Jones’s F-14, call sign Slate 46, was flying over western Iraq looking for Iraqi fighters to shoot down, when an Iraqi SAM slammed into the jet and forced him to eject. Jones came down in the desert, which proved to be blessedly empty of Iraqis. He immediately took out his survival knife and hacked a hole in the hard ground big enough to crouch in. Then he hunkered down on top of his parachute and pulled a scraggly bush over his head. Since he knew the shoot-down had been reported to the AWACS, all he had to do was wait for rescue or capture, whichever came first.

Hundred of miles away, Captain Paul Johnson and his wingman, Captain Randy Goff, were flying up from King Fahd Air Base to King Khalid Military City in their A-10 Warthogs, call signs Sandy 57 and 58. When they landed, they’d sit ground-alert for combat search-and-rescue tasking—not a happy prospect. Their day promised to be wasted on the ground while their squadron buddies were shooting up the Iraqi Army in Kuwait.

The day turned out to be more interesting than they expected.

On a routine check-in with AWACS, Johnson and Goff found that they had new “tasking”: They were to head north to help two other A-10s and a super Jolly Green Giant MH-53J (call sign Moccasin 05) find a downed F-14 pilot somewhere west of Baghdad. That was a big “somewhere,” and it was a long way north of the Saudi border—and a lot farther north than A-10s usually flew. (Up there, their primary fear was to run into a MiG when no F-15s were around. On the other hand, they had little to fear from AAA and SAMs, since the desert was pretty barren.)

Before they headed north into “Indian country,” they pressed west along the border looking for a tanker to fill their fuel tanks. Though the weather was terrible and thunderstorms were all around, they spotted a KC-10 tanker in a clear spot and picked up their gas.

Meanwhile, since the other searchers had so far had no luck, AWACS sent the two Sandys off to check out a suspected Scud hiding place, which turned out to be Bedouin tents. An hour and a half later, after reporting to AWACS, “No luck on the Scuds,” they got vectors to a tanker for another refueling.

Next, they headed north to a new search area, over a hundred miles west of Baghdad. Though fatigue had started to set in, Johnson and Goff really wanted to find and rescue the downed pilot. As they flew deeper into Iraq, Johnson repeatedly tried to contact Slate 46 on the rescue frequency. Just as he was beginning to think he was on a wild-goose chase, he heard Jones calling him with his survival radio. The signal was weak, but still strong enough for the A-10 pilots to take a radio bearing with their direction-finding needles.