IMF team leader Dan Briggs assembles his team for the first time. The mission: to recover two nuclear warheads belonging to General Rio Dominguez from a hotel vault in Santa Costa. Jim and Willy sneak safecracker Terry Targo into the vault, who figures out how to get out. The team then captures Dominguez but Targo's fingers are broken in the attempt. With no other alternative, Briggs has himself and Dominguez put into the vault, and Briggs threatens to enter a random combination if Alicio doesn't tell him the code. Dominguez breaks. With the bombs defused, Willy takes the warheads out of the vault. Briggs remains behind and uses the information Targo gathered earlier to get out during a fireworks distraction set off by Barney. Briggs and the rest of the team make a desperate race for safety and get onto a plane heading to safety seconds before the military can catch up to them.

Rollin and Cinnamon go it alone to recover a reel of recording wire containing information on a chemical warfare project aimed at the U.S. The courier carrying it was killed by the enemy, and the wire is missing. The two fake a lovers' reunion and then Rollin slips out during a pre-recorded conversation. To duplicate the circumstances of the courier's demise as closely as possible, Rollin lets himself be discovered and then chased along the same route. He finds the wire, hidden in plain sight as part of a fence. He and Cinnamon plan to recover and smuggle out the wire the same way, but it is taken by a young boy looking for fishing wire. Rollin manages to recover it, and they send the wire out disguised as the wire on a balloon.

Anastas Poltroni is the head of an international narcotics syndicate, and has taken refuge in a country with no extradition treaty. The IM Force is assigned to lure him out without kidnapping him (to avoid the publicity). Cinnamon woos Carson until Briggs, pretending to be her husband, interrupts. Carson refuses to bribe Briggs, while Barney plants some of Carson's heroin in his own hotel room and tip off the police. The IMF ambush Carson and steal the heroin, and Carson later escapes. He grabs Cinnamon and follows Briggs to a deserted lodge to retrieve his own heroin. The police are hot on his trail, and he flees with Cinnamon still in his grasp. Thanks to confusing road signs altered by Barney, Carson ends up over the border where he is arrested and the heroin is taken into custody.