Meng visualized a building where the commander and staff to be tested would be isolated. All messages and data traffic would be run in and out through the computer, allowing Meng's program to control the action. After outlining this idea to the chairman, Meng was invited to tour the Pentagon's Emergency Operations Center (EOC), the nerve center for any strategic operation conducted by U.S. military forces. Meng was not surprised to find that the EOC was a data and communications hub very much like what he had proposed.
After two years of struggle, Meng had completed an outline of Strams. By that time the army chief of staff who had authorized the project in the first place had retired, and Meng was faced with all of his work languishing. Meng would not have minded except that he had been drawn into a security quagmire. He could get out of Strams but his work could not. The entire project had been conducted under such a high level of security that every computer program and piece of paper was highly classified. Meng would never be able to use his work in the civilian computer world. Additionally, Meng had found himself increasingly drawn into the challenge of making his simulations more and more realistic. War is perhaps the most chaotic of man's ventures, and trying to simulate it was the greatest programming challenge.
Faced with the prospect of the project being disbanded and having his work lost, Meng had seized an opportunity to breathe life into his creation. During the Libyan crisis, Meng was tasked to war-game the retaliatory missions proposed by the various services. Using borrowed computer time, he ran through the various strike missions and sent his results to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The resulting bombing raid on Tripoli so closely matched what Meng had predicted that interest in Strams was revived. With the blessing of the secretary of defense, work on the facility had begun. The Tunnel, built to approximate the Pentagon's EOC as closely as possible, was placed at Fort Meade to have access to both the vast intelligence system at the National Security Agency and the communications facilities controlled by that organization.
The initial series of Strams exercises in the Tunnel was conducted in 1987. Dubbed Bear Sim-1 through Bear Sim-23, the exercises had focused entirely on military actions against the Soviet Union, ranging from selective nuclear strikes to military, economic, and political sabotage of the Soviet infrastructure by surgical strike missions. Meng continually refined the simulation as he learned what worked and what did not. After ten missions, the entire setup had become so realistic that the secretary of defense had designated the Tunnel as the alternate EOC in case the Pentagon center went off line.
Meng had been forced to run the Strams in sequence using the same target country because of the difficulty designing the opposing forces (OPFOR), or enemy, program of capabilities and possible responses. That overall country program was called the scenario program. The one for the Soviet Union Meng had labeled as Bear. The various U.S. military scenarios based on contingency oplans, or operations plans, were the numbered Sim programs.
When the Bear Sim programs had run their course, Meng was ordered to turn his attention elsewhere. He had then run four scenarios in the Middle East — Lion Sim-1 through Lion Sim-4. At that point, in the fall of 1988, he had been directed to scenario-program a new target country: China.
Meng labored for more than two months to develop the Dragon scenario program. The first Dragon Sim took place in January 1989. Since then the Dragon series, and the whole Strams program, had been receiving less and less attention as peace prevailed around the world. To revive the project, Meng wanted to switch its emphasis to terrorism or to the drug war, and indeed after the two Dragon Sims remaining on the long-range planning calendar, the focus would shift to international terrorism.
Meng was finding scenario programming for the new Medusa series to be most challenging. Since it took more than two months to program a new scenario, he had requested that the last two Dragon missions be scrubbed to allow them to concentrate on the Medusa program, but General Sutton had overruled his civilian counterpart. The units participating had already prepared their operations plans and scheduled the operation. Meng had learned early in this job that the military was not very flexible in its operations.
Meng looked at his calendar. Dragon Sim-13 was starting in two days. The oplan sat in his in box. He hated the thought of flowcharting this exercise, since he wanted to get a jump on the Medusa program. He was finding the new program most interesting, considering the number of terrorist organizations in the world and the almost innumerable ways they might act. It was his greatest challenge yet.
Meng grabbed the oplan for Dragon Sim-13 and glanced through it. An army Special Forces mission, he noted — at least it would not be boring. He'd enjoyed the one Bear Sim mission with the Special Forces people. They had shown quite a bit of imagination in their planning and flexibility in their responses to the challenges presented by the computer, unlike many of the other organizations that had been run through Tunnel 3.
Meng began separating the pages of the oplan, preparing to lay them out on his tables and begin the program flowcharting. He would let his primary assistant, Ron Wilson, do the after-action report for Dragon Sim-12. Meng didn't want to have to deal with that obnoxious air force general anymore. Besides, the sooner he got 13 and 14 out of the way, the sooner he could work on his Medusa program.
Meng glanced at his watch — nearly 4 p.m. He pulled the remote control out of his desk drawer, flicked on the color TV mounted on the far wall of his office, and flipped through the channels until he got to CNN. As the CNN logo rolled across the screen, Meng put aside his work and walked over to stand right in front of the TV. The lead story, as he had hoped, was on the one subject that concerned him more than his work. The screen was filled with the image of the Goddess of Democracy overlooking the hordes of students filling Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
Meng felt his heart catch as he viewed the spectacle. It was a sight he had never expected to see in his lifetime. Moving even closer to the screen as the camera panned the ranks of the students, he tried to examine every face as the camera swept along the sea of protesters. With foreboding Meng listened carefully to the announcer. "There have been unconfirmed reports that elements of the 38th Army have moved into positions around the city of Beijing. Whether these reports are true is not known, nor is it known whether the government will use these troops in an attempt to abort this movement that has been going on for more than seven weeks now."
Meng was aware that someone else had come into his office. He didn't let the new presence distract him as the report continued. "So far, things have been calm. The troops that have been stationed around the square have reacted in a peaceful, almost friendly manner to the crowds."
Meng turned his attention away as the story shifted to some self-proclaimed American expert discussing the situation. Meng didn't need an expert to tell him what was going on. He looked over as Ron Wilson spoke out. "Sort of makes you feel hopeful, doesn't it?"
Meng shook his head. "It fills me with fear more than hope."
Wilson looked at his colleague in surprise. That was the most emotional statement he had ever heard the normally stoic Meng utter. "You don't think this will get resolved peacefully?"
Meng shrugged. "I cannot foresee the future. But I do know that those Old Men in charge will not bow to the desires of a group of students."