The Pirate Submarine

THE CHAMPION SERIES
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
CAPTAIN CAIN
THE FLYING SUBMARINE
THE WINNING OF THE GOLDEN SPURS
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY MORRISON AND GIBB LTD., LONDON AND EDINBURGH P 1980

THAT'S done it! Scrap brass has fallen another thirty shillings a ton, Pengelly. The slump has knocked the bottom out of the market. We're in the soup.
Thus spoke Tom Trevorrick, senior partner of the firm of Trevorrick, Pengelly & Co., shipbreakers, of Polkyll, near Falmouth. He was a tall, powerfully-built man, standing six feet two and a half inches in his socks, red-haired, florid featured, with a high though receding forehead and a heavy protruding jaw. His rich deep voice had a plausible ring about it—a compelling, masterful yet persuasive tone, that had largely influenced the shareholders of Trevorrick, Pengelly & Co. to part with their money with the absolute certainty of a pre-war ten per cent. return.
Paul Pengelly, aged thirty-three, or three years older than the senior partner, was of different build and temperament. Trevorrick represented the Celtic strain of Cornishmen; Pengelly had dark curly hair and sallow features—legacies of an Iberian ancestor, one of a handful of survivors from a vessel of the Spanish Armada that had been cast ashore on the rock-bound Lizard. History does not relate why the Cornish wreckers spared the lives of the olive-featured mariners, but it does record that the shipwrecked Spaniards took wives of the Cornish maids, and lived and died in the country of their adoption.
Pengelly was slow of speech, stolid in action save when roused to anger. Of an argumentative nature, he acted as a foil to his partner's exuberance. If Trevorrick suggested a certain course, Pengelly almost invariably went dead against it, not that he disapproved of the scheme, but simply as a matter of habit. He was secretive and cautious; but he never hesitated to do an underhand action if he felt reasonably secure from detection.