AT LEAST TEN MINUTES had passed since the Little Bird gun went down. Also, I hadn’t heard from Eldon. I was about to radio him for an update on the Precious Cargo when Howard Humble came alive in my ear: “I’ve found the Little Bird and the Precious Cargo is okay.”
“What?” I didn’t think I’d heard him right. “Say again?”
“I’ve found the Little Bird and the Precious Cargo is okay,” Howard repeated.
“What are you talking about? The bird we’re looking for is a gun. It was a gun that crashed, not the Precious Cargo bird.”
Howard’s next transmission knocked me for a loop. “Well, the Precious Cargo bird crashed, too. We’re policing them all up right now and are headed for Howard Air Force Base.”
I had no idea that Muse’s bird had been shot down. While I was looking for the Little Bird gun, Gordy was talking to the troop carriers. Both of us missed the call from Chief Warrant Three Mike Dietrich, the pilot of Muse’s aircraft, when he reported he was down. Then, when another MH-6 began transmitting that he saw a Little Bird go down, Gordy and I both thought he was referring to the Little Bird gun. That’s what they mean by “fog of war.”
I called Howard Humble. “Get Muse back to Howard. We’ll stay airborne until you confirm you’re there.”
“Roger that,” Humble said. “We’re crossing Bridge of the Americas now.”
As we orbited Panama City in the command-and-control bird, watching the Comandancia burn, I suppressed my excitement. If we could successfully return Muse to base, and ultimately to his family, it would be Delta’s first successful rescue of an American hostage. In the ten years since Delta had gone operational, we had planned many, many missions: To rescue American hostages in Beirut. To infiltrate Laos to search for American MIAs. In 1985, to rescue the hostages on TWA 847. All those operations had been called off for one reason or another (all of which could be classified under the heading, “White House Unwilling to Risk It”).
The rescue of Kurt Muse had been our first direct test. Like any war, it got messy. But our tactics worked. And we hadn’t gone in and snatched back a diplomat or an intel agent or the child of a dignitary. In the scheme of world politics, Kurt Muse wasn’t anybody special. But we still rescued him, and for one reason only: He was an American. If only for that, everything I’d been through up until then had been worth it.