Nepal's Revolution

Comrade Ranju is standing on a sunlit hilltop in western Nepal, telling me how she'd come to kill more than a dozen paramilitary policemen in one night. Dressed in fatigues, she's tall and strong for a 19-year-old Nepali woman, and her straight black hair is scraped back severely from her forehead. For the past three years she's roamed these mountains as a soldier in the Maoist army, whose brutal tactics have spread terror throughout the kingdom. Ranju is describing an assault in September 2002 in Sindhuli district, 50 miles (80.5 kilometers) southeast of Nepal's capital, Kathmandu. Her unit was besieging a police station just before midnight. After seeing several comrades gunned down, she came upon a line of policemen. "They didn't surrender, she says. "They were still firing. She claims to have killed 16 or 17 officers with her semiautomatic rifle. In all, 49 police and 21 Maoists were killed.