Book Review

Book Review: THE MOUNTAIN BETWEEN US by Charles Martin A Survival Novel

I'm not sure what time it is. It's still dark. I don't know how long I was out. Snow is spilling in through the broken windshield. Can't catch my breath. Maybe broke two or three ribs.

He was dead before we hit the treetops. I'll never understand how he landed this thing without killing me, too. There's a dog here and . . . a woman. Trying to get home to her fiancé and a rehearsal dinner. I'll look . . . .

Chapter one then flashes back to twelve hours before, at the Salt Lake City Airport. The weather is closing in; his flight is delayed, passengers crowding everywhere, and Dr. Ben Payne, an orthopedic surgeon is catching up on his medical records dictation, sitting on the floor by an electric outlet. A woman perhaps age thirty asks if she can share the wall outlet. He agrees, and she begins dictation of a magazine story. Ben learns that Ashley Knox, a writer, hopes to reach Atlanta in time for her wedding two days hence.

Their flight is finally cancelled. Ben rides a shuttle to the private plane area and finds he can charter a flight to Denver. Thinking about the girl who will be late for her wedding, he finds her in the long waiting line for taxis, and offers her the chance to get ahead of the storm; she accepts. Grover, private pilot, has had thousands of hours flying over the Rocky Mountains and gets prompt clearance from flight control. Despite the turbulent flying conditions, he handles his plane easily, while talking with Ashley about his own more than forty years of happy marriage. Grover introduces them both to his dog who is “flying copilot”.

As the plane rises higher to cross the Uinta Mountain Wilderness, Grover begins coughing occasionally. He draws a roll of Tums from his pocket, takes two. Physician sense alerted, Ben taps him on the shoulder. “Tell me about your bum ticker – how long you been coughing and popping antacids?” The plane continues to rise as they approaches the peaks; Grover changes the subject and answers a question from Ashley. A few minutes later he coughs, grunts, grabs his chest. Our speed slowed. Then, as if he'd done it a thousand times, he pancaked the plane against the mountain snow. That's about the last thing I remember.

Ben slowly recovers consciousness, confusing the recent conversation with memories of his own wife. He's gradually aware of chest pain and shivering. The plane's tail has broken off, leaving them exposed to the air, but the rest of the plane is in deep snow, giving a cocoon-like shelter. Ashley lies comatose but the pulse in her neck is even. She has a dislocated shoulder and a bad angle to her left thigh, though the bone hadn't broken through the skin. Her shoulder goes back into place easily, but the break in her left thigh bone is a problem. He is finally able to reduce the fracture and fashion two splints from broken pieces of the plane, tying them with wadded T-shirts from his luggage. Her thigh has swollen twice its size and he packs snow around it. He slowly realizes Grover had not been required to file a flight plan, and that no one knew he even had passengers. They are in a National Wilderness Area, seventy miles from anywhere, invisible to the occasional airplane high overhead. Grover's plane has a few emergency supplies, but they both need medical attention, especially Ashley.

Rummaging around, Ben discovers two sleeping bags, a couple small packs of trail mix, and a small gas heater for water. No one knows their situation; it's urgent to get to a lower elevation and find food. They are on their own. With daylight, and after Ashley has regained consciousness, Ben climbs a small ridge and sees that the only way showing any hope is to head southeast. He can fashion something like a stretcher for Ashley from part of the exposed wing, and a shovel of sorts from a rudder flap with which to dig in the snow and bury Grover's body.

On day six, Ben gently lifts Ashley in her sleeping bag onto the sled, puts the dog beside her and adds Grover's bow, arrows and fly rod. Ashley grabs his arm. “One question, and I want an honest answer. Can you get us out of here?”

“Seriously? No idea.”

Her eyes narrow. “We've got to work on our communication. I'm not asking you because I want honest answers. I want you to lie your butt off. Tell me we've got only a mile to go when there might be a hundred ahead of us.”

I laughed. “Okay. Listen. There's a helicopter waiting just beyond that first ridge. They've got sausage, muffins, and a dozen glazed donuts. And Starbucks.”

She patted me on the back. “Now you're getting the hang of it.”

But the going was slow. Leaning into the harness I had devised, I would take three steps and stop to breathe. By noon, we had gone maybe a mile. By dusk, perhaps two. It wasn't just my busted ribs. The air at 11,000 feet elevation is thin. And our food about gone. A few finger-sized fish. And one day, a rabbit.

Day eleven.After an hour we'd come maybe a quarter mile, dropping maybe a hundred feet in elevation. She was not impressed. “How long do think you can do this?”

“Don't know.”

“We can't do this. You can't. We're in the middle of nowhere.”

I stopped, sweat dripping off me, breathing deeply. “We can't stay up here. If we do we'll die. And I can't leave you. If I do, you'll die. So we're walking out.”

Her frustration at being helpless bubbled over. She screamed, “It's been eleven damn days and not a soul has come looking. What's your plan?”

“One step at a time.”

“And how long do you think you can keep that up?”

“As long as it takes.”

We didn't speak again for several hours.

Day fifteen. Overlooking a wide valley in the distance, I could see some kind of horizontal line half-hidden.

Day seventeen, we see it closer, a building across a frozen lake. A large A-frame, empty; evidently a summer campground. No sign of car tracks, or people. But warm shelter! firewood, water. And big game nearby. A map on the wall with a “You are here” mark tells us we are in the Ashley National Forest. But it nearly becomes her memorial park before anyone finds us.

It will be another ten days before we will reach civilization. And, despite all the complications we have encountered so far, the end will be stranger yet.

Book Review: CODE GIRLS by Liza Mundy (non-fiction history 2017 )

The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

More than ten thousand American women served as code breakers during World War II. The army and navy competed for them, recruiting from top university graduating classes and from high school teachers. Told only that they would be doing important office work in the Nation's Capital, they were given a letter telling them where to report, and cautioning them to never talk to anyone about their work, not even family or fellow workers.

Armies have used codes for centuries. But when radio communication enabled real-time contact with ships at sea, airplanes, commanders on front battle lines, or diplomats in far countries, anyone with radio savvy could listen in. Secrecy demanded cryptic speech that an enemy would not understand. Anyone who could figure out the meaning could anticipate enemy action before it happened. With war approaching in 1939, Army and Navy geared up to detect enemy plans. Recruits were tested to detect high intelligence, especially ability in math and foreign languages.

The influx of hundreds of young women overwhelmed Arlington County, across the Potomac River from Washington. The government hastily built new apartment buildings and dormitories; officials went door to door asking residents if they had an extra room, or a basement apartment two or three girls might occupy. Ms. Mundy entitles one chapter “Twenty-Eight Acres of Girls.”

Many were from small rural towns; their ability to de-code developed as they worked. Washington was keeping track of nations all over the world, but the main focus was on Hitler's Nazi Germany, already at war with Britain and France, and Japan in its expansion through China and beyond. Both countries had complicated code systems which were changed every few days or weeks. Germany had developed a portable machine, “Enigma”, which automaticaly encoded German. It had three wheels, each with twenty-six positions. Varying their relative positions could create thousands of different ways of scrambling the letters of a message.

Japan had a similar device, the “purple machine” which would take phonetic Japanese (using the English alphabet to change Japanese writing and then scrambling the letters.) The British had already decoded Enigma's output, but the teams of both British and American decoders were stymied by the Japanese “Purple Code” for months. They had solved six of the letters, but could not crack the other twenty.

September 20, 1940, several team members were talking together, when a shy young recruit, Genevieve Grotjan, approached. “Excuse me,” she said, “I have something to show you.” She laid down a very long message in Japanese purple code, where she had encircled the position of the same two symbols appearing together four times in different spots. From her discovery, the team was able to deduce the rest of the code.

A number of factors conspired to affect the lack of preparedness at Pearl Harbor that brought America into the World War, but the code breakers had advanced far enough in the following year to achieve three major victories. Japan's progress toward Australia in 1942 was halted by the battle of the Coral Sea. Japanese aircraft carriers were astonished when, approaching Port Moresby, New Guinea, they met American planes from the carriers Yorktown and Lexington, who destroyed some of Japan's best pilots. No ships on either side saw the ships of the other, but the American decoders monitoring Japan's radio traffic directed the Navy to the spot where they could stop the Japanese.

A month later, the Navy was uncertain whether the Japanese designation “AF” stood for Alaska Force or for Midway Island, north of Hawaii. The coders sent a fake notice (in plain English) that Midway's water supply had broken down and soon detected Japanese messages that AF's water supply was short. Japan sent one force northward toward Alaska to draw off the American Navy but the Americans didn't take the bait. Four Japanese carriers at Midway were unaware that the Yorktown, Enterprise, and Hornet were lying in wait off Midway. The score: US lost 2 ships, 145 aircraft and 707 men, Japan lost all 4 aircraft carriers, nearly 300 planes, (they had no place to land) and over 2,400 men. US Admiral Nimitz declared that code breaking had provided a “priceless advantage” at Midway. The Japanese advance never regained its momentum.

The code breakers' third dramatic moment came when they decoded the detailed itinerary of Admiral Yamamoto's inspection trip of Japan's conquests. They learned the precise time his planes – two bombers and six escorting fighters – would leave the Japanese base at Rabaul. Sixteen US P-38s intercepted the Japanese over Bougainville and shot down both bombers. Admiral Yamamoto, commander of the attack on Pearl Harbor was later found dead in the jungle, “his white-gloved hand clutching his sword.” The girls in Washington had solved the code.

The war ended without Japan ever becoming aware that their “purple code” and several other military and diplomatic codes had been broken. Their ambassador to Hitler's Germany was a gold mine of information about German defenses on Europe's seacoast as D-Day approached.

It's not appropriate to exult now over enemy ships sunk, nor enemy soldiers killed; they had families who grieved, just as ours did. But for the millions of lives saved on both sides of the war because it ended when it did, we can honor the Code Girls.

Liza Mundy's book is a fascinating and detailed account of women who never spoke of their accomplishments until long after the war ended.

Reviewer's note: At one point 8,000 women were at work in US military cryptography, counting civilians, army (WACS), and navy (WAVES). I had a cousin, born about 1917 who spent part of her childhood in Japan ( her Dad worked for the YMCA there.) It never occurred to me to ask what she did in the WAVES, but with her experience of Japanese language, I now suspect she was one of those thousands.

Book Review

Book Review: THE MOUNTAIN BETWEEN US by Charles Martin A Survival Novel

I'm not sure what time it is. It's still dark. I don't know how long I was out. Snow is spilling in through the broken windshield. Can't catch my breath. Maybe broke two or three ribs.

He was dead before we hit the treetops. I'll never understand how he landed this thing without killing me, too. There's a dog here and . . . a woman. Trying to get home to her fiancé and a rehearsal dinner. I'll look . . . .

Chapter one then flashes back to twelve hours before, at the Salt Lake City Airport. The weather is closing in; his flight is delayed, passengers crowding everywhere, and Dr. Ben Payne, an orthopedic surgeon is catching up on his medical records dictation, sitting on the floor by an electric outlet. A woman perhaps age thirty asks if she can share the wall outlet. He agrees, and she begins dictation of a magazine story. Ben learns that Ashley Knox, a writer, hopes to reach Atlanta in time for her wedding two days hence.

Their flight is finally cancelled. Ben rides a shuttle to the private plane area and finds he can charter a flight to Denver. Thinking about the girl who will be late for her wedding, he finds her in the long waiting line for taxis, and offers her the chance to get ahead of the storm; she accepts. Grover, private pilot, has had thousands of hours flying over the Rocky Mountains and gets prompt clearance from flight control. Despite the turbulent flying conditions, he handles his plane easily, while talking with Ashley about his own more than forty years of happy marriage. Grover introduces them both to his dog who is “flying copilot”.

As the plane rises higher to cross the Uinta Mountain Wilderness, Grover begins coughing occasionally. He draws a roll of Tums from his pocket, takes two. Physician sense alerted, Ben taps him on the shoulder. “Tell me about your bum ticker – how long you been coughing and popping antacids?” The plane continues to rise as they approaches the peaks; Grover changes the subject and answers a question from Ashley. A few minutes later he coughs, grunts, grabs his chest. Our speed slowed. Then, as if he'd done it a thousand times, he pancaked the plane against the mountain snow. That's about the last thing I remember.

Ben slowly recovers consciousnes, confusing the recent conversation with memories of his own wife. He's gradually aware of chest pain and shivering. The plane's tail has broken off, leaving them exposed to the air, but the rest of the plane is in deep snow, giving a cocoon-like shelter. Ashley lies comatose but the pulse in her neck is even. She has a dislocated shoulder and a bad angle to her left thigh, though the bone hadn't broken through the skin. Her shoulder goes back into place easily, but the break in her left thigh bone is a problem. He is finally able to reduce the fracture and fashion two splints from broken pieces of the plane, tying them with wadded T-shirts from his luggage. Her thigh has swollen twice its size and he packs snow around it. He slowly realizes Grover had not been required to file a flight plan, and that no one knew he even had passengers. They are in a National Wilderness Area, seventy miles from anywhere, invisible to the occasional airplane high overhead. Grover's plane has a few emergency supplies, but they both need medical attention, especially Ashley.

Rummaging around, Ben discovers two sleeping bags, a couple small packs of trail mix, and a small gas heater for water. No one knows their situation; it's urgent to get to a lower elevation and find food. They are on their own. With daylight, and after Ashley has regained consciousness, Ben climbs a small ridge and sees that the only way showing any hope is to head southeast. He can fashion something like a stretcher for Ashley from part of the exposed wing, and a shovel of sorts from a rudder flap with which to dig in the snow and bury Grover's body.

On day six, Ben gently lifts Ashley in her sleeping bag onto the sled, puts the dog beside her and adds Grover's bow, arrows and fly rod. Ashley grabs his arm. “One question, and I want an honest answer. Can you get us out of here?”

“Seriously? No idea.”

Her eyes narrow. “We've got to work on our communication. I'm not asking you because I want honest answers. I want you to lie your butt off. Tell me we've got only a mile to go when there might be a hundred ahead of us.”

I laughed. “Okay. Listen. There's a helicopter waiting just beyond that first ridge. They've got sausage, muffins, and a dozen glazed donuts. And Starbucks.”

She patted me on the back. “Now you're getting the hang of it.”

But the going was slow. Leaning into the harness I had devised, I would take three steps and stop to breathe. By noon, we had gone maybe a mile. By dusk, perhaps two. It wasn't just my busted ribs. The air at 11,000 feet elevation is thin. And our food about gone. A few finger-sized fish. And one day, a rabbit.

Day eleven.After an hour we'd come maybe a quarter mile, dropping maybe a hundred feet in elevation. She was not impressed. “How long do think you can do this?”

“Don't know.”

“We can't do this. You can't. We're in the middle of nowhere.”

I stopped, sweat dripping off me, breathing deeply. “We can't stay up here. If we do we'll die. And I can't leave you. If I do, you'll die. So we're walking out.”

Her frustration at being helpless bubbled over. She screamed, “It's been eleven damn days and not a soul has come looking.. What's your plan?”

“One step at a time.”

“And how long do you think you can keep that up?”

“As long as it takes.”

We didn't speak again for several hours.

Day fifteen. Overlooking a wide valley in the distance, I could see some kind of horizontal line half-hidden.

Day seventeen, we see it closer, a building across a frozen lake. A large A-frame, empty; evidently a summer campground. No sign of car tracks, or people. But warm shelter! firewood, water. And big game nearby. A map on the wall with a “You are here” mark tells us we are in the Ashley National Forest. But it nearly becomes her memorial park before anyone finds us.

It will be another ten days before we will reach civilization. And, despite all the complications we have encountered so far, the end will be stranger yet.