian flying a monster jet that had power and an ability to point the nose unlike anything Wilson had ever seen before?

Was he afraid?

Wilson lay on his back in the darkness and looked up at the bottom of Weed’s rack for the next hour.

Approaching midnight, the guided missile frigate USS Richard Best cut through the murky waters of Hormuz on an outbound transit, her gas turbine engine emitting a steady high-pitched whine as she proceeded at 15 knots. In her darkened bridge, soft red lights used to preserve night vision and the green symbols displayed on the radar repeater, illuminated a group of shadowy figures. The watch team peered into the gloom — the haze reducing visibility to three miles — and plotted the course through the strait using radar and GPS navigation. Oman was 10 miles to the south, and the barren coastline offered few sharp objects or known lights from which to shoot bearings for fixes, even if the night had offered one of those rare moments of clear visibility.

The fracas between the Valley Forge FA-18s and the Iranian jet was several weeks past, and things appeared to be settling down between the two countries, now that the carrier was operating in the Gulf of Oman. However, what the Airedales did mattered little to the crew of Richard Best . After four long months in the North Arabian Gulf guarding the damned Iraqi oil platforms and dodging the lumbering tankers that seemed to have no one on the bridge, they were one month away from San Diego and home. The crew was more than ready to say good-bye to this hellhole.

Ready, but only after they passed one more challenge — a night transit of Hormuz. Following the shoot-down incident, NAVCENT had directed night transits of Hormuz in an effort both to minimize and to conceal the American presence among the north/south traffic on the waterway, much of it potentially hostile. Best’s captain, Commander Mark Albright, blond and athletic at 39 years old, sat up straight in his chair, trying to discern the faint lights off his port bow. His left hand nervously stroked his chin. His helicopter was down with a transmission-line leak, and he wanted it airborne, scouting for contacts ahead of him in the outbound lane. He wanted, and needed, it now . He picked up the sound-powered phone to the flight deck.

“Yes, sir,” answered one of his aviation lieutenants.

“What’s the story, Eric?”

“Sir, we found the leak, and the chief is patching it up. We’re going to run it to make sure it holds pressure… 10 minutes, sir.”

“ Expedite! I need it airborne right away.”

“Yes, sir.”

Albright cradled the receiver, and queried the watch team. “Range to the skunk ?”

“Eight thousand yards, sir,” the officer of the deck replied.

“CPA?” Albright could just make out a white light on a masthead, stationary on the black horizon, as he waited for a reply.

“One thousand yards. He’s tracking south at 3 knots,” the OOD responded.

Dammit , Albright thought. From the other side of the bridge the young conning officer under training gave a command to the helm to maintain their track in the outbound lane. “Come right, steer course zero-seven-seven.”

“Come right, steer course zero-seven-seven, aye,” the 20-year-old helmsman answered. Moments later, he added, “Ma’am, my rudder is right five degrees… coming to new course zero-seven-seven.”

“Very well.”

Albright assessed the situation. The unidentified surface contact was tracking left to right and closing his ship. Not knowing what it was and with no airborne aircraft to tell him, he wanted to give it a wider berth. The only problem was that shoal water ahead on his right allowed him only so much sea room.

He spoke in a low voice to his officer of the deck who was standing next to him. “John, let’s give this guy some more room. What’s the CPA if you put us on the southern border of the lane?”

After consulting the radar repeater, Lieutenant John Reynolds answered, “Three thousand yards, sir.”

Albright grunted. “All right, give me that and some change — as much as you can. Call him bridge-to-bridge.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” the officer of the deck replied, as he charted a course to comply. Within 10 seconds, he turned to the conning officer. “Conning officer, come right to new course one-one-zero.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Helm , right standard rudder, steady course one-one-zero.”

The helmsman turned the wheel while watching the rudder position indicator and repeated verbatim, “Right standard rudder, steady course one-one-zero, aye.”

Just then the phone talker piped up. “Sir, signal bridge lookout reports surface contact bearing three-three-five relative, range 7,000 yards as a dhow, sir.”

“Very well,” Albright said. A dhow, he thought as he studied the solitary light in the distance. But who’s in it? And what are they doing?

“Are they inside the lane, John?” he asked.

“Just outside, sir, but should cross into it in a few minutes.”

“ Rog ,” Albright replied.

He was tired, tired of four months in these restricted waters with obstacles everywhere, unidentified threats all around: above… and below the surface… sometimes even on his bridge in the form of junior officers who were for the most part competent, but who could suffer, without warning, a momentary lapse of judgment. Albright was on edge, and had to control himself so as not to alarm the crew.

Six hours to sunup, where we’ll be pointing south and steaming fair into the Indian Ocean, Albright thought. He looked forward to opening her up to flank speed and leaving a wake behind him pointing aft at this god-forsaken patch of water he’d spent years of his life operating in. Never got a summer Med cruise, never got a Caribbean swing. Every single deployment of his 18-year career had taken him here .

“ I hate this fucking place ,” Albright muttered under his breath, staring ahead into the black night. Again, he rubbed the stubble on his chin.

“Sir?” the OOD inquired.

“What?” Albright answered, surprised he had spoken out loud. “Oh, nothing.”

In the pilothouse of the dhow, the master walked to the port bridge wing and stepped outside. He looked down at a cluster of eight speedboats, each crewed by three or four Revolutionary Guard irregulars. The motley fleet of boghammars , as they were known to the Americans, consisted of everything from small, open-cockpit cigarette boats to a glorified skiff with an outboard motor. The boats were armed with RPGs, recoilless rifles, and sometimes frame-mounted mortars, with other light infantry weapons aboard. He motioned them to cast off their lines from the dhow and from one another, but warned them to keep close and out of sight of the American frigate. He then went inside and bumped the diesel throttles forward with his open palm. The engines growled deeper as the dhow increased speed on a course to intercept.