Chapter 7

The Brigadier had never been much of a sailor. And he had been living on this wretched boat for months! He still hated it every time the vessel rose and fell with the waves! If he were not a loving father and a silly old man who had become besotted with a girl less than half his age, he would have gone back to shore weeks ago!

He recalled those lines from The Tempest. "Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground, long heath, brown furze, anything."

He reflected, in the midst of his continuing battle with nausea, that few of the present generation of semi literate kids in our God forsaken wreck of a once great country had ever, in the whole of their rotten, useless, miserable and hopefully short lives, read these words! And thanks to the craven, traitorous gang of cretinous Europhiles who ran the UK these days with their crazed infatuation with disgusting metric units, none of the snotty nosed, spaced out little bastards ( and that was literally the case with most of them these days!) would have the remotest idea what an acre or a furlong were!

He was abruptly recalled from his curmudgeonly reflections by a high pitched noise coming from the equipment he had brought back from London.

Thank God! Angela had come through! After all these weeks of waiting for something, the girl had done it! Splendid girl! True grit through and through! There was one young woman who stood firm and strong in the great tradition of her race! Pity she hadn't joined the Army, though! If the Brigadier had but known it, all four captives had had a hand in this deliverance! None of them were rubbish!

He was on the radio at once. But the radio was down. Of course it was! He had been warned of this. Only the special equipment on his boat could guide him to the Merry Maid. Thank God he had a few good men with him on the boat! And plenty of fire power!
The equipment the Professor had given him was a kind of detector, but one that would only function if either the transmitter or receiver were to be disabled. The damage would generate enough electro magnetic waves to pinpoint both pieces of equipment, the one at sea and the one on the island. The one on the island could wait! The Brigadier sped towards the Merry Maid, which was only just below the horizon.

There was no resistance. In their hearts the pirates had all known the game to be up as soon as the receiver had been smashed. It was only a matter of time before they were caught and they surrendered very meekly. Even Farr allowed himself to be led away to a life sentence with no protest.

A few day's later the accomplices on the island were arrested after their house had been stormed. As the Brigadier had guessed, a few of the local police had been complicit in the enterprise - not his friend the Chief, though!