One of the rescued Americans, Annie Perlick, a neonatal ICU nurse from Boston on vacation for a scuba trip, discovered she was about to be stranded when Honduras shut down its borders on March 15. Perlick tried the U.S. embassy and reached out to the senators from her home state with no luck. She purchased commercial airline tickets for later this week, as she watched flights being canceled left and right.

"It was an overwhelming sense of confusion, skepticism, misinformation, fear and frustration," Perlick told POLITICO.

Then she heard about Global Guardian, a private security firm, which had begun to arrange a flight out of Roatan for several clients — including an entertainment company and law firm.

Ultimately, Global Guardian, based in McLean, Va., ferried 144 people out of the country on a McDonnell-Douglas MD-80, a model that used to be in heavy rotation for airlines. But not before its CEO Dale Buckner, a 24-year Army special forces veteran, found himself giving instructions for how many pets passengers could bring on an airplane.

"There will be no alcohol. It'll be soft drinks only," Buckner told the passengers.

Buckner said his firm typically works with corporate clients and "high net worth" families, and has evacuated roughly 2,000 of people — some by by air and some over land — from those categories over the last few weeks.

When the company heard about others that were desperate to get home, Buckner made a few tweaks to its business model. Working with the Honduran government, U.S. embassy and FAA, they figured out how to take a disparate group of stranded people and essentially operate like an airline, except that all of its people on the ground were former military, law enforcement or intelligence types, as Buckner put it.

It worked, after Buckner arranged conference calls with skeptical passengers. Now, he says, they're looking to repeat it with more flights in Honduras and elsewhere.