Percy and Ingrid were on their way to Smiling Island, and Percy was wondering what might happen to them.

"You know Ingrid, there might just be some rather nasty people behind this, which means that I will have to be rather unpleasant myself. With a bit of luck we will be considered as their next victims, which gives me a chance to take control of the situation and find out what really happens out here."

The B.L.A.D.E. organisation would only strike when they received a call for help, because their presence as O.C.T.O.P.U.S. would be expected by their prospective victims. If Percy Dale was ever in a situation where help might be required, he usually considered that the best person to provide the necessary help was the Sneaky Spy himself. As it happened, Percy and Ingrid arrived at Smiling Island without any confrontations with B.L.A.D.E.

So they still had no idea of the existences of either O.C.T.O.P.U.S. or B.L.A.D.E.

The other thing that they were unaware of, was the fact that B.L.A.D.E. had detected their presence from a submerged O.C.T.O.P.U.S. submarine patrolling the area. It took Percy and Ingrid the rest of the day to move their supplies and some of their other equipment from the yacht to the cave in the centre of the Smiling Island mountain.

"We don't want any surprise visits tonight," said the Sneaky Spy, when they had settled down in the cave, "So I think we had better take a few precautionary deceptive measures. We'll pile some flat rocks up in the rough shapes of two human bodies in the centre of this cave, and then cover them with blankets. Meanwhile, we'll sleep in that corridor cave - the one I climbed through the night before we rescued you last time - and the chances of our being caught unawares in our sleep will be next to none."

Percy and Ingrid enjoyed tinned asparagus, tinned fruit, potato crinkle-cut chips and bars of chocolate.

"It's hardly the healthiest of diets, but it was the easiest  and tastiest meal I could think of to bring with us. It's only for a few days, and I don't want to be carrying out a full scale migration with portable gas stoves hanging from my arms."

"That's true, Percy. It might have become a bit heavy, mightn't it?"

"I think it would. Now let's find two portions of that narrow cave tunnel, and bed up for the night. I'll sleep closer to this main cave than you. That way I can be sure of being the first one to bump into any unexpected guests."

There certainly were some unexpected guests that night. From a periscope in the submarine, the agents of B.L.A.D.E. had watched every movement made by Percy and Ingrid, except those movements that were made inside the cave. At around ten-thirty that night, a rubber raft came to rest on the shores of Smiling Island, and out of it stepped two men and a girl. Their intentions were less than honourable, and their thoughts were less than pleasant, as they crossed the valley of rocks and climbed up to the lower lip rock structure which gave the island its name.

The cave was lit only partially, and this was owing to the light of the moon. When they noticed the two blanketed silhouettes in the centre of the cave, they stood beside them and fired their guns.

Percy had taken an additional precaution, and placed cushions on top of the rocks that he had piled up.

"After all," he had thought, "A bullet ricocheting off the edge of a hard rock would hardly convince any naughty ones that Ingrid and I had met with a sorry end."

The shots woke Percy, and he noticed that they had awoken Ingrid too.

"Be quiet," he whispered, "and stay right here. I'll slip out into the main cave unnoticed in the darker area, and see if I can use the secret of Smiling Island to trap them."

Percy took a tranquiliser dart gun with him, as he crawled through the corridor cave.

"They couldn't have been B.L.A.D.E. boys," said the girl, staring at the artificial blanket-covered corpses, "so it was a good thing we shot first and thought afterwards."

Percy entered the cave area without the slightest sound. If he used the tranquiliser dart gun on the moonlit trio, they would fire recklessly in all directions, and the fact that he had the advantage of being in the dark part of the cave would not be of any assistance to him. Four metres away was the small opening in the side of the cave. It was an eliptical cavity, large enough for a human arm to reach into and wriggle about for a certain lever. He had to make it without being seen or heard.

"Well they won't see me," he thought, "but I'll have to be extra careful to make sure that they don't hear me either."

He stepped noiselessly around the cave wall, until he found the area  where the cavity should have been. He couldn't see anything, except the moonlit would-be murderers several metres out in the centre of the main cave. He felt about for the hole in the rock wall, found it, and inserted his left hand. All of the time, his eyes were on his three visitors, and his right hand was gripping his tranquiliser dart gun.

"At last," he thought, "The Secret of Smiling Island is about to be put into play again. When those nets fall on them, the idiots will think we dropped them from that dark invisible realm at the top of the cave, so high up that they could not see it in the daytime. So, if they have still got their guns, they will shoot upwards. That will give me more than a fair chance to play absolute havoc with all three of them."

Percy weighed up everything carefully in his mind, planning his every move, and then moved the lever. True to his expectations were the reactions of the three gunpersons, as bullets flew from the fallen nets towards the area from which they had fallen. Percy dropped the closer man with a shot from his tranquiliser gun, and then dropped down to a lying position, as a bullet roared past his head.

"It's a good thing I got my hand out of that cavity in the wall before I started firing," thought the Sneaky Spy, as he fired at the other man, and watched the fellow fall to the ground. Now there was only the girl. Should he tranquiliser her too? No. He wanted immediate answers now, and to wait for the recovery and revival of all three visitors would take too long. There might have been other visitors waiting outside.

Percy took off his slippers and threw them across to another part of the room. He was unable to see it, but a hole appeared in one of his slippers, as he ran like a silent leopard towards the girl, and forced the gun from her hands.

"No need to hang onto it, lass. I don't think you've got many rounds left anyway, and now you're going to play show-and-tell on a grand scale."

The girl smiled at him. She was as tall as himself and as confident as any man could be. She had bright red hair, brown eyes and a smile of wicked defiance. It was not the sort of smile that would be offered in an attempt to seduce her captor.

In a strange sort of a way, Percy admired her principles of not playing up to him in the face of defeat, but she had put bullets into his cushions in honour of those principles, and she had probably killed others successfully in the past.

She had to be dealt with.

"Come on out, Ingrid. This place is swamped with sleeping fellows, well two of them anyway."

Ingrid Castlecove emerged from the corridor of solid rock, and noticed the results of Percy's unexpected surprises.

"You have been busy, Percy!"

"Yes Ingrid, meet the smiling fireball of Smiling Island. She's going to explain a few things to me, while you tie those two up tight."

Ingrid collected some rope from Percy's supplies, and left the two men in a rather helpless situation.

"The first question, sweet smiling fireball," began the Sneaky Spy sarcastically, "is why did you disturb our sleep? I used to be a chronic insomniac, and I still need the closest thing to silence when I go off to beddy-byes."

"Well we ... own this island, and you just invited yourselves in here..."

"And that warrants the death penalty? And you own a public island. Sorry fireball, but if you don't do better, you'll end up on my knee for a spanking."

"What are you doing here?" she snarled.

The pseudo-confident smile was no longer on her face, and she was becoming extremely frightened of the Sneaky Spy.

"You had better hurry up and answer that question yourself," said Percy to the smiling fireball.

The girl told Percy a series of stories, which he established were all lies, and about an hour later, she had no remaining options, but to tell him that an organisation was hiding out in a submarine, and looting other submarines, as well as the occasional surface vessel. Percy might have believed that this final tale was true and complete in itself, except that the girl had already proved herself to be a prolific liar.

"I believe you at last," said the Sneaky Spy, and observed the faint trace of relief in her eyes, "but I know from your other stories that there must be more to it than that. There's another island a few miles away from this one, and I am willing to bet that your friends hide their loot in its thick jungles. Am I right?"

The girl could only affirm his suspicions and hope that he was detected at the complex on Jungle Island.

"More or less," she said, "That island's called Jungle Island, obviously; and we've also got a magnificent boat docked on the shores of that island, but that's all you're going to know. I would sooner die than tell you where we hide things."

"Well it won't come to that, fireball, but you'll have to be tied up with those sea going clowns you brought in here with you."

Percy tied the girl up himself, and then took Ingrid down the mountain, and out into his own yacht. Suddenly he remembered a matter of vital importance.

"Ingrid, bring the torch. We'll have to go back and put those nets back the way they were. We may need to use them again. Then we'll go and take a nocturnal look at that Jungle Island."

The night was still young, and the two friends were soon on their way to the island.

"Percy, I cannot see where I'm going, but you don't want the yacht lights to give us away, do you?"

"No, but we'll still be able to see. We'll just use that beautiful white shape up there in the sky, and the lunar light which it so cordially sheds on our sweet souls. You know, the last time I approached one of these islands in a yacht at night, I went the last few miles by rowboat, and then stole onto Smiling Island. We should be able to go all the way by big boat this time. There's not much chance of anybody on Jungle Island seeing through its enormous plant life and noticing a boat in the dark."

"No, but they could hear it."

"Ingrid, they'll be asleep. I'm willing to bet that we have tied up their only nighttime operatives back at Smiling Island. The lady fireball had no other choice but to persist in lying, until I finally got the truth out of her. We didn't hear their boat. It was the shots that woke me up, and I am sure that they won't hear us, if I slow the motor down to minimum speed, when we're getting close."

Percy had no idea what he would soon be facing, and had underestimated the wisdom of Ingrid's concerns.

"Do you think that they killed that friend of yours?" she asked.

"It's almost certain, Ingrid. we can believe that story about the robbery operations around here. It's only the minor technical details that may hold surprises for us, but we'll deal with them all and put an end to this crazy piracy scenario."

Percy stared out at the water in front of the yacht, waiting for the island to come into view. At last he saw it, but he pondered its shape. There was something different about it, although he admitted to himself that anything would look different - to his daytime recollections of it - in the dark. His first visit to Jungle Island had been in a helicopter, in the daytime, and he had not absorbed the beauty of the scenery, because he had been busy searching for  Ingrid. Soon, they were close enough to slow the yacht down as planned, and to see the newest external appearance of Jungle Island. Percy stared at the moonlit scene, wondering what to make of it.

"Would you believe that, Ingrid? An entire building complex now exists on Jungle Island. This wicked organisation certainly has been rather active since I came here last."

"It's got submarine hangars, docking bays and everything. Even a tower in that structure."

"Do you think we should go and have a little look?"

"Why not? You're wearing your pen-torch and your other secret little pen-weapons, aren't you?"

"It's terrible to have to think of a torch as a weapon, isn't it? Still you're right. We'll need to see them, in order to give them a thumping hard time!"
"They'll see us, if we get too close to that tower. The lights are all on up there now."

"I should have listened to you about the dangers. We'll have to go around the outer edge of the island until we come to some of the jungle that's still left. Then we can sneak up close to one of the buildings, and hopefully get in undetected."

"I hope the people in the buildings are asleep," said Ingrid.

"So do I. Don't you find this a bit of a puzzle, though? Here's an enormous headquarters of some sort, built for a gang of criminals to work from, and nobody knows about it. Surely this would be the first place for Interpol or the Tasmanian police to examine."

"Maybe they don't know about this island. Nobody knew about Smiling Island, apart from your grandfather, before my kidnappers found it."

"Well that's true. But it still doesn't make any logical sense to me. I want to know what this place is really all about."

In circling around the island, they had to navigate their way around hangars and other obstacles. In each situation, they would assume that the obstacle was occupied by somebody, and moved quietly towards their destination. The last obstacle to be passed was the O.C.T.O.P.U.S. heliport. Percy stared at the letters O, C, T, O, P, U, and S on the side of a helicopter, and wondered what they could stand for. He got as far as Organisation Criminal Tactics when he decided not to worry about it, and soon he was walking hand in hand with Ingrid through the thick jungle.

"You can bet your sweet darling life that this is a grand scale operation, whatever it is," said the Sneaky Spy, "and the two of us will have to turn it upside down, if we're going to get to the bottom of all these missing cargo craft. I think your role in this should be confined to the yacht."

"Because of what happened to me last time?"

"Ingrid, they're killers."
"Then I would be better off with you close by me. I want to come with you, everywhere you go."

"I won't argue. It's your choice. I just hope I'm worthy of your confidence."

"Do you think those cargo craft were stolen to be used as part of this base?"

"No, I think the smiling fireball of Smiling Island was honest about the theft of the cargoes themselves. It's more likely that they have blown up the ships and submarines, so that they cannot be traced by the authorities. Well here's our building, my faithful damsel friend. One thing hasn't changed."

"What's that?"

"The tools I have to bring with me. Even on an island owned solely by one organisation, these people saw the need to build locks into their doors. Well it shouldn't take me too long to deal with one of those."

Ingrid stared in admiration, as Percy took the top off a yellow pen, and used the tool within to go to work on the lock.

It was one of the Sneaky Spy's traditional eccentricities, that he liked to tell stories while he fiddled with the locks of other people's property.

He made no exceptions on this occasion.

"Ingrid my dear, did you know that my teacher at school used to make a fuss about the way I held my pen? I don't know where he developed his interest in the matter, because my pen spent most of its time being passed to and from James Hamilton with secret messages rolled around its inner tube."

"You did that in class, right under the teacher's nose? You could have been caught," said Ingrid.

"Not at all. It's common for school students to share their stationery, and we only did the unrolling of the messages and reconstructions of the pen when the teacher was not looking directly at us. It was a clever means of note-passing, and it passed the time."

"I'm glad that I didn't go to your school."

"You're lucky you didn't. That teacher used to ask me to pretend that my pen was all sorts of things like a toothbrush, a shoe polishing brush and a comb, in order to show him how I cleaned my teeth, polished my shoes, combed my hair; and I would hate to remember what else. I'm surprised he found the time to teach the class anything."

Ingrid stifled a giggle.

"Are you going to oil the hinges?"

"No. This complex hasn't been here long enough for the doors in its buildings to become rusty. We'll just toddle on in and see what we can find."

They stepped into a corridor, and Ingrid put her arm around Percy's shoulders, and silently kissed his cheek.

"You were marvellous with that door, and very clever back at Smiling Island too. Thank you  for letting me come with you."

“It’s nothing.”

“No really, you’re even sweeter than a jelly bean.”

He would never have a better opportunity to find out whether or not Ingrid would have eaten him the other morning, if she had known who he was. The question had stimulated him for days.

“That could be risky,” he said.

“Why?” asked Ingrid.

“Pretty girls eat jellybeans.”

“Are you worried that I might eat you?”

“Would you?”