Deserted streets and silence on the dark road to Belgrade

The model of the fighter bomber stood poised on a plinth, surrounded by trees and shining in the moonlight in front of us. Abandoned cars huddled in the shadows apparently moved outside the periphery of the airbase for safety. As we sped down the road towards Belgrade, the burning smell grew stronger, the shroud of smoke much thicker. Orange flames shot from a giant bonfire through the forest in the near distance. The airbase had been bombed for the second time in as many evenings.

The road to Belgrade is long, dark and lonely. Night fell three hours south of Budapest, just as we reached the Hungarian-Yugoslav border. The guard in his old Warsaw Pact issue camouflage was cheerful, but beyond the few hundred yards separating one of NATO's three brand new members from NATO's newest enemy, the Serb Immigration officers scrutinised our passports. Their boss, a giant of a man, mumbled something about it being "a question of national security". Then, whether out of weariness or simply to show us that Yugoslav government visas are still being respected, he politely waved our minibus through.

Boran, the driver, pointed at the bright yellow lights that flashed and died ahead to the right. The first bombardment of the evening, to the south-west, towards Novi Sad. For more than three hours, Boran's eyes constantly scanned the horizon, from left to right and back again. We saw three or four more flashes, nothing like the constant lightning described by the frightened Serbs who had left on the first night of the bombing. People in Belgrade are afraid to cross bridges for fear they will be bombed, Lilijana said from the back seat. And as we crossed the seemingly endless bridge across the Danube, Boran turned off his headlights. President Slobodan Milosevic has asked his people to go about their ordinary business in the daytime. But at night, Yugoslavia plays dead. In the starry sky above us, the NATO pilots were a silent, invisible but frightening presence.

We knew that they were there, for we'd heard the British Defence Secretary promise another night of bombing on the radio. We drove through town after town, with street lights turned off and blackout curtains hung in the windows. There were tiny signs of life - men shooting billiards glimpsed through the open door of a pool hall, men leaning on tables in a bar, two boys riding bicycles down a dark country lane.

There was no petrol for sale at the garage where we pulled up for coffee. A few lights burned in the back of the grocery store and Snjezana, a university professor who had rushed back from a conference at Oxford to be with her four-year-old daughter, found the appropriate words for the deserted pitstop: spooky.

In three hours across the top half of Serbia, three blue police cars directing us off the main highway were the only vestige of Serb military might. Boran fiddled nervously with the radio dial. "Long live Yugoslavia. Long live Serbia. Long live Montenegro!" a man shouted. The words "NATO Pact Aggression" came up every few minutes.

The Russian Ambassador had delivered a letter from President Yeltsin to Mr Milosevic, telling him how much he deplored the situation . . . Radio Belgrade was still insisting that Yugoslavia had shot down two NATO jets. Ten people were dead, we were told, all of them civilians, and another 38 were wounded. Teresa sat next to me in the minivan, constantly urging Boran to drive faster, faster. A medical doctor married to a mechanical engineer, she rushed home from a training course in Germany as soon as the war started. Her two little boys had been taken three times to the basement shelter during air raid sirens and she was frantic to be with them.

When Yugoslavia was whole, she was always proud to be a Yugoslav, Teresa said. Now she hates feeling ashamed when she goes abroad. "It's as if the West sees us through dirty glass, and there is nothing we can do to clean it."

Twenty thousand refugees were reported last night to have fled the bombardment in Kosovo into neighbouring Macedonia, write our foreign staff.

And there were fears that as the assault to disable Yugoslavia's military capability continued, the region may shortly witness a substantial flow of refugees away from the fighting.

The Macedonian Prime Minister, Mr Ljubco Georgievski, appealed for help from the EU.

As anti-American protesters rioted in the capital, Skopje, he added: "At this moment the two biggest problems are the refugees and the anti-American and anti-NATO feelings emerging among the Macedonian public."

About 1,500 people gathered outside the US embassy chanting slogans against the NATO action and waving Macedonian and Yugoslav flags.

Last night, Slovenia, fearing an influx of refugees, stopped issuing visas to Yugoslav citizens.

The Church of Ireland Primate, Archbishop Eames, raised the problem yesterday in the House of Lords in London. "I believe we would be failing not only the people of this nation but our colleagues in NATO if we did not recognise the desperate need for a solution to this tragedy."