(USS Coral Sea, underway, Central Caribbean)
Wilson climbed up the ladder steps in his flight gear, carrying his helmet bag in one hand and steadying himself on the rail with the other. At the top, he reached the O-4 level and undogged the hatch that led to the flight deck and stepped outside.
A week had passed since they had begun Assured Promise, and the ship and airwing were in a routine. First launch at noon. Last recovery at midnight. Lots of routine surface search around the ship interspersed with fun intercept hops against the Colombians who, like the Americans, were honing their air-combat maneuvering skills against a dissimilar adversary. The Kfirs were hard to see until the merge, and the Colombian he had fought yesterday had a good understanding of his jet to fight it slow. However, the Kfirs were no match for the Hornets. When not “fighting” the Colombians, the airwing pilots had scoured the surface around Coral Maru. The ship knew what every passing vessel was and where it was going, and the airwing pilots were competing against each other for the best still pictures of the same ships. As the merchants plodded through the Caribbean in the vicinity of the carrier, the American jets buzzed around them like troublesome insects. The “kids” in those cockpits found ways to compete in everything.
According to the schedule, Coral Sea was to remain here in this same piece of water for the next two weeks, with Wilson and the other airwing pilots doing routine searches and bumping heads with the Colombians while the nukes below carried out their arcane engineering drills. The daily repetition was like Groundhog Day, and, as Wilson walked to his jet parked on the fantail, he wondered once again why they were doing this basic meat-and-potatoes training here and not closer to home. Air Force and Marine fighters based in the Southeast could give them better flight profiles and provide several overland targets for training. In fact, the carrier could be in port for much of the training and drills. And why do the reactor guys care where the ship is anyway?
Weed and the test guys seemed to be busy, and that was the biggest mystery of all. Why test this stuff here when the test infrastructure was back in home waters? Sending Coral Sea here, and keeping it in one area for weeks at a time, was strange. He could only surmise it was to placate the ego of the four-star Combatant Commander in Miami who wanted some Navy assets to control. Or some regional State Department initiative: