It had been dark for an hour when the stealth F-117A Nighthawk flew over Budanovci, a Serbian village like many of the others in the Fruska Gora hills north-west of Belgrade. As the aircraft passed over the hazardous, hilly terrain, the perfect hiding place for anti-aircraft weapons, an SA-3 missile roared through the sky and did the unthinkable: it struck a plane that was designed to be nearly invisible.
The $42 million aircraft crashed, and orange flames jumped into the dark sky. The pilot, through luck or skill, had escaped and was hiding on the ground. It was 8:45 p.m., and the pilot of the NATO plane flying alongside the Nighthawk urgently reported the hit to the air operations command centre, which relayed the bad news through secure radio frequencies to the dozens of NATO pilots in the area.
Meanwhile, Yugoslav troops, aware they had hit the first NATO aircraft in the four-day-old air war, were moving in. Fast.
In Italy, a US Air Force Special Operations team of pararescuers, so elite that there are only 400 of them among the 363,500 personnel in the Air Force, went into action. Outfitted head to toe in black, and carrying an extra camouflage uniform in case they needed to blend into the Yugoslav terrain in daylight, the rescuers waited for word from the pilot.
It apparently came sometime shortly after midnight when the pilot, having been in hiding for about 3 1/2, hours, got a message through to the searchers: Troops in the area were closing in rapidly.
"It was really a race between the rescuers and the Yugoslav army," said a senior Pentagon official, one of several officials who provided details of the rescue on condition he not be named. "There were enemy in the area and the rescuers were making an aggressive attempt to rescue him."
The Yugoslavs had an intimate knowledge of the terrain on their side. The Air Force rescuers had training and equipment on theirs.
The Special Operations troops who jumped from the sky to rescue the pilot are some of the US military's most highly trained commandos. Trained at the Air Force Pararescue School in New Mexico, their primary mission is combat rescue, the art of infiltrating hostile territory, fighting if necessary and living alone on the ground for days in the worst cases. So tough is the training that only about 35 of the 300 selected each year for the training actually finish it.
Nothing is known about the composition of the team which rescued the F-117A pilot on Saturday. Pentagon officials, grimly citing the likelihood that other pilots will have to be rescued before the war ends, said nearly nothing about the circumstances.
The teams that rescued the Nighthawk pilot reportedly arrived in the world's best special operations helicopters, the MH-53 Pave Low and the MH-60 Pave Hawk, both black and flying without lights to avoid detection. The Low carries a crew of six and can transport up to 38 passengers, each outfitted with classified night vision equipment so sophisticated that even the US's European allies don't have access to some of it. The MH-60 Pave Hawks are smaller, lighter birds with crews of up to four and the capability of carrying as many as 14 passengers.
These craft were accompanied by one or more Black Hawk helicopters specially equipped for covert special operations missions.
Overhead, as protection and an extra set of eyes, were AWACs radar planes, scanning the sky for the MiG interceptors that the Yugoslav forces have launched against NATO aircraft four times since Operation Allied Force began. There were also strike fighters and electronic jammers ready to counter attempts by the Serb forces to fire anti-aircraft batteries or missiles at the team of planes as they moved in.
Sometime after the pilot contacted the rescuers, they scooped him up. "He was good at hiding and knew when to come out," the Pentagon spokesman said.
The planes headed out of Yugoslav air space at 3.45 a.m. The pilot was in good condition and the team headed for Tuzla, Bosnia.