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Meloy, 59, a reserved and well-respected career diplomat who had arrived in Beirut only five weeks before, after serving in Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, posts the State Department considers to be high-risk jobs, was on the way to his first call on Lebanese President-elect Elias Sarkis when disaster struck. Because Lebanon's discredited President Suleiman Franjieh still clings to office, despite the fact that Sarkis has already been chosen to succeed him, Meloy had not yet presented his credentials−a move generally interpreted as a U.S. nudge to Franjieh to step down. Together with Waring, 56, a Lebanon veteran since 1972 and the father of four children, and driver-bodyguard Zohair Moghrabi, Meloy set out from the U.S. embassy, situated in Moslem-dominated West Beirut, for the drive to Hazmieh, a Christian-controlled suburb where Sarkis keeps a home. Initially, a chase car manned by three Lebanese security men from the embassy trailed his light green, partially armored Chevrolet Impala, but dropped away before the entry into no man's land−apparently because Christian militiamen on the other side had insisted that only one car pass. Meloy's car moved through the last checkpoint on the Moslem side−and never reached the first Christian barricade. Somewhere between the two checkpoints, at a spot not visible to either side, the car was stopped by gunmen in what appeared to be a carefully planned operation: the three men were dragged from the vehicle and killed by a volley of shots. For a while the embassy did not know that something had gone wrong: a garbled message over the car's two-way radio had been falsely interpreted as indicating that Meloy and his companions had reached their destination safely. The first sign that something was amiss came when Driver Moghrabi's wife received a phone call advising her that her husband and two other men had been kidnaped. Several hours later three bodies were found on a huge pile of garbage close to the seashore, where a new American embassy building is under construction, at least two miles from where the ambassador was last seen alive. One of the first at the scene was Jean D. Hoefliger, the International Red Cross delegate in Lebanon. Lifting the bloody blankets in which the bodies were wrapped, he recognized Meloy. At his behest the bodies were taken to a nearby Red Cross field hospital and covered with Red Cross flags while Hoefliger informed embassy officials of his discovery. "They were shocked into silence," he told TIME'S Dean Brelis.