"What's going on back here?"
Gadgets looked at his partners. He looked to the back of the passenger cabin. He looked up at the ceiling. He looked under his seat. "Nothing's going on. You see anything going on?"
"If nothing's going on," Grimaldi asked, suppressing a grin, "how come our friend George is hiding up front? You guys keep aggravating the-Agency clerks, you just might not get any more of these all-expense-paid trips to faraway exotic countries. Understand? Wouldn't have the pleasure of hunting down international creeps and stepping on them. To make the world a better place to live."
Lyons grinned. "Well, then maybe we'd just hang around Washington, D.C., and step on a few Georgie boys. Wouldn't that make the world a better place to live?"
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.