Delta Force Major Alan "Dutch" Schaefer and his six-man team, consisting of himself, operators Mac Eliot, Billy Sole, and Blain Cooper, ordnance expert Jorge "Poncho" Ramírez and radioman Rick Hawkins, are tasked by the CIA with spearheading the rescue of an official held hostage by insurgents in Val Verde. Agent George Dillon, an old friend of Schaefer's, is assigned to supervise. The team is taken to a remote jungle and begins the mission.
They soon discover the wreckage of another chopper and several skinned corpses, whom Schaefer identifies as U.S Army Special Forces he once trained. Pressing on, the team reaches the insurgent camp and kills every guerrilla, including a Soviet intelligence officer searching through top-secret CIA documents. Dillon, confronted by a suspicious Schaefer, admits the mission was a setup to retrieve intelligence from captured operatives and that the dead unit disappeared weeks earlier in a failed rescue. Holding prisoner a captured female guerrilla named Anna, the group proceeds to extraction, unaware that they are being observed by an invisible entity using thermal imaging.