"Studio B", Belgrade's local public TV station gives regular updates on the U.S.-led attacks. The message "vazdusna opasnost" -- air raid danger -- in the lower left of the screen appears and stays visible during all air raids.

Earlier on Saturday evening, in an unrelated broadcast, public and private television stations had featured interviews with a Yugoslav pilot whose plane had been shot down. The pilot, dubbed the first hero of this conflict, had flown the first Yugoslav defending aircraft to get into the air to meet the NATO bombardments. He said that his radar screen had shown a total of 24 hostile aircraft in his area when he engaged them in combat. That 24-to-1 ratio underscores the David-and-Goliath nature of the military imbalance in the air war. Yugoslavia has only about 15 Mig-29s -- a dated fighter which is the country's best combat aircraft.

The reports about the Stealth shoot-down and the hero-pilot came as encouraging news to Yugoslavs, who late on Saturday were midway through their fourth night of huddling in basements or Cold War-era bomb shelters. People were so happy about the destruction o the supposedly invincible Stealth fighter that they stopped talking about the big poison-gas scare the night before, on Friday.

For me, Friday night began at the IMC NEWS bureau in New Belgrade, the capital's bedroom suburb. Several hours before midnight, there was a series of blasts to the south and west of the city. Fires were visible on the horizon from our bureau, which is located on the top-floor penthouse of one of the tallest buildings in the area. These blasts were more disturbing than the attacks on Wednesday and Thursday because the air-raid sirens sounded only after the incoming missiles exploded. Once again, there was no anti-aircraft fire, leading to speculation that the Yugoslav air force is opting to fight the attackers in the air, while ground-based defenses are held in reserve for a later stage in the conflict

The first air raid on Friday night lasted several hours. Journalists from NATO countries had been warned to leave Yugoslavia two days earlier, but I decided to stay. My Friday-night trip down into the atomic bomb shelter at the base of our building was my first open encounter with a large group of people since the warning was issued to journalists.

A father and child settle in for a long night.

The shelter is enormous. It appeared to be near its 400-person capacity and there were still people standing outside at the head of the stairs leading past the massive steel door. Families sat together on single bunks, lone elderly people were being comforted by neighbors. Some children were crying and coughing -- reminding me that Belgrade suffered a serious flu epidemic in February. The air was stale and I had to walk on wooden planks and plastic cartoons to get across an area of water that had accumulated at the entry to the shelter. The space was divided into about ten rooms holding up to 50 people each. The bunk beds were three levels high, so the top person faced air ducts a few inches away. Some families were separated, a mother had not made it back from the city center before the air raid siren and a father and a child took comfort from each other.

I took my photos, but for the first time, I felt personally embarrassed that old women, babies and young mothers were hiding from an attack force that includes planes from my native Canada.

When the all-clear siren sounded, I set out on foot for the center of Belgrade, about 6 kilometers away. It was after midnight and all street lights were off. There were no cars on the road because gas stations closed when a state of war was declared after the NATO bombing started on Wednesday. It is strange to walk through a blacked out city of about two million people on a warm Friday night without hearing any sound except the howling of dogs reacting to air raid sirens.

It took more than an hour to get to the city center and into the same basement at which I spent Thursday night. The number of people in the basement had increased to 30 since my Thursday visit. Nada, the young mother whom I photographed carrying her baby into the shelter on Thursday, was there again, but she was more at ease because her husband had made it home to Belgrade from his soccer training camp.

Shortly after arriving, I heard a loud explosion. It surprised me, not by its intensity, but by the fact that the air-raid warning siren sounded only after the incoming missile had struck. The realization that an attacker can hit you without any warning is disturbing. The situation got worse when Belgrade's public broadcaster issued a special alert against poison gas. NATO's bombs had apparently struck a chemical facility of the ICN-Galenika pharmaceuticals company, as well as what NATO officials called a rocket-fuel dump. When I checked what type of rockets Yugoslavia possesses, I was informed that the facility is used for low altitude projectiles used to break up storm clouds.

The radio warning about poison gas ended with instructions for people to close all windows and to use gas masks. That warning brought tears to the eyes of some of the older women in the basement and caused mothers to pull their children under blankets -- we had no gas masks. If there were any to be had, a gas mask would cost more than a month's earnings for most of those in the room. It was difficult to maintain professional journalistic detachment from the people sitting beside me. I climbed out of the basement and used a wireless telephone to call back to our bureau, which was much closer to the explosions. Our local correspondent said that he had felt a little burning in his eyes, but that he had washed them with water and had put a towel over his mouth and nose and was now doing fine. I reported the 'good' news to those in our shelter and the tension eased.

There were three air raids on Friday night. After the second all-clear siren sounded while I was in the city center, I went upstairs to an apartment to check the latest news on local television. Instead of news, I found myself watching a subtitled version of the U.S. movie 'Wag the Dog'. The movie's storyline tells how a U.S. president caught a scandal over a sex affair with a staff member diverts public attention by fabricating a war in the Balkans. The plot goes into the details of generating detailed photo montages of fake Albanian refugees and deploying an imaginary invincible Stealth aircraft.

After recently spending a whole week searching around Kosovo with other journalists to try to find what we were told was a mass of at least 5,000 Albanian refugees -- to end up have only about 250 people ever turn up, I found the movie a bit predictable.

The three days I had gone without sleep finally caught up with me. I woke up five hours later to the sound of the third all-clear of the night, having slept right through the blaring wail of the third air-raid warning.

Feature story to continue with details about Saturday night

I am breaking off this report because another surprise attack has just taken place near Belgrade at 8:08 a.m. Sunday morning. Seven explosions hit to the west of the IMC NEWS bureau in New Belgrade at intervals of about three seconds. The air-raid sirens sounded only after the first five blasts. These are the largest explosions to date -- our building shook. If you are within range of the domestic BBC radio service in the United Kingdom, you should be able to hear my voice report about the NATO attack on Belgrade's Surcin Airport, which is a civilian facility. Local residents are now running to bomb shelters, some of them dressed only in their bedclothes. People with young children are taking longer to get organized and are straggling behind. Update to follow in several hours.

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Any questions about this report may be sent directly by e-mail to our correspondent, John Bosnitch, who is now on assignment in Yugoslavia. His e-mail address is: bosnitch@imcnews.com We appreciate your comments and suggestions.