Rain of Doom

2

Rain beat down on their backs. Wind-driven waves splashed into the inflated boat. Leaning over plastic oars, Able Team and their Miskito contraallies rowed for the harbor of La Laguna de Perlas, on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua.

The Miskito contras, descendants of the indigenous peoples of Central America, accompanied Able Team as contract soldiers — mercenaries. They would invest the thousands of dollars Able Team paid for this night raid in their continuing war against the Sandinistas. Like their ancestors who fought the Spanish Conquistadors, the young soldiers from northeast Nicaragua fought for the survival of their culture. In the sixties and seventies, they fought the fascist Somoza regime's attempts to seize their lands. Now they fought the tyranny of the Soviet Sandinistas, who had initiated a program of forced collectivization of the Miskito tribes.

For Miskitos, tonight's raid represented only one more skirmish in a centuries-old struggle.

North of the dinghy, two red beacons flashed, marking the entrance to the harbor. When the plastic boat rose on a swell, the scattered lights of the town became visible. But in the darkness and falling rain, nothing of the shore could be seen.

The six men aboard the tiny dinghy heard waves breaking. Without a word, they rowed deeper and faster. The time of greatest danger was upon them. Upon the open water, their black-suited forms and black boat concealed by the night, they faced little chance of being spotted by the Sandinistas. But in the white foam of the breaking waves or on the pale sand of the beach, a sharp-eyed sentry might easily see them and sound the alarm.

A swell lifted the boat. Groaning with the exertion, all six men pulled in unison. The swell passed, then broke a few meters ahead. They drove the oars down again and pulled hard. Another swell lifted the boat. The men pulled their oars through the water in unison.

The boat flexed as the wave crested, then shot toward the beach, skipping over backwash. White foam engulfed the men. Blinded by the churning water, they continued toward the beach.

When they neared the sand, two men dashed toward the wind-whipped palms, pulling the dinghy. The three members of Able Team and a Miskito, a teenager who moved with the calm and efficiency of a career soldier, removed the heavy gear from the boat. The Miskito teenager stayed with the boat. Gadgets, Blancanales and Lyons grunted across the beach to join the two lookouts. Then the lookouts advanced into the palms.

Able Team waited, weapons in hand, packs of munitions and electronics on their backs. Warm rain streamed down their faces and fatigues. Blancanales looked back and saw the oval shadow of another boat in the breaking waves. He nudged his partners.

"That's number two," Gadgets whispered.

"There's number three." Lyons pointed a hundred meters to the south. Two dark forms sprinted from the waves to the palms.

Three boats had left the cruiser offshore. Able Team, laden with equipment, needed the help of three Miskito soldiers. The two other boats each carried four men.

In seconds, the lookouts sent an all-clear code on their radios. The men at the boats dragged the inflated crafts into the palms and camouflaged them with palm fronds and brush, then returned to the shore with branches and whisked away the marks of the boats and every bootprint.

Able Team unpacked and distributed equipment. Two contrasand the sentries who would remain with the boats received Pocketscopes. The passive night sights used second-generation image-intensification electronics to amplify the ambient light of the stars and moon.

As the Miskitos checked the scopes, Blancanales switched on the NVS-700 Starlite scope fitted to his M-16/M-203 over-and-under assault rifle/grenade launcher. He scanned the darkness, the light-amplification electronics turning the rainy night to brilliant green-and-white day. Then he slipped a suppressor over the muzzle of the M-16 and jammed in a magazine of Interdynamics reduced-charge 5.56mm cartridges. Though Blancanales, Gadgets and Lyons all carried silenced pistols, the combination of the Starlite and Interdynamics suppressor kit gave them the capability of invisible, silent attack over a range of two hundred meters.

Gadgets checked the multifrequency coded impulse generator. Tonight, though he would not even carry a rifle, he had the greatest responsibility. The Sandinistas had garrisoned hundreds of soldiers in the region: the satellite photos revealed barracks near the workshops and docks of the harbor. If a sentry or guard dog saw Able Team slip into town, the latter risked pursuit by a battalion of Nicaraguan soldiers commanded by Cuban and Soviet officers. Gadgets could not stop a battalion with the electronics and radio-triggered claymores he carried, but he could slow one down. Other than his heavy gear, he carried only a knife and a silenced Beretta 93-R.

Impatient, Lyons waited for the others, his eyes piercing the darkness. He carried his standard equipment: a four-inch Colt Python in a shoulder holster, a modified-for-silence Colt Government Model and a Konzak selective-fire 12-gauge assault shotgun. He had no faith in electronics, only in firepower.

"Ready to go," Gadgets whispered. He passed Lyons a backpack. Lyons shouldered it and stood, the weight of his weapons, ammunition and twenty kilos of explosive and steel forcing him to stoop. The pack contained ten of Gadgets's claymore mines and a reserve multifrequency transmitter.

Led by one of the young contraswho scanned the darkness with a night viewer, they moved along the beach. Wind thrashed the palms, covering the noise of their boots on the sand. Three times Gadgets stopped to lash claymores to the trees.

Beacon lights marked the entry to the lagoon, a kilometer-long spit of low hills and palms designed by East German engineers to create a harbor for freighters and patrol boats. The beacon on the eastern side was mounted on a steel tower. On the western side, where a steep hill descended almost to the beach, the beacon sat on a two-story concrete building. Gunports overlooked the lagoon and the passage into the Caribbean.

Looking through the night viewer, one of the Miskitos spotted two sentries. They stood in the building, scanning the storm-whipped ocean with binoculars. The contrapointman went flat in the sand and motioned Blancanales forward.

Rain streaming off his eyebrows, he watched shadows pace inside the beacon house. The revolution of the beacon light illuminated the night in a sweeping section of diffuse red. When the light beamed toward him, Blancanales saw nothing. When it beamed away, the soft red of the falling rain backlit the sentries in the beacon house. He saw three of them.

Replacing the caps on his Starlite scope, Blancanales crawled back to his partners. "No problem..."

Leaving the beach, they cut inland along a trail evidently used by patrols. Gadgets positioned another claymore. The trail twisted up the hill. As they approached the ridge, the pointman went flat and crept forward. A minute passed. Then the pointman motioned them on.

The ridge had been cleared of palms and brush. To the east, at the end of the ridge, was the beacon house. To the west, the naked ridge vanished into the night. To the north was the village and harbor.

Only poor fishermen and their families lived in La Laguna, no more than a line of shacks and a dirt road along a rain-flooded creek. But two hundred meters away, on the other side of a chain-link fence and security lights, Cuban and ComBloc advisors enjoyed the modern comforts of the harbor complex.

Prefabricated barracks housed the Cubans and ComBloc nationals. Diesel generators provided electricity to light the barracks, offices and warehouses near the piers. On three long piers, lit as bright as day by mercury-arc lamps, Able Team saw pairs of sentries in black plastic raincoats patrolling.

Despite the storm, a freighter with deck-mounted cranes was being unloaded. Workmen in bright yellow rain slickers attached cables to cargo containers, which were being hoisted onto diesel trucks with flatbed trailers on the dock.

Blancanales pointed to the junction of the creek and the lagoon. Then he traced the creek through the harbor-complex fence. Exactly as the anti-Soviet agents in La Laguna had described and as satellite photography had confirmed, the flooding creek provided an entry to the harbor facilities.

"The clerk got it right," Lyons admitted.

As the others surveyed the harbor, Gadgets placed three more claymores. He worked by the intermittent red glow of the beacon light, carefully positioning the claymores, then securing them to immovable backstops: a jutting rock, a palm stump, a rotting palm tree. When he finished, he crept back to the group.

"How many left in your pack?" Lyons whispered to him.

"Down to three."

"Then take some of mine."

"No way. Those are for down there." Gadgets pointed to the harbor complex. "Couldn't sort them out in the dark."

"What're you talking about? Just take five of them."

"And scramble the sequence? Forget it! You don't want to mess with the sequence."

Blancanales motioned Lyons forward. The Puerto Rican, a veteran of twenty years of war, pointed to a ridge less than a hundred meters from the fence. "I'm leaving one of our friends on that hillside there with this rifle and Starlite." He tapped the M-16/M-203 he carried.

"And two men at the fence?"

"No. He can cover us. The other goes with us."

Lyons nodded. One at a time, the men went downhill through the flowing mud as the rain splashed down. They reached the flooding stream minutes later.

Stripping off his bandolier of 5.56mm magazines and six 40mm grenades, Blancanales passed his M-16/M-203 to one of the contras. The teenager took it and climbed the hill to a point where he could cover their entry and exit.

They continued to the fence in single file, fighting the current and drifting debris. Where the stream passed under the fence was a tangle of branches and litter. The force of the surging water had bent the chain-link fence. Though the security lights illuminated the area, no one inside the complex or patrolling the perimeter could see the infiltrators in the stream.

Blancanales directed two of the young contrasto the banks, one to each side: they crawled to the top and watched for patrols. Then Lyons and the contrasripped into the tangle, pulling fronds aside, dragging branches clear. Lyons found a piece of lumber jammed in the streambed. He stood on the board and gripped the chain link.

Breaking the board, Lyons released the entire mass of debris. Gadgets grabbed Lyons's feet. Blancanales and a teenage contraclutched at the bank. Another contralost his footing and disappeared: Lyons saw him reappear, choking and sputtering, twenty meters past the fence. He immediately scrambled to the bank. Staying low, he swam back to the others, remaining hidden in the shadows.

One by one they ducked under the rushing black water. Lyons held the fence until the others had gone under, then dropped. The two lookouts went last.

Between the stream and the barracks were parked trucks and stacks of crated cargo. Grinning, Lyons passed the heavy pack of claymores to Gadgets. Then he tightly cinched the sling of his Konzak, binding the assault shotgun against his body, and slipped out his modified-for-silence Colt. Blancanales and Gadgets worked the actions of their silenced Beretta 93-R auto-pistols.

Lyons, followed by a contrawith a machete, dashed to a truck's trailer and went flat beside the wheels. Rainwater streaming from the truck's plastic-covered cargo poured over their muddy blacksuits. Lyons motioned for the contrato wait, then snaked toward the barracks. He crept across an open stretch of mud and hid behind another parked truck.

Looking across a two-lane asphalt road illuminated by mercury-arc lamps, he saw garages and workshops. Another asphalt lane separated the utility buildings from the barracks.

Where the road met the dock, a group of soldiers stood at a sandbagged machine-gun position. In the opposite direction, toward the gate of the complex, two soldiers paced the fence.

Lyons took the hand-radio from his belt, clicked down the transmit, and whispered, "We can't cross the road."

"Look for another way," Blancanales told him.

"There isn't... unless... Standby."

Staying flat in the mud, Lyons crawled alongside two heavy diesel trucks, a tractor, an ancient Chevrolet pickup and a ComBloc flatbed truck. Then he approached an old Dodge panel truck. He scanned the vehicles around him, scanned the road. He saw no one. Rising, he tried the door.

The foul scent of alcohol filled his nostrils. As his eyes adjusted to the dark interior, he heard snoring come from the back. Seeing a man curled on the floor, Lyons holstered his modified Colt.

He pushed the seat forward and lunged inside. He tore away the man's shirt, jammed it into his mouth and threw the suddenly awakened drunk onto his face. Lyons took plastic riot handcuffs from his web belt and secured the man's hands. An oily rag went around the drunk's head as a blindfold. Finding the keys to the Dodge in the drunk's pocket, he clicked on his hand-radio.

"I got transportation."

Minutes later, as the others crowded into the truck, Blancanales put the prisoner's jacket over his blacksuit. Then he drove directly to the building where the Iranian allegedly slept.

The Nicaraguan Communists had provided first-class quarters for their visiting comrades. Unlike the technicians and shipping crews who stayed in the barracks, the ComBloc officers enjoyed private suites and conference rooms. Their one-story bungalows boasted patios and landscaping.

Able Team knew the numbers of the rooms occupied by the Iranian and his group. Blancanales stopped the truck at the Iranian's bungalow. As the contraschecked their weapons, Lyons said to Blancanales, "Remind them that our targets are the Soviets and Iranians. They don't get paid extra for killing Nicaraguans."

Gadgets laughed softly. "Mercy for the Sandinistas? That don't sound like the blood-lusting, Commie-hating Ironman we know and love."

"What? I just don't want them wasting time making numbers for a body count. We're here for information."

"Oh. Ironman the efficient."

As Blancanales spoke to the Miskito contrasin idiomatic Spanish, Gadgets prepared claymores for placement. Lyons glanced to the shadowed doors of the bungalows. He screwed valved hearing protectors into his ears.

In a split second, Lyons, Blancanales and four contraswere out of the Dodge. In pairs, they went to three doors. Three kicks sounded and three doors sprang open simultaneously.

Behind them, Gadgets moved silently through the rain, placing claymores. He made no effort at concealment. In a few seconds, the alarms would sound.

Rushing through a bungalow, the modified-for-silence Colt in his hands, Lyons heard glass shatter. He kicked open the bedroom door and spun to one side as a pistol fired wild. He called out, "White light! Luce bianco..."

The contrapitched in a stun-shock grenade. Designed for antiterrorist confrontations, the grenade had no shrapnel. It exploded with a deafening blast and a blinding flash.

In the other rooms, stun-shocks boomed. A pistol fired, then two more grenades exploded.

Not moving, a dark-haired, narrow-faced Semitic man groaned in bed, his eyes fluttering. Then he collapsed onto the sheets. Lyons cinched plastic handcuffs around his wrists and ankles while the contrateenager gathered his papers. Lyons buckled a nylon harness around the prisoner's shoulders, waist and feet. The harness had loops providing handholds for carrying.

The papers in his wallet provided an identity: Ahmed Choufi, a Syrian with an international import-export company.

Jerking Choufi off the bed, Lyons dragged him through the broken glass. In the other rooms, autofire hammered.

Returning to consciousness, Choufi pleaded for his life, first in French and Arabic, then English. "I am no one, only a businessman... Why do you do this?"

"Shut up or you get a bullet," Lyons ordered.

"But I am no one political."

Dragging his prisoner into the rain, Lyons kneed him in the gut. Gasping, choking, the Syrian struggled to breathe. An AK-47 flashed from the end of the lane, slugs slamming into the bungalow. Lyons saw Gadgets brace his silent Beretta 93-R with both hands. The pistol recoiled once. Someone in the darkness cried out. The rifleman didn't fire again.

Blancanales, emerging from the bungalows alone, whispered to Lyons, "He wasn't there! No clothes, no luggage, nothing!"

Lifting his prisoner's head by an ear, Lyons demanded, "Where's Dastgerdi? Where is he?"

"Who?"

Lyons aimed his silenced Colt at the Syrian's left foot.

Choufi begged, "No more! Have mercy! I know nothing of the colonel's affairs."

"Where is he?"

"He returned to Syria today."

"If he's here, you live. If not, you die. Where is he?"

"Have mercy!" Choufi lapsed into Arabic.

The two contrasfrom the third bungalow rushed to Blancanales and spoke rapidly in Spanish, handing him a folder of identification papers. Blancanales nodded and sent the men to the truck.

Several Sandinista militiamen ran to the bungalows. One staggered as a silent 9mm slug punched into his chest; then bursts from the contras'M-16 rifles dropped the others.

"Christ, it's gone wrong!" the Puerto Rican cursed. "They had an accident. Their man opened up on them and they killed him, blew off his head..."

Lyons thought fast. "Wizard! Here, fast! Bring a radio-pop. And one of those dead men. A skinny one. We got to improvise."

"What?" Blancanales asked.

"It's a sixty-six percent failure so far. Let's make it one hundred percent."

"What are you talking about?"

Snapping open Choufi's briefcase, Lyons removed the Syrian's identification. Gadgets and a contracarried a thin, bloody, dead militiaman.

"I don't even want to know what you're doing with that," Gadgets jived.

"Get that radio-pop ready." Lyons glanced at the dead man: a bearded, hard-muscled, middle-aged soldier, punctured by a crescent of 5.56mm slugs. His height and weight approximated the Syrian's. Lyons jerked the corpse off the walkway, dragged it into the bungalow and threw it onto the bed.

"Cut off his gear and uniform and boots. Put the claymore on his head."

"What?"

"I want nothing left of him except a stain."

"That's what he'll be."

As Gadgets stripped the dead man, Lyons found the Syrian's slacks and pocketed his identification. He kicked the slacks across the room.

Seconds later, they sprinted into the rain. Autofire came from both ends of the street. The contrasreturned fire with their M-16 rifles, Blancanales with his silent Beretta. Lyons and Gadgets dived into a muddy flower bed.

From the ends of the street, the muzzles of Kalashnikov rifles flashed. From doorways and corners, militiamen raked the intruders with full-auto fire.

AK slugs roared over the North Americans to shatter the bungalow windows, hammer the walls. A hail of 7.62mm ComBloc slugs punched through the stolen Dodge and whined away. Shattered glass fell around them. Gadgets surveyed the street, noting the positions of the Sandinistas. He shouted to the contras, "Mata las luces!" He pointed to the streetlights.

"Inmediatamente!" one teenager answered.

Shifting their aim from the Sandinistas, the contrasplinked out the lights one by one. Globes shattered, darkened, the crashing sound loud even amid the cacophony of shouts and shooting and whining slugs.

High above, on the third floor of the barracks, a silhouette appeared, a pistol popped from a window — fatal mistake. Three contrassighted and fired. The silhouette disappeared.

Gadgets surveyed the dark street. He called, "Ready to go?"

"Quinze segundos." Several voices answered.

He turned to Lyons. "Watch this magic trick."

Flipping open his multiband impulse transmitter, the Able Team electronics specialist laughed as he keyed a series of digital codes. "Now you see them..."

Simultaneous explosions ripped the darkness in one shattering crack of C-4. A sound like hundreds of flying bullets followed as a storm of steel pellets penetrated the distance, shattering glass, bouncing off steel, imbedding in wood, rattling on sheet metal.

The return fire had died. In silence, the contrasand North Americans dragged their prisoner into the panel truck. Brushing glass and plastic shards off the seat, Blancanales turned on the ignition and accelerated away.

"Take the same way out as we came in," Gadgets shouted. "That way's got the radio-pops."

"Hit the button on the bedroom!" Lyons told Gadgets.

"Ain't safe," Gadgets answered. "Gotta wait until we're around the corner."

With the muzzle of his Konzak, Lyons smashed what remained of the windshield. He jerked back the actuator to chamber the first 12-gauge round. But he saw no targets.

Skidding around the corner, they saw the effect of Gadgets's radio-detonated claymores. Where a group of militiamen had been firing from the barracks, only rags and torn flesh remained. Vast streams of blood flowed from headless, limbless corpses. The volleys of steel pellets had denuded the grounds of landscaping, shattered every window, punched hundreds of holes in the barracks.

Gadgets keyed another code. Another blast shook the night. "I declare that guy gone."

Roaring through the complex, they encountered other headlights. Militiamen were running in all directions. In the confusion, no one fired at the speeding truck. Lyons, low in the seat, kept his Konzak ready. Gadgets, looking back, saw the living gather around the dead. A few rifle shots resounded from inside the bungalows.

Blancanales maneuvered the Dodge between a large truck and a cargo container in the storage area, parking behind a stack of telephone poles. As the others dragged out the Syrian, Blancanales braced his silenced Beretta on the poles and methodically extinguished the lights along the security perimeter. In the distance, the one-sided firefight continued.

They ran through the darkness to the stream, which was swelled by the rain. As they carried the bound-and-gagged Syrian through the rushing water, sudden glare lit them.

Waiting for the contrateenager to transport the prisoner across the fence, Lyons and Gadgets did not move. High above them, a magnesium flare swung on a miniature parachute. They saw two jeeps of Sandinista militiamen speed from the complex. Spotlights followed the jeeps along the fence.

"Time to shortstop the pursuit," Gadgets told Lyons. He pointed to a small rectangle visible by the flare's light twenty meters away, hanging on the side of an aluminum shipping container.

"See that?"

"Yeah. A claymore?"

"Absolutely right! That's the pop covering this area." He keyed a series of numbers into the impulse transmitter. "What if I'd taken some of those claymores out of your pack? What if I'd gotten the sequence scrambled? You understand? Like what if I pressed the button..."

He touched a digital key. At once, all the claymores planted throughout the harbor complex exploded. Fragments of steel sprayed the two jeeps: their head-lights went black and they lurched to a standstill on flat tires. Flames spread as gasoline spilled. Nothing moved in the wrecks.

"What if I pressed the button and that one..." Gadgets indicated a claymore only a few steps away "...went off instead of those others? You understand?"

"No doubt about it. I understand."

"Technology's great," Gadgets jived, closing the impulse transmitter. "But you got to keep it straight."

The flare sputtered out. Gadgets and Lyons slipped under the flowing water and escaped into the darkness.