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..."