The Real Thing (16 page)

Bing stumbled and almost fell, but Clara caught his arm just in time. They were scraping their way down a rock-strewn path towards the jetty. It would have been a tough track for three young triathletes in the full light of day, she felt. For the three of them, at night, with Joe shouting at them to hurry up, it was a minefield of rocky knobs and edges just waiting to grab them by the ankles and throw them down the steep drop to their left.

Gunshots sounded from the other side of the island, where an alien glow lifted up to the heavens from bright lights of some kind. They had seen a small airstrip on the helicopter flight in, which Clara guessed was the cause of the glow.

The cause of the gunshots was less clear, but it certainly seemed possible someone had come to their rescue. She wondered if it was the police or the army. She didn’t know if the gunshots came from revolvers or rifles, or whether the kidnappers or the rescuers fired them.

‘Hurry it up,’ Joe said again, trying to sound angry but only succeeding in sounding scared.

Scared was good, Clara thought, and, for the first time, she felt she might possibly survive the evening’s adventure.

Fizzer and Tupai are two of the bravest people you are ever likely to meet, and Dennis Cray climbs mountains and scuba dives in underground rivers, so he’s no limping lily either, but when bullets are flying at you out of the darkness, you don’t stick out your chin and puff up your chest and say, ‘give us your best shot,’ because their best shot is likely to hit you in your puffed-up chest and punch your clock, as they say.

‘Get out of the light,’ Dennis shouted.

So they ran, scrambling over ragged volcanic rocks that tore at their legs in the darkness.

A couple more shots crashed out from near the shack, and there were voices, at least three of them.

Fizzer located Tupai and Dennis by the sound of their breathing and led them behind a small stand of stunted trees struggling for life in the pumicy soil. His eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness, and he could discern shapes of rocks and small shrubs. The others seemed totally blind.

‘We’ve got to get to the executives before they …’ He stopped as another shot sounded and there was a corresponding crack from a rock nearby.

‘We can’t …’ Dennis began, but Fizzer hushed him urgently. Another sound had intruded.

‘Listen,’ he said.

The sound swelled and they heard it also. The low rumble of diesel engines on the far side of the small island.

‘That’s how they’re going to do it,’ he whispered. ‘They’re going to take them out to sea where they can dispose of the bodies.’

There was a shocked silence, broken only by the shouts of their pursuers and the sound of the Jeep being driven slowly around the edge of the airstrip, its headlights on full beam probing the darkness beyond the landing lights.

‘You two stay here,’ Dennis whispered. ‘Give me a few minutes then throw a few rocks around, make a little noise. After you hear a bit of a commotion, make your way as fast as you can to the boat.’ He paused for a moment, then said, ‘Don’t get shot.’

That sounded sensible.

‘Where are you going?’ Tupai wanted to know.

‘To earn my fifth dan,’ Dennis grinned and disappeared into the blackness.

Even Fizzer couldn’t hear him making his way among the rocks and crags of the island.

Shouts and the occasional shot carried clearly through the evening air, rising above the idling throb of the engines on the small ship, now brightly lit with floodlights fore and aft.

Candy sat in the front of the small rubber dinghy, holding the gun as if it were a small dead animal she’d found under the shed. It was pointing the right way though, or the wrong way, Clara supposed, depending on your point of view. Joe sat at the back, behind the three of them, revving the outboard motor while a V-shaped wash spread out from the back of the boat, lapping against the legs of the jetty as it slid away behind them.

It was a short trip to the
Turtle Dove
, and still there were no running footsteps back on the shore. No searchlights from Coastguard cutters, or men in black suits and helmets rappelling out of helicopters above them. Whoever was coming to their rescue was taking their time, Clara thought. Once they were out at sea, their death warrants were surely signed.

The rubber boat bumped into the low diving platform at the rear of the yacht, and a deckhand threw down a line which Candy fastened to a small T-bar on the front of the dinghy. She did it hastily, without lowering the pistol, and without looking away from them. Just a couple of quick loops.

She climbed over the bow on to the diving platform and pulled the dinghy sideways up against it. The gun never wavered, though. Joe clambered out, and Candy passed the abhorrent object that was the pistol to him with a look of relief. Joe climbed a short ladder to the deck and covered them from there, while Candy held the dinghy fast up against the platform.

‘Get moving,’ she said.

Ralph was first, rolling over the rounded side of the dinghy and rising to his feet on the diving platform, water sloshing around his shoes. He started to climb the ladder.

Bing was next and nearly slipped on the wet floor, but recovered himself just in time, muttering under his breath. That’s what gave Clara the idea.

She struggled out of the dinghy, but then deliberately slipped as her foot touched the platform, falling forward and colliding with Candy, whose head hit the side of the boat with a satisfying thud.

‘Stupid old witch!’ Candy screamed, but the trick had worked, the dinghy drifted away from the platform, and, arms flailing, Clara fell into the gap between the boat and the ship.

Her first thought on entering the water was how warm it was, all things considered. Her second thought concerned sharks.

She floundered, she screamed, she grabbed the rope that led to the dinghy and thrashed around in the water with it.

If they had known that she had been a regional champion swimmer in her youth, or that she still regularly waterskied and scuba dived, they might have suspected something was amiss. But, as it was, the crew of the boat only saw what she wanted them to see, a helpless little old lady floundering in the ocean.

The ship’s engines, which had just started to swell with noise, abruptly shut down again, there were shouts from above, and a life-ring splashed down near her. She conveniently ignored it.

Then there was a splash somewhere nearby, and two strong arms in a white uniform found her and deposited her roughly on the diving platform. ‘Damn,’ she thought. She’d hoped to use up much more time than that. She only hoped that the second part of her plan had worked.

As she was assisted up the ladder she looked down, and saw it had. Well away from everyone’s attention, the little rubber dinghy bobbed away from the ship, the gentle swell of the waves pushing it back towards the shore.

They counted under their breaths to a hundred and twenty, counting the kids’ way, one-banana, two-banana, three-banana, four …

‘Do you think he’ll be OK?’ Tupai asked.

Fizzer smiled to himself. ‘They don’t just hand out fourth dan black belts in cereal packets,’ he said, and tossed a few small rocks as far as he could into the distance. They made a satisfying ‘tick’ noise as they landed.

That caused some shouts and general alarm amongst the guards so Tupai let go with another handful; his flew even further, drawing the guards down towards the other end of the airstrip.

There was a muffled thud then, and a half-shout, followed by a crack and the slam of a car door.

‘Follow me,’ Fizzer whispered hoarsely, and they scrambled away from the patch of trees and slipped deeper into the darkness of the depths of the island.

Tupai, behind, could barely make out his own hand and could scarcely believe how Fizzer was able to navigate, as if by some built-in radar, around the dangerous, knife-edged boulders of the island. He followed his friend closely, stepping where he stepped, ducking where he ducked, but, even so, he managed to collect some mighty bangs and gashes on his shins, and one or two on his forehead.

They mounted the brow of a low crest, and a small lagoon lay before them, illuminated by the lights of a ship moored just offshore. Some people were climbing out of a dinghy on to the back of the ship, but it was too far away to make out who they were.

Fizzer and Tupai started down the slope towards the lagoon, very conscious of the decreasing window of time they had. If the ship turned out to sea, then everything was lost.

There was a faint cry from the ship and one of the figures, a woman, lost her balance and toppled backwards into the water.

They could see her floundering and thrashing around near the rubber boat. Fizzer, who was setting the pace, did not slow. A man in a cap, probably the captain, and a few deckhands were looking down from an upper deck, and, after a moment, one of the hands climbed the handrail and dived into the water near the stern.

Fizzer and Tupai had reached a sharp, steep, little path that led down to the jetty by the time Clara Fogsworth was deposited, wet and worried, on the platform at the back of the
Turtle Dove
.

They slipped and slid down the path and reached the base of the jetty, only to hear the muted throb of the ship’s engines turn into a mutter and see the bow of the ship cut small breakers in the water as it started to head for the open sea.

‘Now what?’ said Tupai.

Fizzer said, ‘Look,’ pointing at the ocean between them and the ship.

Tupai looked but could see nothing.

Anastasia Borkin was looking at the report in her hand, quivering with fury and excitement. How could they be so stupid? So inept! And yet how close were they to finding the Coca-Cola Three?

The Australian police had contacted Coca-Cola Amatil in Sydney with a report of a kidnapping and suspected murder plot. They’d received a cellphone call and thought it was a hoax and so they had not assigned it any priority, but, eventually, an officer had followed it up and made some phone calls.

By sheer luck, the officer had contacted a public relations officer at Amatil named Kate Fogarty. She had put them in touch with one Harry Truman, in New Zealand.

Harry had subsequently phoned Borkin directly, and the conversation had started with, ‘Heaven help me if I am wrong, but you’re the only one I think I can trust.’

And so, by a combination of luck and circumstance, the news of Dennis’s frantic call to the Sydney police had made its way to Borkin. If it had gone elsewhere, she knew, there would have been a very different result.

She alerted the FBI, and they had made contact back with the Australian police, who, suddenly realising the extent of what they were dealing with, had mobilised a huge task force.

They had traced the cellphone that Dennis’s call had come from, and tracked its location using cell site transmitters.

That had led them to a small airfield on the outskirts of Sydney, which in turn explained the subsequent rapid cell site hopping that the phone had made. The phone was clearly in a plane that had flown up the coast of Australia.

The last cell site connection had been from Port Douglas, in North Queensland, then contact had been lost. That could only mean the plane had turned out to sea. An Air Force Hercules aircraft had already been mobilised to search the area.