Today Bardha would go home. As thousands of cheering, chanting, flag-waving Albanians lined the streets of Skopje to watch the NATO tanks thunder towards the border, the 21-year-old took in a long, deep draught of the dusty, fume-filled air and raised her arms exultantly to the sky: "That smell and sound of NATO - it makes me feel so strong." It felt like the dawn of liberation, the end of fear.
The heat was already stifling as we drove past Stenkovic II. Behind its bleak wire fences, the crowds of refugees who once stared out at the free world with haunted, anguished faces, were transformed. They roared out their passion for NATO and the KLA, chanting the familiar, rhythmical homage: "NAA-TO, NAATO, U-Cha-Ka".
At the Blace border crossing - a witness to unspeakable cruelty - where Bardha and hundreds of thousands of her country people once begged for hope and mercy, day after day, in the scorching sun - she presented her Yugoslav passport and her refugee papers. The passport was returned but not the papers. Suddenly, in official eyes at any rate, she was no longer a refugee.
Then through no-man's land. "Look! Look! No fuckin' Serbs," screamed a young Albanian jubilantly. Bardha stared disbelievingly as we drove through an empty Serb checkpoint.
Two and a half months after her desperate flight to Macedonia, she was back in Kosovo. In front and behind us, the might of NATO was lumbering towards Pristina, paratroops and small watchful Gurkhas inspecting the verges and derelict buildings for mines. Chinook helicopters zipped back and forth with supplies as Apaches stood look-out.
But Bardha had gone quiet. With every mile of this familiar, two-lane country road, memories were flooding back of her last desperate journey with only her passport and the clothes she stood up in, and the subsequent break-up of her close, prosperous family, today scattered throughout Europe. Now home again, the evidence of her country's devastation unfolded all around her.
Fertile land normally bursting with grain and vegetable crops has become a wasteland swarming with the white flowers of wild camoumile. Roadside motels and cafes have been smashed, looted or bombed. The reality of ethnic cleansing is evident in the carefully targeted burnt-out houses.
Every few kilometres aroused old memories of Serb checkpoints and the old terrors. Here was one where people were taken out at random and beaten; a few kilometres on, where a stork could be seen resting in its high, open nest, was another - less a checkpoint than a place where armed Serb civilians simply held up fleeing refugees at gunpoint and took what they wanted.
But up ahead, in this beautiful place where men who became like animals and expected no retribution seemed to have gone to ground, the welcoming chants of yet more Albanians were already audible. They had been there since dawn, lining the road, cheering on everything that moved. Groups of them could be seen at old homesteads down in the fields, waving energetically. NATO soldiers and crusty media veterans confessed afterwards that they had been moved beyond words.
Then a few kilometres outside Pristina, the NATO convoy peeled off for Prizren. Inside our minibus, the excitement and tension among the Albanians rose in concert. Confidence was ebbing at losing NATO's protective shield. And there was the worry of what lay ahead. Would their homes be burnt out, looted, taken over? Forked lightning split the sky as a massive thunderstorm broke. At the entry point to the city, at what appeared to be a congregation point for Serb military and police, our mini-bus hit a flood and stopped dead in the centre of a busy road.
The answer in such a crisis is obvious. You call a garage or a friend with a tow rope. After all, we were on the edge of a city where there is petrol, electricity, water and a splendidly functioning mobile phone network. But this is no ordinary city.
Three of our number were ethnic Albanians, two of them natives of Pristina. But so great was the fear in Pristina that neither could get a friend or relative to leave their triple-locked homes in reply to calls by mobile phone. No sane Albanian would appear out after 5 o'clock in the evening; panicking Serbs were hijacking Albanian cars. Appeals to passing Serbs weren't even considered: tales abound of "help" turning up in the form of thugs in uniform. No-one knew of a garage owned by an Albanian.
The sound of gunfire echoed around us as the Serb military appeared to be developing an interest. With each failed attempt to start the car, Bardha and the others became more frantic. The menace in the air was palpable.
A woman of about 55 approached. She looked like anyone's respectable, permed mother, in her well-pressed dress and polished shoes and umbrella open against the deluge. Then - like a scene from a movie where the human becomes a vampire - she set eyes on Bardha. She began to howl, her voice rising to a shriek. "We will cut the throats of all Albanians tonight. You will all die tonight, we will slit your throats," she raged, on and on.
Meanwhile, in a petrol station down below us, soldiers from the Irish Guards had taken up position, awaiting a convoy. They couldn't leave but they gave us courage and lent us a towrope.
Major Ben Farrell and Colour Sergeant Andy Haines were the first NATO soldiers into Pristina on Saturday. They had the task of advance liaison with the loathsome MUP (the Interior Ministry's police) - a job for which they had to muster all their cool professionalism in the face of an extraordinary charm offensive by the MUP, who had come armed with a bottle of Bell's whisky. Even as Serb military pulled up at the garage for petrol, with their alcoholic breath, unshaven faces and open-necked, filthy uniforms, the dapper MUPs were offering handshakes all round along with their very best co-operation.
As for Bardha, this would not be the day she would go home after all. Courtesy of a London Times journalist and his courageous Albanian driver, we made it finally to the Grand Hotel, which houses the media centre and every journalist lucky enough to get a room there.
Pristina after dark became a ghost town, the kind of town where the side door of an innocent white Hiace van opened to reveal a platoon of Serb soldiers, where skin-headed paramilitaries and their chums in football shirts roamed the streets shooting in the air. There were, too, many stories of hijackings and beatings. A TV crew accompanying an Albanian interpreter to her home was confronted with a mob loading up lorries with household goods and told - in English: "Fuck off. This is a dangerous area for you." The interpreter remained silent and turned back with the journalists.
Frightened beyond measure by now, Bardha chose not to risk the 10-minute journey to her home. She and we - and dozens of others - ended up sleeping on the floor of the Grand Hotel lounge. The fact that sleep did not come easily had less to do with the floor than the two uniformed thugs lounging against the wall eyeing us and our bags.
Yesterday morning, Bardha finally went home. As we walked to her Serb-dominated apartment block, a group of people turned to hiss. An old family friend stood at a window, her face full of incredulity and emotion. Bardha called a quiet greeting but judged it best to keep her distance.
We entered her sister's apartment first - alert for booby traps in the doorway - a bright, comfortable, newly decorated haven occupied by her pregnant sister for only two nights before she, too, was expelled. Then her parents' apartment, where Bardha looked around in wonderment. Everything was neat, untouched. The Nike jacket she had bought days before fleeing in March was hanging in the wardrobe. The fish in the aquarium, incredibly, were alive. The water, phone and electricity worked. The morning was spent calling ecstatic, disbelieving relatives.
Down below, Serb neighbours were clearing out, loading a lorry with everything from Persil to the kitchen sink. In a sudden surge of bravado, Bardha asked if they were leaving. "What is your name? Why are you asking these questions?" a man roared at her, at this 21-year-old girl whom he knew perfectly well. "You know I could kill you now - you know that?" He wasn't joking. The ubiquitous Kalashnikov lay alongside the lorry. It was too much. She slumped into a chair and wept.
Bardha was home at last. Gunfire echoed around us all day. The city-centre mosque went up in flames, coincidentally just as the military were leaving their base at the nearby school. Albanian houses were burning around the suburbs.
Liberation may be some days away yet.