Documentary : Covering a War--With Computer by Candlelight : As battle-scarred Kabul slips into the Dark Ages, reporters resort to technical wizards to get the story out.

This story was written on a computer by candlelight.

It was researched in an urban war zone where tanks routinely collided with buses, where rockets disemboweled bulls, where the gunfire of celebration ripped through the skulls of children and where rival armies changed the city map each night. It was also a climate in which journalists had to be as good at scavenging as they were at reporting the daily onslaught of bullets, grenades and tank fire, and an all-consuming chaos.

Still, even as Kabul seemed to slip back into the Dark Ages during its dramatic transfer from corrupt, citified, Soviet-style authoritarians to Islamic holy warriors from the mountains, it was only thanks to the marriage of a substance as basic as gasoline with the most sophisticated satellite technology that the world shared even a glimpse of Afghanistan’s last, extraordinary two weeks.

Wizards of the new information order like Peter Heaps, a 48-year-old Briton with Independent Television News, were the press heroes--people who have perfected the fine art of linking high and low technology and who, for nearly 48 hours from the depths of Afghanistan’s darkest hour, were literally Kabul’s only link with the outside world.

Heaps has spent years learning how to jury-rig communications systems, using everything from gaffer’s tape and paper clips to six-foot-diameter ground stations and satellites in outer space to transmit the words and images that link billions of people tens of thousands of miles apart.

“Yeah, this is the worst,” he said on the weekend, as the entire city of 2 million people was without power, water, telephones, telex, fuel and, increasingly, food for its fourth straight day.

“Let’s see, there was the Queen (Elizabeth II of Britain) in China. That was bad. Very low-tech. Romania was fun. But no, this was the worst. Because here, everything went out for everyone all at once. This was nice, very global.”

Even in the best of times, Kabul has been one of the most remote cities on the planet--its own links with the outside world limited to balky, 30-year-old telex machines.

But on that critical night last week when the lights went out in Kabul--and the telex machines as well--Heaps was there. He was there for every television network, every magazine, newspaper, wire service and radio station in the world.

It was nearly midnight on the day that the mad real-estate grab for the capital by Afghanistan’s victorious Islamic rebel forces turned from a celebration of liberation into a bloody urban turf war that still threatens to rip the nation to bits.

It had been a bad day for the press corps. We’d watched an Italian television cameraman get hit in the head with shrapnel as he filmed enduring images of a searing tank and artillery duel between moderate guerrillas holding a 5th-Century fort and fundamentalists occupying a strategic, nearby hilltop graveyard called the Cemetery of Martyrs.

The cameraman lived. He was rushed to a Red Cross hospital already overflowing with hundreds of civilian casualties who were caught in a cross-fire so intense it destroyed entire neighborhoods. But his serious injury, and that of another cameraman hit in the back the following day, twisted the guts of all of us who had been nearby.

Then, the lights went out. I was in the elevator, trapped between floors of the Kabul Intercontinental Hotel--a hilltop prison of sorts whose services had already collapsed under the pressure of scores of journalists. The citywide power cut, which came when fundamentalist factions knocked out the link between Kabul and its power station 50 miles away, similarly rendered useless the small satellite phones that, just one year before, had proved the crucial link to the battle zone in Kuwait.

In the darkness, the wounds of Kabul’s war would have gone unnoticed as far as the outside world was concerned; the images unseen, the torment of a city in desperate need of international intervention would have turned completely inward.

But there was Peter Heaps, huddled in a remote section of the blackened lobby of the crumbling hotel, offering the services of his “Advent two-meter dish driven by a high-powered amplifier, which, on transmission, puts out 300 watts of power and will get you just about anywhere you need to get. But don’t stand in front of it or it’ll fry your gonads,” he warned any and all in need--which was every journalist from Islamabad to Los Angeles.

A few days later, the dozens of correspondents he had saved held a ceremony of thanks, presenting him with an Afghan carpet and a card that declared: “To Peter Heaps, the man who should be king.” We asked Kabul’s wizard of the microwaves if there was anywhere on Earth his gear did not work.

“Yes, the North and South Pole,” he said without a pause. “Of course, this has covered the release of Nelson Mandela, live two-ways from inside war zones. The furthest we’ve been is Iceland, and that’s a bit tight--skimming the Earth pretty close there, you know. And, of course, the excess baggage is pretty steep, 10,000 pounds ($17,800) from London to Delhi on this one, it was.

“But, in a situation like this, it’s the only way to go. When you get into these sticky ones, it’s got to bring everyone together. That’s what it’s all about. It’s been very global.”

The only crisis that even Heaps couldn’t overcome, of course, was Kabul’s lack of gasoline. When the power went out, his was the only gas-powered generator in the hotel. Then, even the gasoline ran out. And, in the days that followed, journalists found themselves spending as much time scouring the impoverished, battle-scarred capital for precious, overpriced fuel as they did for shreds of information--dodging incoming artillery rounds as we filled battered one-gallon gasoline cans and grabbed interviews along the way.

Perhaps not so coincidentally, there was a flood of stories the following day on Kabul’s failed experiment in socialism.

Although it is hardly as critical as communications, transport is another key factor when working in the chaos of war zones. And in Kabul, a crossroad on the ancient Silk Road renowned through history for its banditry and cunning, the problem was the army of taxi drivers.

On a very good day before the capital got really dangerous, a Kabul cabby could get $40 a day from a foreign journalist. The day the war broke out, the tab shot up to $100. Day Two: $200. And, on Day Three, the handful of taxi drivers who had not been hijacked or commandeered at gunpoint by the dizzying array of rebel and tribal groups fighting over the city decided the going rate would be $300.

As the city’s new Islamic leadership met to decide the fate of a nation in traditional councils known as shura s , the press corps met for a taxi shura. The consensus: Boycott.

The world may have missed a few hours of coverage of Kabul’s historic transformation that morning, but the recession-racked Western media were saved tens of thousands of dollars.

And then, there was the ultimate problem of transport in a war zone--getting out.

In the days and weeks since everyone had flown into the capital on the regime’s decaying Ariana Airlines--one journalist dubbed it “the world’s only 12th-Century airline”--all land exit routes had been taken over by competing, heavily armed guerrilla groups.

The arrangement was reminiscent of the days when Kabul lay between the rich empires of Persia to the west and China to the east--when ownership of a bit of road meant the power to levy tolls. Now, however, every roadside check post, garrison, and town had been taken over by moujahedeen (Islamic holy warriors)--many of them belonging to fundamentalist guerrilla factions that deeply resent the West. And all the bands had tanks, rocket launchers and grenades, meaning that the stakes for any Western journalist trying to pass were higher than the tolls of antiquity.

Kabul’s international airport was a grim alternative. The fundamentalist factions that were brutally driven out of strategic positions in the capital by the coalition of moderate rebels who eventually secured it--if only tenuously--found solace in isolating the entire city from a distance. They fired endless, long-range rocket barrages on the airport that made Ariana’s crews a bit reluctant to resume service. Deteriorating Soviet-built airliners were one thing. A rocket in the cockpit was another.

“Even if we could find a crew willing to fly now, I’m not sure we could find transportation to get them to and from the airport,” said one beleaguered Ariana official in Kabul on the eve of what promised to be the first flight out Friday.

“Our cars and buses have all been taken by the moujahedeen . How can you fly a plane when you can’t even hitch a ride?”