They talked it through in the car as they tailed the man and the woman through steadily firming evening traffic.
The man, Joe, was driving. Fizzer had picked his name up out of one of their conversations. The woman’s name ended in ‘andy’, maybe Sandy or, as she was American, possibly Brandy or Mandy.
Dennis had already tried the police but they had not seemed at all interested. Either that or they simply hadn’t believed him.
No news of the disappearance of the Coca-Cola Three had been made public, so the only hope they had of convincing the police was by persuading them to contact The Coca-Cola Company, and they didn’t want to do that unless absolutely necessary, as they didn’t know who to trust there.
‘If we just stay on their tail,’ Fizzer said, ‘they’ll lead us straight to the missing execs. The three of us should be able to deal with one man and one woman.’
‘As long as they don’t have guns,’ Tupai said.
Dennis said enigmatically, ‘There are ways of dealing with guns’.
‘You’re sure about what you heard?’ Tupai asked.
‘I didn’t hear everything she said, and I couldn’t hear the other end of the conversation, but if I had to put a bet on it, I’d say that something in the US has given them a fright and they’re going to kill the executives and bury the whole operation.’
‘Murder is a pretty serious business,’ Dennis said. ‘They don’t look like murderers to me.’
‘If I’m right, they’d be desperate,’ Fizzer replied. ‘They’re in too deep. Way too deep. And anyway, what do murderers look like exactly?’
Dennis nodded. ‘You’re right, and even if you were wrong, we couldn’t take the chance.’
A few cars ahead, the eye-shaped tail-lights of the blue Mondeo flashed and indicated a turn.
‘Any chance they’ve spotted us?’ Tupai asked.
‘I doubt it.’ Dennis was pretty cool about that. ‘We’ve never been closer than three cars away from them, and there are dozens of cars about like this one.’ As if to prove his point, an identical silver Holden indicated and moved in front of them.
Dennis turned off, following the Mondeo at a safe distance.
Fifteen minutes later the car turned into a long, straight lane leading to a small airfield. Dennis drove past, picking up the name of the airfield from a sign, and got busy on his cellphone. By the time they had allowed some breathing space and doubled back to the lane, he had hired them an aeroplane.
‘It’s a twin-engined Piper Cherokee,’ he told them. ‘Flies like a rocket; we’ll be able to keep up with anything in that, as long as it isn’t a jet. They want cash though. Do you have enough?’
Fizzer nodded, and didn’t feel at all guilty about spending Coca-Cola money. They were on Coca-Cola business after all.
The sound of Joe and ‘Andy’s’ plane was still lingering around the dusty hangars and offices of the charter plane firm as Dennis handed over quite a large stack of Harry Truman’s private money. While filing his own flight plan in the firm’s log-book, he had a good look at the flight plan of the plane that had just left.
‘They’ve filed for Brisbane,’ he said, as they went through pre-flight procedure in the small cabin of the Cherokee. But I bet that’s not where they’re going. They’ll veer off at some point to their real destination. They have a single-engined Cessna. We’ll be able to overhaul them easily in this little baby, but we’ll hang back, pick them up on radar and wait to see where they land.’
‘We don’t want to alert them,’ Fizzer mused. ‘But I guess after they land they’ll lose their own radar.’
Tupai said, ‘We need to be close enough behind them so we can stop what they’re going to do!’
‘It’ll be tight,’ Dennis said, and they were both glad they had him along. He had an air of confidence, of being able to deal with any situation.
The sleek white aircraft took off into the sunset with a throaty roar from its twin engines.
They didn’t speak for most of the flight, there was little to say. They had no plans, and there were none to make, as they had no idea what they were walking into. All they could do was wing it when they got there, and hope they were in time.
‘They’re turning away from Brisbane,’ Dennis said after a while, his eyes on the small radarscope in the centre of the controls. ‘Heading for the Gold Coast.’
The plane showed no signs of landing at the Gold Coast, however, and continued northwards and out to sea.
‘Interesting,’ was Dennis’s only comment. The two boys waited quietly. The Cherokee flew up the coast, not following the Cessna’s flight out across the ocean.
Only after the Cessna circled around once and disappeared from their radar did Dennis yank the controls in that direction. The small plane banked sharply and the darkened beaches of the Australian coast slid away far beneath them, the gnash of the breakers grinning whitely against the dark lips of the shore.
Dennis had noted the co-ordinates at which the Cessna had disappeared, but, even so, it took them a little while to locate the island.
‘There!’ Fizzer called, looking at a smudge of light on the dark canvas of the ocean.
‘Where?’ Dennis asked. Tupai also peered into the distance, not seeing anything.
‘Just follow my hand,’ Fizzer said, aiming with a flat palm in the direction of the light.
Five minutes later Dennis and Tupai saw it too.
The light grew steadily brighter until it became a string of bright pearls on a black velvet pad.
The lights of a vehicle of some kind, just two small pinpricks, were tracing a jagged line away from the small airstrip. The Cessna was a child’s toy, parked on an angle at the far end.
Dennis brought the small plane in on a satin-smooth landing and pulled it up, just off the runway, beside the small Cessna.
They had barely stepped out of the cabin door when there was a revving engine, and bright headlights cornered them against the plane. There was the sound of car doors and two burly shapes were silhouetted against the lights. The dark outline of a holster was visible on each of their hips.
‘This is a private island,’ a voice spoke out from one of the shadows. ‘You have no permission to land.’