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CHAPTER 26
U.S. NAVY CENTRAL COMMAND (USNAVCENT)
BAHRAIN
FRIDAY; 18 MAY
1025 hours (10:25 AM)
TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’
Admiral Vincent Rogers, Commander Fifth Fleet, leaned back in his
chair and squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and index finger.
The ever-present stack of paperwork on his desk seemed to grow every
time he took his eyes off it for a few seconds. Maybe it was reproducing
itself through some mechanism of parthenogenesis that had heretofore lain
dormant in paper products—perhaps a recessive gene hidden deep in the
paper’s DNA that had somehow been activated by the stifling Middle
Eastern heat.
Rogers ran his fingers through the iron-gray stubble of his flattop
haircut. Eight days shy of his fifty-seventh birthday, he was an old man to
the Sailors he commanded, but—to his own way of thinking—he was far
too young to be chained to a desk full of reports, operational summaries,
force projection studies, feasibility matrices, and whatever the hell else had
found its way into his Urgent stack.
There were two quiet knocks on his door.
Admiral Rogers sat up. “Enter.”
The door opened, and his chief of staff, Commander Troy Moody,
stepped into the office. Moody carried a yellow folder in his left hand.
Under the color-coding system used by the USNAVCENT staff, yellow
was reserved for SITREPs, or situational reports, from ships assigned to
Fifth Fleet’s command.
The admiral’s eyes stayed locked on the yellow folder. “Say, Troy, I
was just wondering … whatever happened to that paperless Navy we were
supposed to be headed for? Remember that?” He pointed to his desktop
computer and then to his laptop computer and finally to his palm-top. “As
I recall,” he said, “these were supposed to get rid of those.” He pointed to
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