Darryl was wide awake—that’s what a few espressos will do for you—and grinning. “Look out your window!” he shouted over the engines. “It’s on your side!”
Michael sat up, rubbing the rough whiskers on his chin, and lifted the shade. Again, he was struck by that eerie light that made him want to close his eyes or look away. But far ahead and far below, he could see the very tip of the South American continent, tapering like the sharp tip of a shoe, winnowing itself down to almost nothing where the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans merged. And on the very tip of the shoe, he saw a tiny, black smudge.
“Puerto Williams!” Darryl cried, exultantly. “Can you see it?”
Michael had to smile—he kind of liked this guy, but he was definitely going to take some getting used to. He gave him a thumbs-up.
The pilot issued some instructions in Spanish, which Michael assumed meant something like return your seats to their upright position, and the plane banked steeply toward a long, spiky line of brown mountains. When it was parallel to them, and presumably protected from the easterly winds, it swiftly dropped altitude—Michael’s ears popped like corks—and the pilot cut back on the engines. For a moment, it felt like the plane was in a free fall, before Michael heard the rumbling of the landing gear coming down and felt the nose of the plane coming up a bit. The engine noise subsided considerably, and the plane seemed to glide, like a seabird, onto the gravel runway, touch down with a bump, then roll, unimpeded, toward a couple of rusted hangars, a ramshackle terminal, and a control tower that Michael could swear was tilting ten degrees.
Several of the passengers applauded, and the pilot came on to say, “Muchas gracias, se?oras y se?ores, y bienvenidos al fin de la tierra.”
That much Michael didn’t need a translator for. Welcome to the ends of the earth.
CHAPTER FIVE
November 24, 4:15 p.m.
CAPTAIN BENJAMIN PURCELL, the Commanding Officer of the icebreaker Constellation, was getting impatient. From his cabin, he’d heard the arrival of the prop plane carrying his last two passengers, but that had been well over an hour ago. Where the hell were they? How long could it take to get from the airstrip to the port? It wasn’t like Puerto Williams (pop. 2512 at last count) offered much in the way of sightseeing. Once you’d stopped to pay homage to the Proa del Escampavia Yelcho—the preserved prow of the cutter that had been used to rescue Ernest Shackleton’s starving crew from Elephant Island in 1916—there wasn’t a lot else to capture your interest. And Purcell should know—he’d been running his ship among the southernmost Chilean and Argentine ports for nearly ten years—and he still hadn’t seen any more cooperation or amity between those two countries than when he’d started. To this day, there wasn’t a reliable boat connection between Puerto Williams, on the northern shore of the Isla Navarino, and Ushuaia on the Argentine side of the channel.
He went up to the bridge, where Ensign Gallo had been placed on duty while they remained at dockside. Short of the aloft con tower, which rose another forty-five feet above the bridge and was used as a lookout post for oncoming bergs, the bridge afforded the best available view of the port and what passed for the town just up the hill. A few hundred yards away, at the Muelle Guardian Brito, or main pier, a Norwegian cruise ship had berthed, and he could hear one of the old Abba hits—was it “Dancing Queen”?—blaring from its party room.
“Give me those,” he said to the ensign, gesturing at the binoculars that were lodged beside the wheel. He trained them uphill, toward the Centro Comercial—not much more than a few crafts shops, a general store, and a post office—looking for anyone who might look like a photojournalist or a marine biologist. The few people he could see were elderly tourists, carefully framing pictures of each other with the towering granite needles, known as the Teeth of Navarino, in the distance behind them. But then, if you were going to take the trouble to travel to one of the most remote spots on the planet, you probably did want to have incontrovertible proof of that fact when you got back home.
“How’s the doc settling in?” Purcell asked Ensign Gallo.
“Fine, sir. No complaints.”
“Where’d you put her?”
“Petty Officer Klauber volunteered, sir, to give up her cabin to Dr. Barnes.”