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.

In a chrome-and-plastic lounge of Orly international airport, Colonel Dastgerdi of the Syrian army waited. The casual sports clothes he wore had been purchased in a Madrid men's shop. His lightweight headphones lulled him with a Spanish pop ballad. Surreptitiously he watched the entrances, studying the face of every passenger who emerged from the terminal.

Two days earlier he had flown from Managua to Madrid. After a few hours' delay, he continued to Paris, and there spent a night in a luxurious hotel, enjoying the French cuisine and an expensive Vietnamese prostitute. Recalling the pleasures of that evening, he consulted his wristwatch. In a few minutes he would be departing on another long flight. Destination: Damascus.

A man approached, also wearing the lightweight headphones of a portable cassette player. His nondescript Semitic features and cheap clothing — a gray sport coat and gray slacks — made him appear like a poor, grubby, foreign laborer, one of thousands in Europe. The portable cassette player enhanced the image of the hardworking Arab returning home to the distant East with his savings and a few luxuries after a year's work in the West. Dastgerdi looked elsewhere as the man crossed the lounge and sat beside him.

In Arabic the man asked, "What are you listening to?"

Dastgerdi pulled the tape player from his coat pocket and ejected the cassette. "See?"

The man took the cassette, looked at the label. "I don't read Spanish." Passing it back, he took another from his pocket. "You might like this. Play it when you are home."

It was pocketed. Though the case bore the label of a Swedish singing group, the tape carried digital information that could be decoded only by an American desktop computer, like the one in Dastgerdi's Damascus office.

A United Nations diplomat had purchased several of the small computers from an ordinary electronics shop in New York City. They were shipped as diplomatic papers to Moscow. Then Soviet technicians modified and reprogrammed them to serve as coding machines. Their outward appearance remained unchanged. Though the codes they created would not withstand the scrutiny of the American National Security Agency or the Soviet KGB, the codes did deny outsiders access to Dastgerdi's communications. And the cassettes, appearing to contain only music, would pass by customs inspectors without difficulty.

"Any other information?" Dastgerdi asked.

His companion glanced at the predominantly European passengers around them, who would be seeing only two Middle Easterners chatting about music before their respective flights. Then he spoke in a low voice.

"Fascist contrashit the port. Choufi is dead, Gabriel is dead. But there has been no compromise of the mission. The Nicaraguans drove away the fascists and annihilated them in the mountains."