Judge & Jury - James Patterson [88]
It was autumn in the southern hemisphere, and we were down at the very tip. The sky was slate gray, and a steady wind beat into our faces anytime we stepped outdoors. It took a day to adjust. Remlikov said Cavello’s ranch was near Ushuaia, a twelve-hour drive.
“Where the hell is Ushuaia?” Andie asked, squinting at the map.
“South.”
“I thought we were south.” Andie smirked cynically.
I pointed at a dot at the very tip of South America. “All the way south.”
For years, Ushuaia was pretty much noted for its remote prison. I had a book on Patagonia by a writer named Bruce Chatwin. He described a fabled and mysteriously remote land. Magellan had stopped there, and all he had encountered were Indians who didn’t wear much clothing and huddled around fires in the most hostile climate. The Land of Fire, he named it. Tierra del Fuego.
As we sat there on the second morning in our rented Land Cruiser, ready to pull out, Andie said to me, “All I can say is, if Remlikov turns out to be a liar it’s a helluva long drive back.”
The route south and east was weather-beaten and winding, but the landscape was spectacular. Like nothing I’d ever seen anywhere. We immediately climbed up through the Andes. Craggy, saw-toothed mountains jutted from sprawling plains. Massive ice-blue glaciers nestled between the peaks. The channel coastline was rocky and irregular, as it must have looked a million years ago. As if God couldn’t make up His mind between beautiful and desolate. At almost every turn in the road, swirling clouds opened to sudden chasms of the most brilliant blue.
We finally crossed the border into Argentina. The winding road hugged Beagle Channel, islands and peninsulas pushing out into a blue-gray sea that looked freezing cold. Occasionally men on horseback with scarves over their weathered faces waved silently from the side of the road. The landscape was barren and lunar.
We eventually came upon a roadside cantina, the first commercial establishment we’d seen for miles. There were gauchos sitting around outside, hearty-looking locals who looked us over and probably wondered if we’d gotten our seasons wrong.
“I get the feeling we ought to stop,” Andie said. “The closest McDonald’s is probably about thirty-two hundred miles away.”
The meats at the cantina were roasted on open flames and served smothered in a green chimichurri sauce with vegetables on tortillas. Not outstanding, but not half-bad. We took a picture of a sign that read ANTARCTICA, 807 MILES in a dozen languages.
A young cowboy with a multicolored shawl let Andie climb up on his horse. Her smile was one I’d remember until I died. I hoped that wouldn’t be too soon.
Andie looked wistfully at me as we climbed back in the car. “I wish Jarrod could have been here, Nick. All the things he missed.”
When we came to the outskirts of Ushuaia there were no picture postcards. The last stopover before Antarctica.
The town sloped upward from the sea against a steep mountain, almost a wall. This was the other side of the world from Haifa, and not just geographically. The place appeared to be a pit. Narrow streets rose up from an industrial port, loaded with locals hawking everything from penguin dolls to Antarctica T-shirts. Packs of mangy dogs roamed the streets. The low stucco houses had these strange baskets atop stakes in front of them. The stunning beauty of our drive there came crashing down.
We found a modest hotel near the port called La Bella Vista that the guidebook said was decent. I shrugged in Andie’s direction. “The Ritz was booked.”
Our room had a queen-size bed, some pictures of the town as it was a hundred years ago, and a framed nautical map of Antarctica, which was