What happens when a war game stops being a game? That’s the question I built Dragon Sim-13 around.

As a Green Beret, I spent years training for missions that we hoped would never go live. We rehearsed, planned, and war-gamed scenarios with deadly seriousness—because the line between exercise and execution can vanish in a heartbeat. That experience is the backbone of this book. In fact, my A-Team conducted a mission against a pipeline exactly like the one in this book.

Dragon Sim-13 follows Dr. Meng, a Chinese-born scientist who fled the Cultural Revolution and now runs STRAMS, an ultra-classified simulation system buried beneath Fort Meade, Maryland. His job is to war-game America’s most sensitive military operations against China. Dragon Sim-13 is just another exercise on the calendar—a Special Forces team led by Dave Riley rehearsing an infiltration that should never leave the screen.

Then Tiananmen Square erupts. The real-world crisis in Beijing changes everything, and suddenly the hypothetical becomes operational. The men trained to fight on paper find themselves facing a mission that was never supposed to go live.

I wrote this book because I lived in that space between simulation and reality. I knew what it felt like to plan operations against real targets, knowing that one phone call could turn a training exercise into the real thing. The tradecraft in these pages is authentic. The moral dilemmas soldiers face when caught between duty and conscience—those are real too.

If you like your thrillers smart, grounded, and dangerously plausible, Dragon Sim-13 was written for you.