The Misty Pilots
Howard's family back in Ohio deserved the same sort of closure, Rutan felt. And since he had persuaded Howie to join Misty in the first place, he was the one obligated to give it to them.
Rutan arranged for a couple days of leave and made plans to hop a flight over to NKP, keeping his scheme to himself. Then the evening before he was planning to go, the phone rang at Misty's operations room. "Hey Rutan, it's for you!" the duty officer shouted.
"Who is it?" Rutan asked.
"I don't know," came the answer. "He wouldn't identify himself."
Rutan took the handset. "Captain Rutan here," he announced.
The voice on the other end was stern. "I can't tell you who I am," the anonymous caller began, "but I know what you are going to do tomorrow. Don't do it! It's been taken care of. Do you understand?"
Rutan didn't understand at all. He was shocked that anybody knew about his scheme to hike up to the crash site, and thrown off balance by the caller's abruptness. He had no idea what had been "taken care of." Rutan asked who it was, wondering if one of his pilot buddies was playing a prank. The caller would say only that he was a major and couldn't identify himself. Then, with an air of impatience, he asked again: "Do you understand? It's been taken care of."
Confused, Rutan stammered, "I think so." Then before he could ask another question, the mystery major hung up.
Rutan puzzled over the bizarre call. Obviously somebody over at NKP had mentioned what he was up to, and word had gotten around. If some commander had gotten wind of the scheme, it would be no surprise at all that he didn't want some dumb-s- - - Air Force prima donna tagging along and getting himself into trouble, forcing the special ops guys to put everything on hold to bail him out. But how would he have known anything about Howie?
The best Rutan could figure was that somebody up the chain of command had gotten intelligence that Howie had been captured by the North Vietnamese, and the same people had learned of his plan to go looking for Howie's plane. They were telling him not to go to the crash site because there wasn't a body there. He would have been taking big risks to accomplish nothing, beyond checking out a wrecked F-100. This was good news, it dawned on Rutan, as he sorted through the implications. It meant his friend–whom he assumed was dead—was in fact alive. Howie would be headed to prison, but at least he might return home some day.
Rutan canceled his trip to NKP. Still, the whole episode left him feeling uneasy. If somebody in the Air Force knew Howie was a prisoner, why wouldn't they tell Misty? Or more important, Howie's family? He felt a current of relief at the prospect Howie might be alive, but he didn't mention any of it to anybody. And he started poking around in the prisoner-of-war reports that passed through the intelligence shop, seeing if there was any info that could be a reference to his friend.
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