Terror In Africa

When terror strikes, it always tears through the comforting screen of normality. One moment, midmorning shoppers and workers bustle along Nairobi's Haile Selassie Avenue at the downtown corner where a bronze eagle and a fluttering flag mark the five-story U.S. embassy. The next, the earth trembles as a thunderclap unleashes a mighty shock wave. Seconds later, black smoke plumes into the sky as the tarmac ignites, flashing fire to parked cars and passing buses. The blast shatters every window within a quarter-mile radius into lethal slivers, blows the bombproof doors off the embassy, sucks out ceilings and furniture and people, pancakes...