Codename Boudica

© By Oscar Windsor-Smith

Fellow Americans, you are reading this exclusive story on the America Wide Web rather than my usual column in the New York Times because this once great nation remains cowed by the satellites above our heads and the nuclear missiles locked-on to our cities. Whatever you may have heard, exclusive stories always come at a price; in this case my solemn undertaking, without regard to personal cost, to convey a to the Free World a message from the past. For yesterday I met the woman they have named Boudica.

The call came as such calls invariably do in the small hours. A journalist is always awake when the White House calls. That familiar voice, the motorcycle outriders, and the Aeroflot Konkord Tu-144 skulking in the off-limits area of New York's F D Roosevelt airport indicated this was no small story.

Of the Konkord's hundred and twenty seats, only a handful were occupied. I recognized two faces from the State Department, one from Langley and several bodies, uncomfortably squeezed into civilian suits, clearly from Special Forces. Two nervous-looking men seated further to the rear were strangers to me. A uniformed Soviet military officer directed me to my seat and then went forward into a curtained-off area before the passenger door closed. I was, it seemed, to be the only journalist on this mission. The Secretary of State crossed the aisle and shook my hand. She sat at my side fabricating female small talk until the four great Kuznetsov engines swept our aircraft along the tarmac and up into the night sky. In level flight, the Konkord roared eastward at Mach 2.3, thrusting us forward in time and back into history.

The mission briefing began. A Soviet officer informed us that members of the British Patriotic Front, lead by the terrorist leader known as Boudica, had hijacked a domestic Aeroflot airliner and forced it down in the Disputed Territory. Among the hostages were a People's Commissar and two Heroes of the Soviet Union, one of whom was the grandson of Semyon Konstantiovich Timoshenko notable victor of the Great Patriotic War. To the irritation of my countrymen, the officer explained how Timoshenko had led their victorious armies in1939, which had penetrated the Mannerheim Line, overrun Finland and captured the Norwegian port of Narvik, thus depriving Nazi Germany of its essential Scandinavian steel. It appeared he was also responsible for the combined operations raid on Peenemümde, in the Baltic, capturing German rocket scientist Werner von Braun and his team, and thus ensuring the glorious Union of Soviet Socialist Europe its present unchallenged dominance in space and weaponry. When asked what were the hostage taker's demands, the officer appeared puzzled. He understood that the terrorists also held an elderly woman. It appeared they wanted the woman taken to America, for urgent medical treatment. This was their only demand.

The Konkord made a slow low-level pass over the hot zone of the Disputed Territory as the sun threw dark shadows into the great craters left by Soviet battlefield nukes. That was where they had halted our one abortive attempt to retake Europe. Somewhere below was our destination, but there was nowhere for a Konkord to land in the wasteland that had once been southern Ireland. Twenty minutes later we were on the tarmac at London Joseph Stalin airport, boarding a Kamov Ka-60 transport helicopter.

We flew north for some time before turning west and then south to cross the northern Irish coast. The Kamov swooped down over the demilitarized zone, low enough for us to see the missile batteries and mile upon mile of razor wire, a serpent of death shimmering in the sunlight, on the northern side of the minefield.

A runway, crazed by grass-filled cracks, came into view. On it, close to a concrete building, stood a Tupolev Tu-134 airliner, the long time workhorse of Aeroflot. Our helicopter had landed close to a group of figures on the opposite side of the building when the Secretary of State whispered in my ear: "That is Boudica." I looked at her in surprise, for the person she indicated was a gray haired woman in her eighties. She nodded in confirmation. "Boudica was connected with the British aristocracy", she whispered, "one of the few who survived the executions at Balmoral. Strangely, her mother once held a workers' union card, which may have helped."

Surrounded by heavily armed figures wearing camouflage uniform and black balaclava masks, the elderly woman first shook hands with the Secretary of State, and then with me. The two unidentified men, now each carrying medical bags, then stepped forward and escorted the woman gently into the concrete building. After a few moments one of the masked figures beckoned me into the building.

The woman was sitting in a makeshift examination room where the two men were carrying out medical test procedures. She waved her hand toward a seat at her side, and I sat.

"Shall I call you Boudica?" I asked, uncertain how to proceed.

"You may call me Boudica if you wish, young woman," she said, smiling. "But in truth Boudica is an idea, and ideas are less vulnerable than human bodies. We are all Boudica." She indicated the two masked fighters who guarded the door. Unflinching, she watched a needle being pushed into a vein on her wizened arm. "Do you know why you are here?" she asked.

"Because I'm a female journalist with a major national newspaper?" I ventured.

"Your sex is of less significance now than the fact that your employer is the New York Times. My great grandfather once owned the New York Times."

She explained how her mother, Clara, had tried unsuccessfully to break into politics in the1920s and 30s, a time when women had only recently been granted their right to vote in Britain. Clara had written to newspapers and tried to warn the government of the need to rearm, of the German threat, and the threat from Soviet Russia, to no avail. She had protested when the appeaser Lord Halifax became prime minister after the collapse of the Chamberlain government. She could see that an equal and opposite ego was required to combat the Nazi dictator, and that none was forthcoming. Helplessly she watched as, without a credible adversary, Hitler ordered his Panzer divisions to annihilate the BEF without reprieve at Dunkirk and the British government, sated with death and blitzkrieg, sued for peace. Had it not been for the distraction caused to Hitler by the easy victory in Britain, the Soviets might not have risked breaking the Russian-German Treaty of Non-aggression and moving from Finland into Norway and from Poland into Peenemümde. But it had happened; and with the success of Soviet rocketry, so had come a new victor and a new and continuing occupation.

The two doctors moved close in concerned discussion. I have seen enough of human suffering and body language to know that their findings were not good. I rose and stepped away, to allow them privacy with their patient. Heads shook apologetically, and Boudica gave a rueful, stoic smile.

The two uniformed fighters guarding the door removed their masks, revealing their likeness to their mother and grandmother. They stooped by the old lady and hugged her, women again for as long as it took to demonstrate their love and loyalty. Boudica called me to her side, and whispered her message, before patting my arm in farewell. I looked at the expressions on the faces of these fighting women and I knew I could not let them down.

The message Boudica passed on from her mother, Clara, to her daughter, to her granddaughter and to me, was this: * "We must defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We must fight on the beaches. We must fight on the landing grounds. We must fight in the fields and in the streets. We must fight in the hills. We must never surrender, and if this island, or large part of it, were subjugated and starving, we must fight on, until, in God's good time the New World with all its power and might steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."

Our entrenched isolationist position must change. We are not alone. No man or woman - indeed no nation - is an island.

One cannot help but wonder how different our world might have been, had Clara Spencer Churchill been born a man.

* With apologies to Winston S Churchill for liberties taken in the interests of creativity.