The Real Thing (11 page)

‘Le tracteur vert,’ Tupai shouted with a smile over the noise of the engine and the tyres.

‘Le what?’ Fizzer looked back at him, perplexed.

‘I never paid much attention in French,’ Tupai shouted, ‘but for some reason I remember that phrase, le tracteur vert. The tractor green.’

For some reason this seemed really funny, and they both laughed for a while. It felt good not to be walking, and it felt good to be making some real progress. They must have been travelling at around thirty kilometres per hour, which was all the tractor could manage.

The sun warmed their backs and the breeze of their speed ruffled their hair. It was altogether a much more pleasant feeling than lying face down in a muddy ditch.

The ugly brothers spotted them as they passed a grassy track that led to another huge barn. The pick-up truck was circling around in front of the barn when there was a shout from one of the brothers on the back of it, and it suddenly accelerated back down the track towards the road. It was a small satisfaction to see one of the twins lose his footing when the truck took off and slide back down the tray, cracking his head on the tailgate.

The pick-up slid out of the track on to the road, sending shingle flying, and came charging after them like a dog after a wild pig.

As it spun out of the track they could see the other twin aiming a shotgun in their direction, but then the truck was behind them, hidden by the metallic mass of the plough.

The plough was keeping them alive. On one side of the road was the drainage ditch, on the other a sturdy wooden fence. The plough was wide enough to block the small dirt road, leaving no room for the pick-up truck to pass. And it was solid enough to block any shots the brothers might be stupid enough to make.

There was a bang behind them, and a spray of pellets bounced harmlessly off the underside of the plough.

Fizzer and Tupai’s estimate of the brothers’ intelligence dropped a few more points. A couple more shots rebounded from the metal behind them but none penetrated the thick steel.

The pick-up truck swerved to the left, then to the right, as if by doing so it could find a way past.

An open gate appeared in front of them, opening on to another freshly ploughed field, huge furrows running the length of the paddock.

On impulse, Fizzer swung the big machine in through the gate and across the field of dirt. As he’d hoped, the pick-up truck slid to a halt at the gate, the narrow tyres of the truck unable to cope with the soft dirt and deep ruts of the freshly ploughed field.

The tractor trundled away happily, although the big tyres did score deep grooves sideways across the field, making a mess of someone’s hard work.

The pick-up pulled forwards a few yards, trying to get an angle on the tractor, but Fizzer aimed the tractor away from them a little, blocking their shot with the plough until they were out of range.

Another gate on the far side of the field led to another road, tarsealed. Fizzer felt a rising hope. Tarseal. That surely meant a public road.

‘I think we’re getting close to civilisation,’ he shouted.

On cue, the khaki pick-up screamed around the corner of a road somewhere behind them, its tyres smoking with anger as it slid on to the tarseal.

‘This is not good,’ Tupai shouted.

The road was wider, and there was just enough space for the truck to get by, if Fizzer would let it, so he didn’t. He swung the tractor desperately from right to left as the truck swerved around behind them.

Tupai was examining the rig of the plough, holding on to the roll bar with two rigid hands as the machine careened along the road.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ he shouted. ‘When I tell you to, slam on the brakes.’

Tupai reached up to the plough attachment. He had to stand on the seat of the tractor and stretch to his full height. The way the tractor was waltzing down the road made it almost suicidal.

Another pointless shot bounced off the underside of the plough as he reached up and pulled out a small locking bolt, then grasped the fat, rubber-coated handle of the assembly pin.

‘Ready …’ he shouted, watching the truck through a small gap in the plough and bracing himself with one hand on the roll bar. ‘Now!’

Fizzer stood on the brakes. Literally. He stood up out of the seat with all his weight on one foot, the one on the brakes.

A tractor is a huge deadweight and takes a lot of stopping, but those massive tyres put a lot of rubber on the road and, when they stop turning, they grip like glue.

The tractor shrieked to a halt, smoke pouring from both big tyres, and slewed a little to one side.

The pick-up truck slammed its anchors on too, but not quickly enough, and it rammed into the back of the tractor between the great wheels. It was a fight the tractor won.

Even before the impact, Tupai wrenched out the huge pin with a sound that was half scream, half roar, and the whole weight of the plough smashed down on to the front of the pick-up, the metal tines scything through the hood and into the engine bay below, with a screeching, tearing sound.

‘Go! Go!’ Tupai yelled, and Fizzer stood on the accelerator. The tractor surged forward dragging the hood of the truck, the distributor cap, the carburettor, half the radiator and a collection of small plastic hoses and wires with it.

The whole mess hit the road as it was dragged forward off the pick-up and the rear end of the plough bounced out of the towing bars and gouged its way to a stop in the tarmac.

The tractor went a lot faster, they discovered, without the plough, and they took off down the road, leaving the ugly brothers staring at the wreck of their truck.

Ten minutes later a State Police Cruiser approached on the other side of the road, and, by a combination of arm signals and general mad shouting, they managed to get it to stop.

The troopers inside were tough, experienced front-line policemen, with handguns the size of small cannons strapped to their waists, and hats that looked a little like lemon squeezers.

More importantly, though, they had a photo of Fizzer and Tupai in a clipboard on their dash.

The backlash was more widespread and vehement than anyone could have anticipated.

They began shipping the new formula that week, and most of the bottling plants around the United States, along with almost all the international plants, were using it a fortnight later when their existing syrup stocks ran out.

The response from the public was both immediate and frightening. There were public rallies in Pittsburgh, marches in Washington DC, and near riots in some areas of Los Angeles.

Coca-Cola denied the recipe had changed, although it was pretty obvious to anyone with tastebuds that it had.

Network news bulletins carried the news as a lead story, and even the normally sedate
New York Times
had a front page banner asking, ‘Is this the Real Thing?’

Local channels interrupted daytime programming, including the popular soap,
The Beautiful Years
, to report the story, but that only caused a backlash against the channels from viewers for whom nothing less than World War Three would have justified interrupting the programme.

People began stockpiling older bottles, with the original formula, and a black market took off on the Internet with cans of ‘Old Coke’ selling for up to twenty times the price of the new product. Two US Congressmen came out swinging at The Coca-Cola Company, and a group of lawyers in Seattle filed a class-action suit to force Coca-Cola to change back.

What they didn’t realise, of course, was just how impossible that was.

Critics called the drink, ‘the Coke you have when you’re not having a Coke’. David Letterman, on
The Late Show
, called it ‘Joke-a-Cola’, while Jay Leno on
The Tonight Show
, paraphrasing an old Coca-Cola advertising line, said, ‘Things go better with … just about anything else,’ before pouring a can of Coke down a toilet that had been set up on stage.

This caused a renewed outbreak of fury, directed, not at Jay Leno, who had done the pouring, but at The Coca-Cola Company, who had done the mixing.

There was something sacred, it seemed, about the century-old soft drink, something deeply embedded in the American psyche. Pouring Coke down a toilet was akin to burning an American flag, and the anger was real and extreme, as if the executives at The Coca-Cola Company were, somehow, trying to cheat the American public out of their heritage.

Nor was the raging storm limited to the United States. In Mexico and Iceland, the two largest per-capita drinkers of Coca-Cola in the world, cars were overturned and buses burned in some of the largest street riots seen in those countries. Particularly in Iceland, where rioting was a relatively unknown pastime. In Uruguay a seventy-year-old man chained himself to the top of a church steeple, claiming that he would not come down until they re-introduced the original recipe. In Rio de Janeiro a special Coca-Cola Carnival was held, in a strange kind of prayer to Coca-Cola to reconsider.

Coca-Cola stocks dropped. They plummeted in fact, faster than they had during the
New Coke
blunder of the 1980s, and there was no sign of the near miraculous recovery that had occurred back then, when they had simply reverted to the original flavour.

Most of this, Fizzer and Tupai learned from the newspapers that were delivered daily to their expensive suite at the Four Seasons hotel. Some of it they picked up from the television news, and other information came to them first hand in the shape of Anastasia Borkin, who visited them daily, partly to check on them and partly to check on the armed guards, who were rostered in shifts in the corridor outside their room. No point in taking chances, she thought.

The next day brought even more bad news for The Coca-Cola Company, when a major fast food restaurant chain announced it was breaking a long tradition of serving only Coca-Cola products, and would, in future, be supplying a cheaper Australian soft drink. This announcement followed hard on the heels of similar announcements from some major international airlines.

The day also brought more news from the FBI, which was handling the kidnapping charges that had been levelled against Robert, Leonard, Kenneth, Hank and Curtis Cooper, five brothers who ran a mixed ranch and racing stables in Macon, Georgia.

The Cooper brothers, it turned out, were well-known to the local law enforcement agency, and State Troopers had been on their way to investigate the farm when two idiots, yelling and screaming from the top of a large green tractor, had waylaid them.

The FBI had asked the boys to stay around until they could properly arraign the Cooper brothers, and The Coca-Cola Company was happy to foot the hotel bills, considering what they had put the lads through.

The Cooper brothers were not entirely co-operative, but a mixture of promises and threats in separate interviews had the FBI convinced that they were no more than hired muscle, paid to keep the two boys under lock and key.

All other things considered, the whole affair had been an unmitigated disaster. The taste tests were discontinued, as the only thing The Coca-Cola Company could be sure of, was that if changing the formula once had been a disaster, then changing it a second time would be a catastrophe, unless they could absolutely guarantee they had re-discovered the original recipe.

All efforts were directed into the search for the Coca-Cola Three, but this too had turned into a series of blind alleys and red herrings, and the investigation was treading water with no good leads.

The Coca-Cola Company, of course, paid Fizzer and Tupai the agreed hourly rate, but not the huge bonus they would have got for cracking the formula.

It was probably enough to cover Fizzer’s university expenses, but it wouldn’t get him and his dad out of the caravan, and Italian sports cars were definitely out of the question.

Within the boardroom of The Coca-Cola Company a furious debate was raging, which saw some of the most vitriolic speeches the walnut-lined walls had witnessed. Some of those present, including Anastasia Borkin, wanted to come clean with the American public and let them know of the kidnappings and the reason for the change in the formula.

‘They’ll sympathise,’ she expounded, whenever she had the chance. ‘They’ll take pity on us and forgive us the new taste while we keep searching.’

Others wanted to continue to deny any change had occurred, as if it were just some collective fantasy.

‘There are millions of Coke drinkers out there who are continuing to drink the new flavour,’ was Ricardo’s argument. ‘We’ve already alienated the Coke fans. If we admit there really was a change, then all we’ll do is alienate everyone else. Deny, deny, deny. We’ll suffer, but we’ll survive. Wash our dirty linen in public and we won’t last out the year.’

Borkin thought Ricardo was more concerned about lasting out the year as Vice-President (Production) than he was about Coca-Cola, the Company, lasting out the year.