BY AUTUMN 1989, Noriega had stepped up his harassment of American military personnel. By then, Special Operations engineers had constructed a three-quarter scale model of Carcel Modelo in Middle-of-Nowhere, Florida. Over and over, Delta’s assault teams blew the cupola door, poured down the stairwell to Moose’s replica third-floor cell, blasted the lock off, and spirited the Precious Cargo away in an MH-6 Little Bird, double-tapping all PDF actors who got in the way. Easy pickins.
In October, an elite Panamanian police unit staged a coup, toppling the Noriega regime. But by the end of the day, the Pineapple had grabbed the reins of power again. The days and weeks that followed brought two developments: First, Carcel Modelo rang with the screams of torture as Noriega sent a steady stream of “political prisoners” to their doom. Second, relations between Panama and the U.S. broke down completely as Noriega blamed America for the coup. The Pineapple made militant speeches bragging about the bloody end U.S. soldiers would come to if they took on his PDF. Then he made his boldest threat yet: Any American attempt to unseat him from power would be met with violent resistance. And the first person to die would be Kurt Muse.
To show that he meant it, Noriega ordered that a chair be placed outside the bars of Muse’s cell. That chair was to be occupied at all times by a guard whose only job was to wait for the order to put a bullet in Moose.