Publisher's Synopsis
Best friends Bjorn Amundson and Richard Porter share a bitter conflict.
Youthful and ambitious, they watch lascar stevedores load carved wooden chests onto the sailing brig, Agilis.
It is 1854 in Calcutta, India. The chests are from the Ghazipur Opium Factory.
Porter hopes to own the ship with the obscene profits from the drug trade. But peddling opium in the Guangdong province is criminal, banned, and deadly. The Sino government beheads captured smugglers. Amundson opposes the opium that ruins his Chinese friends in San Francisco.
Greed, the first force of the sea, exposes the friends to seagoing raids by clans of vicious professional looters. Farmers turned pirates overrun the Strait of Malacca and the sea route to Zhaoqing, China. Warlords plunder passing ships.
Porter's avarice menaces Amundson's friendship. They fight the forces of tides and winds beside sea bandits, spies, a stowaway, a disruptive crew, and swimming predators with teeth.
Savage enemies and forces on sea and land menace their every turn. Can they deliver the secret cargo and survive?
