The missiles which destroyed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade also took the life of a young reporter and his wife. On the streets of the city, a reporter finds signs of hope and fear. PNS correspondent Terence Sheridan, a former reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, has been living and writing in the former Yugoslavia for the last eight years.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- I knew, all too briefly, two of the people killed in the Chinese Embassy Friday night -- Xu Xinghu, a reporter for Beijing's Guangming Daily, and his wife Zhu Yin. They had moved into the embassy three days before, thinking it would be safe.

Officials blame the strike on an "intelligence failure." The embassy, a distinctive 5-story building set apart from other buildings in the area, was built two years ago for one purpose only -- to be the Chinese Embassy. Three were killed and 20 injured -- one blinded -- when three "precision weapons" from a B-2 Stealth struck.

Xinghu, 31, and I got our Yugoslav credentials together last August, drinking coffee and Scotch with a tardy but affable Serbian policeman who made us wait most of the afternoon.

A hard-working reporter with a smile for everyone, Xinghu spoke only fair English but excellent Serbo-Croatian. We ran into each other from time to time. He tipped me off to a good Chinese restaurant, but since it was in suburban Zemun, and NATO missiles have a habit of parking on the main street there, I put off a visit.

We talked often about food and I thought he would be impressed with the open-air markets' variety and price, but he was not-- compared to China, he said, the produce was expensive small pickings. But he did admit that it would be difficult to equal the Serbian peasant vendor who says, "If these greens aren't fresh you can come back tomorrow and spit in my mouth."

In his last story, a few hours before the embassy was hit, Xinghu wrote, "Today is pretty relaxed." It was relaxed, in part, because of a NATO-imposed power outage. He and Zhu Yin, 28, arts editor of the Guangming Daily, were married last year.

The unfortunate bombing of the embassy may play a key role in plans to settle the Kosovo conflict. A peace plan has been cooking for weeks and the Group of Eight, the seven major industrial democracies and Russia, is close to presenting a draft to the U.N.'s Security Council.

The fear in Belgrade is that Russia is about to "sell out" its Slav brothers, who said they would not accept any plan that includes NATO troops in Kosovo. But China, as a permanent member of the Security Council, has a veto vote. Meanwhile, the tiny Chinese community here has been parading with banners proclaiming solidarity with Serbs and loathing for the U.S.-led Operation Allied Force.

Nevertheless, both NATO and the Serbs seem ready for a deal. A canny political survivor, Vuko Draskovic -- president of the Serbian Renewal Party and deputy federal prime minister, until he was recently sacked for comments "embarrassing" to the government -- says "I have no reason to fear that Russia will accept anything in the Security Council that would not be in our best interests, and to say no to Russia today would be suicide."

No matter what NATO says, Belgraders angrily refuse to believe it was an accident, like a hit man going to the wrong house. A 40-year-old woman -- before the war, a translator in Serbian, English, French and Russian -- vows to buy a gun to use against NATO if it invades.

She tells this to her mother, a retired Yugoslav Army colonel, who now lives in Toronto (and who still has a Nazi bullet lodged in her back, a legacy of her youth with Tito's Partisans in Bosnia). 

"A little gun wouldn't do you any good against NATO."

"I don't want a little gun, I want a big gun; I plan to be attacking."

"My dear, you are a fool. If NATO attacks, no gun, big or small, is going to help you. You have become a chauvinist, like all the Serbs."

Two women and two men arrive at an outdoor cafe as a sonic boom rattles the windows. The younger of the two women immediately turns on her heel, saying, "That's it! I'm leaving!" The older woman screams after her, "Where are you going, you idiot? You're going to cross the bridge?" She is referring to NATO leaflets in Serbian, just dropped on Belgrade, warning that the city's bridges are potential targets. The young woman reluctantly joins the others at a table where they order a platter of small spicy sausages and a large pitcher of beer, while nervously eyeing a blue sky and fleecy clouds.

Speaking of NATO leaflets, the people writing them come off sounding like Serb nationalists to the right of Slobodan Milosevic.

The leaflets claim that during the President's 10-year reign hundreds of thousands of Serbs have been run out of Croatia and Bosnia, and are about to lose Kosovo -- precisely the point of the nationalists who argue that if Milosevic had done a better job, Serbs today would be united and living together in a "Great Serbia."