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Basayev said that he launched the Budennovsk raid to make Russians feel the real horror of the war that Moscow had unleashed on his people. This has become his leitmotiv, as the string of terrorist attacks he has orchestrated since then prove. In 1999, he and Khattab helped provoke the second Chechen war, when they led a failed invasion of the neighboring republic of Dagestan. Basayev barely survived the resulting Russian offensive on Grozny in early 2000; part of his leg was blown off as he led his men in a retreat across a minefield. Friends and enemies thought this was the end of his military career. Yet a few months after the injury, a courier from Vedeno was amazed to see Basayev drive up to a meeting behind the wheel of an SUV specially adapted to his disability. And he has lost none of his bravado. Last December, he sent a taunting message to the Russian nationalist Motherland movement, which had offered a $500,000 reward for his capture: "Why are you scumbags offering so little?"

Since the retreat from Grozny, Basayev has largely ignored guerrilla warfare in favor of outright terror. The Moscow theater was taken over on his orders in October 2002; 129 hostages died after Russian troops stormed the building. In July 2003, his suicide bombers killed 15 people at a rock concert in a Moscow suburb.

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) Then came the orgy of violence this summer: two planes and a Moscow subway station were bombed, leaving some 100 dead, even before Beslan erupted in tragedy.

The chaotic Russian response to the Beslan school siege left the impression that the Kremlin was taken by surprise. But Time has learned that the Russian security services were tipped off about a possible raid months earlier. Aslambek Aslakhanov, President Vladimir Putin's adviser for the North Caucasus, told Time that he had been informed of a planned assault "well before August. We were looking at the possibility that they would seize a theater or a cinema. We never thought they would take over a school." Law enforcement sources say élite antiterror units were sent to the region in early August, and were warned to expect the seizure of a large public building. One team was stationed near Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, just 20 km northwest of Beslan. Yet by Basayev's own account, he and some 30 other guerrillas spent 10 days in woods about 20 km north of Beslan rehearsing the attack.

Since his terror spree began, Basayev has lost most of his close friends and relatives. Khattab was poisoned by the Russians in 2002. Basayev's father was killed in a shootout with the Russians two years ago. His brother, Shirvani, has been reported dead by the Russians but is, according to numerous accounts, actually living in exile in Turkey. Life goes on for Basayev, however. He has taken a third wife in the past year or so — Eset, the widow of one of his closest commanders. And he is unmoved by the international uproar at his brutality. His Beslan statement was typically callous: "We find it funny when the whole world, with anger and indignation, calls on us to stop. We ask them, What have you done for us that we should listen to you?"

The tragedy in Beslan drew an angry denunciation from Chechnya's deposed President, Aslan Maskhadov. But Basayev leads a more radical wing of the resistance movement that has largely displaced Maskhadov's men (see Rebels with conflicting causes). And he's unlikely to change his tactics now. With Russian forces more likely to collude with guerrillas than track them down, and Chechens themselves too terrified to turn him in, Basayev is left free to plot the next atrocity. He calls his attacks Operation Boomerang, a metaphor for how he wants to make the carnage in Chechnya felt all the way back in Moscow. After Beslan, people across Russia can only wonder if Basayev's boomerang will circle back on them next.