It was early morning on December 29, 2000, when Gifford Shaw and Clarke Bynum bowed their heads to pray on British Airways's Flight 2069 from London's Gatwick Airport to Nairobi, Kenya. They weren't supposed to be on this flight; they'd missed a direct flight to Uganda because of winter weather delays in London. But now finally enroute to their two-week mission trip in Uganda, where they would be speaking to Sudanese refugees, Gifford, 45, and Clarke, 39, repeated the prayer of a lesser-known Old Testament figure named Jabez.

Found in 1 Chronicles 4:10, Jabez's prayer reads: "Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain." After making these bold requests, the two men from Sumter, South Carolina, quickly fell asleep in their business-class seats, two rows behind the cockpit.

Not quite an hour later, Gifford woke up as the Boeing 747-400 cruised at 35,000 feet over Sudan with its 398 passengers and crew. The first five and a half hours of the eight-hour flight had been smooth and uneventful, but it had been dark outside; now that the sun had risen, Gifford peered out the window at the African landscape.

He'd been to Africa once before, in 1993, working for the same group he hoped to help on this trip, African Christian Training Institute, which recruits and supplies workers to meet various ministry needs in East Africa. Henry Krabbendam, a professor at Covenant College (Presbyterian Church in America) in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, and Gifford's friend since his days at Clemson University, was leading the mission trip. He was sitting a deck below in coach.

Five or ten minutes after Gifford awakened, Clarke was startled from his slumber by a nasty jolt. Gifford thought it was more than turbulence and looked out his window to see the plane plummeting. They would later learn the plane dropped 19,000 feet.

Terrified, the two men heard screams for help from the cockpit, just a few feet away. A passenger in the front row was standing, shouting that an African man had entered the cockpit. (British Airways does not lock the cockpit door during flights.) Business-class passengers sat in shock, fearing the end was near.

Clarke turned to his friend, and said, "We're going to die." Gifford responded, "I know. This is it."

In an instant, the men thought of their wives and children back home: Gifford has three daughters; Clarke has two sons and two daughters. Both had tearfully prayed with or for their children and their wives before leaving for the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina. Both were thankful for that closure. And both were ready to meet their Lord.

But Clarke, a 6'7" 210-pound former college basketball player at Clemson, felt he needed to try to do something. He had no idea if terrorists were hijacking the plane or if weapons were involved. He said to Gifford, "I've got to go."

By the time Clarke opened the cockpit door, the struggle inside was perhaps 20 to 30 seconds old. A 27-year-old Kenyan named Paul Kefa Mukonyi, a graduate student at a university in Lyons, France, later diagnosed with acute paranoia, had burst into the cockpit trying to seize control of the plane. As he fought with Captain William Hagan, 53, and first officer Phil Watson, 38, the autopilot became disengaged, causing two steep dives.

The Kenyan man had bitten Hagan on his ear and finger; the captain had stuck his finger in the intruder's eye. A third pilot, Richard Webb, 35, had entered the life-or-death mel?e just a few seconds before Clarke arrived.

The scene before Clarke was chaos. With his arms around Watson, Mukonyi, dressed in a hooded, slick-finish, black winter coat, was flailing and grabbing for the controls. Webb was bearhugging the man around his waist. Hagan was fighting off the man while trying to bring the plane out of its nearly lethal dive. (British Airways later denied that a crash was imminent. However, according to Daily Nation, a Nairobi newspaper, at least one passenger says the captain told him that in four or five more seconds the plane would have flipped upside down, preventing the pilots from ever regaining control.)