When it was over and the rebels had retreated from Zaire to the Angolan border, the vastness of Africa seemed to swallow them up. For Johannesburg Bureau Chief William McWhirter, who had flown north to enter devastated Kolwezi on the private plane of Zaire President Mobutu Sese Seko, that vastness was a large part of the challenge. The complications of communication and transportation made the job of staying with the news especially difficult for this week's cover story (see WORLD).

The essential problem was that no telephones -- let alone telex machines -- were available at the battlefront. To file his reports to TIME'S editors in New York, McWhirter was forced to use his hotel phone in the beleaguered capital of Kinshasa. Within a week, he made five trips over the 1,000 miles of grassland between Kinshasa and Kolwezi by hitching plane rides on paratroop convoys, with U.S. cargo shipments, and once on a Belgian 727 converted to a refugee carrier.

TIME Photographer Peter Jordan remained in Kolwezi to capture the invasion's grim aftermath on film and made his own way using abandoned cars and bare-rimmed bicycles when he chose not to walk the deserted streets of the town alone. He expects never to return to Kolwezi.

Meanwhile, Nairobi Bureau Chief David Wood flew to Lusaka, then chartered a plane into northern Zambia, landing at a missionary station and school a few miles from the Zaire border. Here the transportation problem beset him too. The missionaries fed him and translated for him but balked at lending him a car: Spanish journalists the previous year had borrowed a local farmer's car, only to be arrested across the border in Zaire and have the car destroyed. Consequently, Wood explored the nearby border roads to report on the strange victory march of the rebels in their victims' clothes, driving stolen cars, to the cheers of native bystanders.

It was a new and compelling vision, but Wood's own circumstances were by now all too familiar to him.

Since arriving in Nairobi eleven months ago, Wood has traveled almost constantly from one battle scene to the next, his suitcases never quite unpacked. "My wife has tacked a large map of Africa on the wall of our Nairobi house," he reports, "just to show the kids 'where Daddy is now.' "

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