Picture this: A young female student nurse works the midnight shift in a London hospital where she meets a young male "house officer" (intern). It is summer in England. The young couple slip away during their break to meet outside in a rhubarb patch, illuminated by the moonlight, to read to one another the poetry of Yeats, Browning, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

And this: A mother of three young children pursues master's degrees in economics and sociology (at night, so as not to be away from the children during the day). She assumes a teaching position at a local university; then writes a book, The Rape of Reason, in which she attacks the "physiognomy of hatred" propagated at her school by hardline Marxist/Leninist thought. A columnist for the London Times covers her book in three consecutive issues; these columns influence both politicians and academics.

And this: A grandmother "lives the life of a truck driver," eating and sleeping out of a 32-ton truck for a week in Poland. Why? Because her name appeared on the letterhead of a relief organization as a "patron," and she didn't like the idea of "just being a name on the writing paper."

And this: An advocate for persecuted Christians leads a delegation of lawyers, professors, and human-rights workers, on foot, through the line of fire, waving a white tablecloth attached to a branch, across the border of Azerbaijan (a former Soviet republic) to "talk to" the Azeris. She had been visiting Christian Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh (an isolated enclave of Armenians that Stalin relocated to Azerbaijan) who had been under heavy attack by the Azeris?including ransacking and torching homes, forcibly driving residents off their land, and beheading citizens. She wanted to meet the Azeris face to face so they would take her seriously.

Four amazing women? No, just one. Meet Baroness Caroline Cox, of Queensbury?Lady Caroline to some, and Caroline to her friends, who are just about everyone she meets. ("The title shows God's sense of humor," she says.) While Michael Horowitz was awakening the American evangelical community to the plight of persecuted believers around the world, Caroline Cox was working among them, delivering medicines to the dying and maimed and buying back children who had been commandeered as slaves. She was helping those who, in her words, "are bereft of aid and advocacy; who are among the most isolated, outcast, and deprived in the world." The ones who told her, "We thought the world had forgotten us."

"As indeed it had," she adds.

Caroline Cox?a deputy speaker in the British House of Lords and president of Christian Solidarity? UK (United Kingdom) began her humanitarian efforts in the 1980s with the truck trips to Poland on behalf of the Medical Aid for Poland Fund. This introduced her to members of the Polish Solidarity movement and earned her Poland's highest award for a foreigner, the Commander Cross of the Order of Merit.

She was then asked to help organize a human-rights conference in Russia in 1990, which got the attention of Andrei Sakharov's widow. Mrs. Sakharov invited her to help organize a human-rights congress in Moscow to commemorate what would have been the 70th birthday of her deceased husband. Lady Caroline chaired a committee looking into human-rights abuses in the USSR. That's how she ended up crossing into Azerbaijan, waving a white flag.

"I had no idea what I was getting into," she says.

What she was "into" was helping and comforting people?most of them Christians?who face the worst kind of misery and brutality. During one visit to a village that had been overrun by Azeri troops, she met a nurse who had lost 14 relatives in the assault and who, hours before, had witnessed the beheading of her son.