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light enough to see out into the dry streambed where the helicopter was supposed to land. At exactly 0658, Riley stepped out onto the rocks under the watchful guns of his team and turned on his strobe light. Light flickering, he waited. The appointed time came and went. At 0702 Riley shut off his light and came back to the team.
    Exfiltration was supposed to be a highly coordinated and exactly timed event. A window of two minutes prior and two minutes after the designated time was all that was allowed for security reasons. In this case, however, Riley mused, the highly coordinated part seemed lacking.
    Another blown exfiltration because the helicopter didn't come. Since he'd been on Team 3, Special Forces Detachment-Korea (DET-K), Riley had not been exfiltrated on time on more than half his training missions, due to helicopters not showing up on time or at all. It worried him. He'd been told by other, more experienced Special Forces NCOs about helicopter pilots in Vietnam who had flown through all sorts of obstacles, both natural and man-made, to pick them up. But in this peacetime army, it seemed that the birds wouldn't fly if there was a cloud in the sky.
    Riley heard the muttered curses of the team members as they realized that they had a fifteen-kilometer walk back to the truck pickup point. God help us if we ever have to do this for real and those birds don't show, Riley thought. We'd be walking a hell of a lot farther than fifteen kilometers.
    Fort Meade, Maryland Thursday, 1 June, 1800 Zulu Thursday, 1 June, 1:00 p.m. Local Meng pointed at a stack of papers on one of his desks. "Those are your copies of the oplans for the units involved, along with my initial mission assessments."
    Ron Wilson looked at the bulging stack with little enthusiasm. After just having finished the debrief on Dragon Sim-12, he wasn't thrilled about jumping right into the next mission. In his opinion, Doctor Meng was pushing the whole project too quickly. Wilson knew that Meng wanted to get onto the Medusa scenario, but this pace was too much. "What's the time line, Doctor?"
    Meng didn't even bother turning. "Top sheet."
    Wilson looked at the schedule with dismay. "Inbrief tomorrow?"
    Meng looked up from where he was still flowcharting the mission. "The operation starts here tomorrow morning. I'll inbrief the strategic mission commander and his staff then. You can relax for a little while. I want you to look over the Medusa scenario for me anyway. You'll pick up your shift day after tomorrow on Sim-13."
    Wilson sighed as he started sorting through the pile of papers, all stamped top secret. He was getting very tired of all this work. His responsibility in the Strams exercises was to back up Meng. The two of them usually split the time for the exercises, each spending twelve hours on duty.
    As he started reading the first oplan, Wilson saw that this next mission was going to involve special operations aircraft and troops. That meant the majority of the actions on their end would be to monitor the message traffic between the strategic mission commander at Fort Meade and the forward operating base (FOB) that would launch the actual mission, at least until it became time for the part on the ground to begin. Then the computer would kick in, generating the simulated message traffic. For the people back at Fort Meade, the whole operation looked realistic and continuous from start to finish.
    Wilson looked up. "Are we going to offset the aircraft and the team

    involved?" An offset meant sending aircraft and troops on a mission similar to the one in the oplan but in a local training area rather than the target country.
    Meng looked up briefly from his work. "No. Once the team gives its briefback, we go to the computer exclusively. The offset didn't work well in the Bear Sim with Special Forces. The computer can do a much better job than the offset. Besides, we're not testing the team. We're testing the people in Tunnel 3." Meng turned back to his