Correspondent Marcia Gauger has a fine professional facility for being in the right place at a stimulating time. Three years ago, while on loan from TIME to teach journalism at the American University in Cairo, she was caught in one of the riots over high Egyptian food prices that rattled the government of President Anwar Sadat. This year, even before settling in as the magazine's New Delhi bureau chief, she covered the collapse of the government of Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai.

But nothing can match the timing that Gauger demonstrated last week: she was the only journalist inside the U.S. embassy in Islamabad when it was attacked and burned by a Pakistani mob. Gauger's first-person account of the siege and her subsequent rescue is a substantial part of this week's cover story.

Gauger had gone to the embassy to seek information concerning a Voice of America radio report about last week's seizure of the Sacred Mosque in Mecca. When an official she sought turned out to be away from his office, she headed for the embassy commissary, one of few places in the sternly Islamic city where alcohol is served. "I thought I might have lunch and a beer and try to catch him before I left for my next appointment," she says. "You know the rest. It could happen to anyone who likes a beer."

Gauger has spent much of her life in motion. As a youth she traveled through North and South America with her father, a chemical engineer. Her childhood ambition was to become a foreign correspondent, but her economics degree from Swarthmore led to a job with TIME as a New York-based researcher in the Business section. She later moved to the news service, where she kept track of colleagues' travels, and eventually be came a reporter in the New York City bureau.

During her years in New York she visited Europe, the Middle East, the Soviet Union, China and India. In her first months as head of the New Delhi bureau, she has traveled through the Indian subcontinent to reacquaint herself with the region's politics and varied cultures. She has followed the election campaign of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, covered a public flogging in Rawalpindi and finally traveled to Islamabad for her appointment with danger. "It was not quite the way I had planned to spend Thanksgiving," she says of her ordeal. "But I am really in the spirit of the holiday now. When you think you will either be shot on a roof or roasted in a steel vault, but then escape, you have learned something about how to be thankful."

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