Tai-Pan Read Free

have started an hour ago. Time be running out, he thought. Yus, but not on Brock and Sons, by God. Dirk’s had seventeen-year run of good joss, and now be time for change.
    Brock reveled in the thought of his second son, Morgan, who capably—and ruthlessly—controlled all their interests in England. He wondered if Morgan had been successful in undermining Struan’s influence in Parliament and in banking circles. We be going to wreck thee, Dirk, he thought, and Hong Kong along with thee. “Wot the hell be the delay for?” he said, hastening toward the naval officer who was striding up and down near the marines.
    “What’s the matter with you, Jeff? You know he’s right about Hong Kong,” Tillman said. “You ought to know better than to bait him.”
    Cooper smiled his thin smile. “Brock’s so goddam sure of himself. I couldn’t help it.”
    “If Brock’s right about the half million taels, we’re ruined.”
    “Yes. But Struan will lose ten times that if there’s no payment. He’ll get paid, never fear. So we’ll get ours.” Cooper looked after Brock. “Do you think he knows about our deal with Struan?”
    Tillman shrugged. “I don’t know. But Brock’s right about the treaty. It’s stupid. It’ll cost us a pretty penny.”
    For the last three months Cooper-Tillman had been acting as secret agents for The Noble House. British warships had been blockading Canton and the Pearl River, and British traders were forbidden to trade. Longstaff—at Struan’s bidding—had put the embargo on as another measure to force the peace treaty, knowing that the Canton warehouses were bulging with teas and silks. But since America had not declared war on China, American ships could go through the blockade freely and thumb their noses at the warships. So Cooper-Tillman had bought four million pounds of tea from Chen-tse Jin Arn—or Jin-qua, as he was nicknamed—the richest of the Chinese merchants, and shipped it to Manila, supposedly for Spanish merchants. The local Spanish official, for a considerable bribe, had issued the necessary import and export licenses, and the tea was transferred—duty free—into Struan’s clippers and rushed to England. Payment to Jin-qua was a shipload of opium delivered secretly by Struan somewhere up the coast.
    A perfect plan, Cooper thought. Everyone’s richer and gets the trade goods he wants. But we would have made a fortune if our ships could have taken the teas direct to England. And he cursed the British Navigation Acts that forbade any but British ships to bring goods into English ports. Goddam them, they own the world.
    “Jeff!”
    Cooper followed his partner’s glance. For a moment he could not pick out what Tillman wanted him to see in the crowded harbor. Then he saw the longboat pulling away from the flagship and in it the tall, redheaded Scotsman who was so powerful that he could twist Parliament to his purposes and put the greatest nation on earth to war.
    “It would be too much to hope that Struan’d drown,” Tillman said.
    Cooper laughed. “You’re wrong about him, Wilf. Anyway, the sea’d never dare.”
    “Maybe it will, Jeff. It’s time enough. By all that’s holy.”
     
    Dirk Struan stood in the prow of the longboat, riding the twist of the waves. And though he was already late for the ceremony, he did not hurry his oarsmen. He knew that there would be no starting until he arrived.
    The longboat was three hundred yards offshore and the bosun’s “Steady as she goes” mixed nicely with the crisp northeast monsoon. Far aloft, the wind gathered strength and scudded cumulus off the mainland over the island and out to the ocean beyond.
    The harbor was crowded with shipping, all British but for a few American and Portuguese vessels, merchantmen of every size. Before the war the merchantmen would have been anchored at Macao, the tiny Portuguese settlement on a tip of the mainland, forty miles southwest across the huge mouth of the Pearl River. Or off the