<<even if they had been informed that night who would have gone looking for them?>>
Soapbox Cowboy makes some very good points. The lack of SAR was repeatedly driven home to me.
In talking to the US State Department, if you go missing overseas, there is little to nothing the US government can do to look for you. Our embassies don't have the staff to mount large scale or intensive searches. They rely on the host government to do any searching...and Angola basically had little or no SAR resources nor did they seem to have much interest in the case.
And there was the problem that no one had any idea where to even begin looking.