First came the ominous, high-pitched wail–dee-doe, dee-doe, dee-doe–signaling that Serb gunners had tracked the U.S. jets and painted them with radar beams. Next, the pilot heard the sound of the radar lock on, which veteran fliers compare to the eerie clatter of a rattlesnake shaking its tail. Finally, the snake bit: near the town of Mrkonjic Grad, Serbs fired a Russian-made SA-6 surface-to-air missile, which rocketed toward the warplane at nearly three times the speed of sound. Seconds later the SAM warhead exploded with a thunderous boom, violently shaking the plane and pilot like dice in a cupped hand. The fighter jet went down. The pilot apparently had the quick-wittedness to eject; NATO officials reported seeing a parachute deploy. What went through the pilot’s mind as he fell to earth? “He was scared, confused, hoping like hell he could remember his survival-and-rescue training,” surmises Capt. Jack Ensch, a recently retired navy pilot who was shot down over Vietnam.
At the weekend, it was not yet clear if the pilot had survived. Pentagon officials, who refuse to release his name or rank, thought so. When he punched out of the F-16, an emergency locator transponder, a communications device, was automatically activated, sending out a signal picked up by U.S. military intelligence for a brief period, then disappeared. The conclusion: that the pilot either turned off the beacon, ran out of battery power–or met some fate at the hands of the enemy. Bosnian Serbs made the most of a tense and ambiguous situation. Their commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic, passed the word that the pilot was alive–and was their prisoner. But hours later a top aide to Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic contradicted that report, insisting, “We have no information about the pilot.”
Immediately after the plane went down, NATO launched a search-and-rescue effort. Radar operators aboard the USS Arleigh Burke, one of the navy’s latest destroyers, had been monitoring the F-16s as they headed south from Italy, went “feet dry” overland into Croatia and flew just south of Banja Luka, where the ship’s Aegis system picked up the SA-6 missile. Suddenly, the fighter jet disappeared from the radarscope. From the on-scene battle-fleet commander, orders went out to the USS Kearsarge, an amphibious ship steaming some 15 miles off the Adriatic coast, which dispatched up to 50 marines packed into two CH-58 helicopters to the site of the plane crash. Navy F/A-18 Hornets took off from the USS Theodore Roosevelt to provide air cover to the ma-fines. The mission to the Mrkonjic Grad area took 30 to 40 minutes. Foiled by bad weather, the rescue team had to turn back. At dawn on Saturday, the same rescue force lifted off and spent all day searching for the pilot – in vain.
Could the mishap have been avoided? Possibly. The allies have known about anSA-2 missile site near the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Banja Luka, as well as the more mobile SA-6s, since Operation Deny Flight began in October 1992. But in the last few months, pilots returning to the base in Italy have complained repeatedly to U.S. officials about the surface-to-air missiles, and the fact that the Serbs have been painting their planes with radar. Pentagon planners long ago signed off on a classified plan, developed by American targeting experts, to destroy the SA-2 missile battery if the Serbs ever turned their sights on a U.S. plane. “It had always been the gospel that if that site had fired anything, we were going to take it out,” says a naval officer who participated in the plan. A high-ranking adviser to Adm. Leighton Smith, NATO commander in the region, claims that his boss “has been screaming for a year to take out the SAMs.” But Smith has been constantly overruled by his political superiors, who feared that any such mission would be construed by the Bosnian Serbs as an act of war.
Instead, the CIA and National Security Agency found themselves waging war electronically–with satellites and the world’s most sophisticated listening equipment–for any clues to the pilot’s whereabouts. “This is a very delicate operation, and we’ve called in a lot of assets,” says a NATO official in Naples. “Trust me, this is not like going through the woods looking for a lost child.” But it was just as desperate. At the weekend, Clinton administration officials were reduced to asking the Bosnian Serbs for help in locating the pilot.
