In Katrina-stricken New Orleans, before there was the Red Cross there were the Crescent City hoteliers who heroically extended themselves on behalf of their storm-stranded guests. On the eve of Mardi Gras, Guy Martin chronicles their extraordinary acts of courage—and pivotal role in the region's recovery

On Thursday, September 1—forty-eight hours after serial breaks in the Lake Pontchartrain levees began inundating central New Orleans—groups of heavily armed marauders entered the Central Business District. Several of the major Canal Street stores were looted. One was torched. The trouble hadn't gotten as far toward the Mississippi as the Sheraton Hotel yet, but with the water and violence levels rising, the situation along Canal could best be described, in both disaster-relief and security parlance, as extremely fluid.

At midday, Dan King, the manager of the forty-nine-story Sheraton, at the east end of Canal, received a radio call from one of his managers.

"Get someplace safe," she shouted into the walkie-talkie. "Get someplace safe."

King thought he was someplace safe. He had taken 150 cops from the Fifth District into the Sheraton on Wednesday after their headquarters had flooded. The police had set up a command center of sorts and had dispatched patrols around the hotel. A few officers with shotguns were stationed on the balconies. In front of the building on Thursday, however, the authors of the mayhem ran freely in groups, carrying automatic weapons. Some opened fire. King noticed that the police were running from the brigands.

"There was panic and desperation," explains King, fifty-one, in his makeshift office in a first-floor ballroom, four weeks after that day. "We all had radios, so we could hear the police taking cover as all these people with automatic weapons were coming by. At that point, I said to myself, 'Maybe I'd better get the rest of my team out of here.'"

King himself elected to stay in the hotel, as he had during the storm and its immediate aftermath with seven hundred guests and five hundred staff and their family members. He retained two engineers to help run the generators and an IT man to keep the communications up, evacuating the remaining staff and their families by bus. Then he put in a call to Blackwater Security Consulting, the North Carolina–based firm providing protection for U.S. diplomats and civilians in Iraq.

Blackwater choppered in twenty-six special ops–trained mercenaries on September 2, the next day. The operatives would secure all three Starwood properties in New Orleans—the Sheraton and two W hotels. They had originally planned to land on the roof of the Sheraton, but Katrina's hundred-mile-per-hour winds had left it littered with debris. So the Blackwater team landed by the river and proceeded to the hotel on foot, carrying their standard kit: communications equipment, body armor, semi-automatic sidearms, and automatic weapons.

It would have been an ordinary, even modest, deployment in Iraq. But this mission was extraordinary in that it was staged at the request of a major American hotelier in a major American tourist destination—a rare, bold, and sadly necessary move. "We felt that the Blackwater people were the only ones who would be effective," says King.