The Great Zoo of China

42

The two silver Range Rovers zoomed around the ring road with their two troop truck escorts.

They were speeding down the eastern side of the valley now, passing a high ravine cut into the eastern wall of the crater. The four vehicles shot through an awning-covered receiving area—it housed a turning bay which serviced an elevator that led up to the cliff-top monastery built in homage to the Purple Cloud Temple.

Sitting in the cab of the lead troop truck, Dr Benjamin Patrick peered out into the night, concerned. Beside him, a Chinese sergeant drove.

Then, just as their four-vehicle convoy emerged from the receiving area, all the streetlights on the ring road blinked out.

The road went dark.

‘We’ve lost power…’ Ben Patrick said.

The driver said, ‘The back-up generators will—’

‘The generators were destroyed in the initial attack,’ Patrick said, looking quickly from the roadway to his own shield-generating watch.

The pilot light on it winked out.

‘We have no protection anymore,’ he said ominously. ‘We’re all exposed.’

As he said this, something large and black swept past his truck. The rush of air that followed the flying beast was so great it made the eight-ton troop truck wobble.

‘We’re in trouble,’ Patrick said a split second before his truck was hit with incredible violence and his world flipped over and went black.

While CJ had been battling dragons inside the cable car station and fleeing to the revolving restaurant, Hamish, Syme and Seymour Wolfe had also been fleeing: in their case, to the small building they had spotted at the base of the waterfall.

They dived inside the little building and slammed the door. No sooner was the door shut than there was a loud bang from the other side, followed by furious screeches from the two earless red-bellied black princes that had been pursuing them.

Hamish took in the space around him.

They were in a very tastefully decorated café, with picture windows looking out at the curving waterfall and the ruined castle on the opposite shore of the lake. Six glass-roofed Great Dragon Zoo tour boats sat tied to the dock outside.

The café was dark. The only light came from the red glow of a Coca-Cola refrigerator and a cake display.

The dragons banged on the door for a time and then stalked around the side of the one-storey building, peering in through its windows.

Foiled for the moment, they retreated to the muddy treeline not far from the building—although Hamish had a feeling that they weren’t far away. They might be watching the café, waiting for their prey to emerge again.

That had been fifteen minutes ago. He, Syme and Wolfe had stayed very still, below the windows, watching, waiting.

And then the twin glows of the refrigerator and the cake display went out and the café was plunged into total darkness.

Inside the revolving restaurant atop Dragon Mountain, CJ, Li and Go-Go stood with their hands raised before the ten Chinese commandos arrayed around them. Johnson still lay on the floor.

CJ glanced at the restaurant around her. It had clearly not seen any fighting or attacks from the dragons: there was no wreckage or blood pools. The commandos, she guessed, must have landed on the roof and come in through a ceiling hatch or something.

The small lamps on each table glowed. The soft halogen bulbs in the ceiling gave off a dim light.

Then, abruptly, all the lamps and all the overhead lights winked out and the whole restaurant went dark.

CJ saw the computer screen in the adjoining office shrink to black.

And then she saw every source of illumination outside the restaurant—the floodlights encircling the valley, the streetlights on the ring road—extinguish.

The power was out across the zoo. The only light was that coming from the spotlight on the Chinook helicopter hovering outside.

The Chinese commandos aiming their guns at CJ instantly became a cluster of shadows.

It was then that CJ heard the shrieks. At first there were just a few of them, but then there came a chorus of replies.

Dragon calls.

The dragons were communicating.

The Chinese commandos looked about themselves, nervous, unsure.

With a loud whoosh, a large shape swept past the windows and CJ saw the underbelly of an emperor dragon rush by and, in a shockingly powerful move, collect the hovering Chinook helicopter as it did.

It simply snatched the helicopter out of the air—one second it was there, the next it wasn’t. CJ didn’t see the chopper hit the side of the mountain, but she heard the explosion and saw the sudden fiery glow.

She spun and, for the briefest of moments, locked eyes with the Chinese trooper in charge of the commandos. Hunter and prey, caught in the unfolding plan of an even more dangerous creature. Would he still execute her?

In answer to the unasked question, he clenched his teeth and raised his 9mm pistol, aiming it squarely at CJ’s head—

—just as the entire wall of windows behind him shattered and an eight-ton Chinese Army troop truck came flying in through it.

43

CJ dived left, pulling the wounded Johnson with her as the troop truck smashed through the windows on the eastern side of the restaurant and bounced up its broad levels.

CJ glimpsed the red-bellied black emperor that had hurled the truck at the restaurant. It banked away before pulling up, its wings spread wide, and landing on the roof of the restaurant with a loud, floor-shaking thump.

The troop truck ploughed through tables and chairs, sliding on its side right through the circle of commandos that had been threatening CJ. It ran right over the lead trooper and two other commandos before crushing two more when its side-turned grille smashed them against the wall.

While CJ had dived left, Li had dived right, only to have a section of the restaurant’s ceiling come crashing down on top of him. The young electrician’s shout was cut off as he was buried beneath the rubble.

The truck came to a halt and it was only when the noise of its spectacular entry had subsided that CJ heard the groans of the men inside it.

The dragon must have picked the truck up somewhere—with the troops inside it—and flung it at the restaurant.

Wind and rain whipped in through the gaping thirty-foot-wide hole in the eastern side of the restaurant. The open sky loomed beyond the opening. The valley floor yawned a thousand feet below it.

CJ lay on her belly beside Johnson inside the darkened restaurant, staring in disbelief at the side-turned troop truck.

There was a truck inside the restaurant. The mountaintop restaurant.

And then the other dragons came.

They came screaming in through the truck-sized opening in the side of the restaurant.

Red-bellied black princes, purple royal princes, even a couple of eastern grey princes: there must have been twenty of them.

CJ’s eyes went wide.

It was a veritable invasion of dragons.

They launched themselves at the Chinese commandos, leaping astride them, ripping out their throats. A couple of the Chinese commandos managed to get off a few shots, only for the dragons to overwhelm them and throw them to the floor and start eating them alive. Screams filled the air.

And just when CJ didn’t think it could get any crazier, the whole southeastern section of the restaurant was wrenched away.

The sound of rending steel drowned out the screams of the commandos and where only moments before there had been neatly laid tables and chairs and soft lamplight, now there was a gaping hole of loose wires and shredded floorboards and a hundred-foot-wide stretch of emptiness!

CJ saw an emperor dragon flying away with an entire section of the restaurant gripped in its claws. It dropped it, circled back and proceeded to stick its massive head in through the great hole it had created. Its roar sent wineglasses toppling and plates smashing to the floor.

Amid all this pandemonium, CJ shoved Johnson over a serving counter and into the kitchen. She dived over the counter after him just as a black prince snapped at her heels. Go-Go threw himself through the swinging kitchen door, the OUT door used by waiters and waitresses.

It was a standard industrial kitchen: there were five long island benches with gas stoves and hotplates, while one wall featured ten ovens. Pots and pans and cooking utensils hung from hooks in the ceiling.

CJ threw Johnson’s arm over her shoulder and hurried away from the counter. She needed to find somewhere she could—

There!

She spied a dumb waiter off to her right. Like everything else in the zoo, the box-like miniature elevator was oversized; Johnson would fit inside it easily. It also had sturdy industrial doors. It would be a decent hiding place.

Johnson was weighing her down. She’d never outrun the dragons with him on her shoulder. If they were going to get out of this zoo alive, she was going to have to hide him somewhere safe and come back and get him later.

She hurled him into the open dumb waiter and said, ‘Stay in here. I have to find a way to contact the outside world. I’ll come back for you later, okay?’

‘Okay. Hey,’ Johnson groaned. ‘Thanks.’

CJ shrugged. ‘I’ll probably be dead in five minutes, so don’t get your hopes up. Mind you, given that we both might die soon…’ She leaned forward and, surprising herself a little, gave him a quick impulsive kiss on the cheek.

Then CJ pulled the dumb waiter’s doors closed over Johnson’s surprised face.

CJ stepped back into the kitchen proper to find Go-Go turning dials on all the ovens.

‘What are you doing?’ she called.

‘They may be smart,’ Go-Go said, ‘but we’re smarter. We unleash the gas, then we blow this place on our way out.’

CJ could already smell the gas from the ovens. It wasn’t the best plan ever but it wasn’t a bad one either.

Go-Go moved down the line of ovens, stepping close to the serving counter CJ had dived over to get into the kitchen.

‘Go-Go,’ she warned, ‘don’t get too close to the—’

It happened so fast, CJ hardly even saw it.

A skeletal black claw reached over the counter, grabbed Go-Go by the arm and yanked him bodily out over it.

CJ saw Go-Go’s face go slack as the dragon outside slammed him up against the counter. Life faded from his eyes as he slumped from CJ’s view. He would be dead before he hit the ground.

CJ’s eyes boggled. ‘Jesus…’

And then another prince pushed through the swinging door beside the counter.

Red Face.

Fresh blood dripped from his jaws. He glared at CJ.

Beep-beep… beep-beep.

CJ ran.

Red Face sprang after her.

CJ slid over a benchtop just as the dragon dived at her and slid over it, too, sending pots and pans clattering to the floor.

But it was on its feet in a second, charging at her with a roar. CJ rolled as the dragon leapt astride her and lunged at her face with its mighty jaws—just as CJ snatched up a nearby frying pan and hit Red Face with it right on the snout.

The dragon screeched and recoiled and CJ took the opportunity to bolt for the other exit from the kitchen: the IN door.

CJ burst through the doorway—and immediately tripped on something and went sprawling to the floor, where she found herself staring into the blank, lifeless eyes of a dead Chinese commando who had no lower half to his body. He still gripped an MP-7 in one hand.

CJ snatched up the submachine gun and stood—and realised that she had emerged in a war zone.

The previously tranquil restaurant was now being pelted by wind and rain. A dozen princes feasted on dead commandos while two emperors yanked and tugged on the ceiling, trying, it seemed, to tear the place apart.

Beside her, a maintenance closet had been ripped open by the dragons. Its contents lay strewn all over the floor: mops, brooms, dusters, even a couple of backpack-mounted vacuum cleaners.

A roar from behind her made her spin.

Red Face stood in the doorway to the kitchen.

In the blink of an eye, CJ took in the situation.

Kitchen: no good.

The elevators: no good either; that meant running past a dozen dragons.

She glanced to her right and saw the torn-open section that was once the southern side of the restaurant. Tables that had sat cosily beside the windows now teetered at the edge of a precipice, lashed by rain.

She saw one of the vacuum cleaners by her feet. It was designed to be worn on someone’s back and it had a long power cord, maybe ninety feet.

And she smelled the gas wafting out from the ovens in the kitchen.

Windows, precipice, power cord, she thought.

You’re gonna die anyway…

‘Screw it,’ CJ said to no-one as she grabbed the vacuum cleaner and bounded down the broad descending levels of the restaurant, dodging chairs and hurdling tables, heading for the open southern side of the structure.

Red Face gave chase, flinging tables out of its path.

CJ stopped at what had once been a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. The world fell away before her: she was a thousand feet above the valley floor but about three hundred feet directly beneath her, a short way down the mountainside, she saw the cable car tunnel disappearing into the mountai—

Beep-beep… beep-beep.

She turned.

Red Face had her cornered. He crouched low, tensed, ready to leap.

Then the floor shook and CJ spun to see a gigantic emperor standing to her right, perched on the edge of the restaurant, grinning down at her. Girders moaned, straining under the weight of the beast.

CJ backed away, uncoiling the power cord of the vacuum cleaner as she did so.

The heels of her boots touched the edge of the precipice.

Nowhere else to go. It was now or never.

She had uncoiled the whole power cord by now, so she looped it around the splintered frame of a floor-to-ceiling window and knotted it. Then she slipped the vacuum cleaner onto her back.

She sniffed the gas again and looked up at the dragons.

‘You assholes can’t breathe fire, can you? Try breathing this.’

And she raised her MP-7 and fired it… not at the dragons, but at the doorway to the kitchen.

She only needed one round to spark off some metal, a spark that would—

One round sparked…

…and with an almighty whoosh, the gas-filled kitchen exploded.

A billowing cloud of flames burst forth from the kitchen, blowing the IN door off its hinges, sending tables and chairs and dragons flying.

And as all this happened, CJ jumped out the window.

44

CJ fell through the darkness.

She dropped away from the restaurant with the vacuum cleaner on her back, its long power cord trailing above her as a billowing fireball blasted out from every window of the circular restaurant.

If there was still glass in a window’s frame, it shattered. If there wasn’t, the fiery explosion just fanned out unimpeded.

Seen from afar, for a brief instant, Dragon Mountain looked like an ancient lighthouse, with a sudden flare of orange at its summit.

The dragons started crying out.

CJ kept falling.

And then her power cord went taut and her fall was arrested abruptly about ninety feet below the restaurant. CJ jolted to a halt. For a moment she just hung there, dead still, high above the world, about fifteen feet from the rocky flank of the mountain.

She rocked back and forth to build some momentum and swing in toward the mountain. The force of her fall, however, had almost dislodged the cord from its socket in the vacuum cleaner. It had almost been torn clean off it. Now, as CJ swung, she felt that the cord was only attached to the vacuum cleaner by the barest of threads. Her first swing didn’t bring her close enough to the mountainside. She swung back out again… and the cord stretched even more, almost to breaking point. CJ arced back toward the mountainside as—snap!—the cord broke and she fell—

—safely onto the rocky flank of Dragon Mountain. She’d made it, just.

‘Sheesh,’ she breathed. ‘Talk about out of the frying pan.’

She wriggled out of the vacuum cleaner’s shoulder straps, discarded it and looked up to see flaming dragons flying out of the blazing restaurant, squealing. They burst out of the disc-shaped structure and made for the nearest lake.

CJ didn’t have time to stop and watch. She started hurrying down the mountainside, heading for the cable car tunnel directly beneath her.

Rain pelted her as she stumbled and slid down the side of the mountain until at last she arrived at the opening to the concrete tunnel and dropped into it.

She landed on flat, clean cement. It was dry here. She was out of the rain.

CJ peered outside. She was still high above the world—the now-darkened world of the Great Dragon Zoo. Looking south, she could see the dark outline of the main entrance building and the high encircling wall of the crater.

She wondered where she could possibly go now and how she could possibly get there.

She couldn’t steal a chopper. The dragons had been going after the choppers, presumably because they knew that the choppers were their jailers’ best weapon against them.

She would have to get out of the zoo on f—

Something struck her. A sharp blow across the face sent CJ flying backwards as a dragon landed inside the tunnel in front of her.

Beep-beep… beep-beep.

Red Face.

A second and then a third red-bellied black prince joined him in the mouth of the tunnel: Melted Face and the fourth member of Red Face’s gang.

CJ crawled desperately away from them, spittle and blood dripping from her mouth. She felt dizzy from the blow and her vision was blurred. The tunnel around her was maybe eighty metres long. She could never outrun them, even if she could have got to her feet.

Spreadeagled on the floor, struggling to see, CJ slumped. She was officially fucked.

Red Face crept forward.

Beep-beep… beep-beep.

CJ shut her eyes and waited for the end.

45

Nothing happened.

It was only then that CJ heard a long, deep-throated growl.

She opened her eyes.

Red Face had stopped a few paces short of her and was standing frozen on the spot, staring daggers at CJ.

Actually, that wasn’t true. Red Face was staring past her—

The growl had come from behind CJ.

CJ turned…

…and through blurred eyes, saw a yellowjacket prince standing in the concrete tunnel behind her.

But not just any yellowjacket prince. It had a black-and-yellow saddle on its back.

It was Lucky.

Lucky growled again and CJ saw that the dragon was not addressing her: it was growling at Red Face and the other two red-bellied black dragons.

She also noticed that Lucky’s growls were not simple animalistic grunts: they were a mix of deep-chested coos, throaty vibrations and sharp squawks. It was like a—

With a startlingly quick swoop, Lucky took briefly to the air and landed in between CJ and the red-bellied blacks.

It was claiming CJ from the red-bellies. Or…

…CJ frowned…

…defending her.

Red Face snapped at Lucky with its jaws, only for the yellowjacket to lash out with a foreclaw and smack the red-bellied black prince on the snout.

Lucky backed up, grunting softly.

‘What?’ CJ said aloud. Barely able to stand, bleeding and exhausted, her mind reeling, it seemed as if the dragon was grunting at her.

Lucky grunted sharply again, but getting no response from CJ, the yellow dragon grabbed her with one foreclaw and shoved her backwards, thrusting her against the saddle on its back.

CJ slammed up against the saddle. Did it really want her to—

She dragged herself up into the saddle. Lucky wriggled slightly, assisting her, and suddenly CJ was sitting astride the dragon.

The three red dragons fanned out, edging forward.

There was a triple-point harness on the saddle’s pommel.

‘What the hell are you doing, Cassandra?’ CJ said to herself as she fumbled with the harness, clipping it to her belt. She slid her feet into the stirrups.

Lucky backed further away from the three black princes.

Red Face and his buddies looked absolutely furious. They hissed and then…

…leapt forward, foreclaws raised and jaws bared, but Lucky was quicker, and the yellowjacket spun and took to the air and suddenly CJ found herself zooming at phenomenal speed back down the horizontal concrete tunnel!

The walls of the tunnel blurred with superfast motion as she shot through it on the back of the dragon.

Lucky flew like a missile. She pinned her ears back and streamlined her body for maximum speed. Her tail slithered behind her, long and sleek, guiding her like a rudder.

CJ glanced behind her and saw the three red-bellied black dragons in hot pursuit, wings flapping, bodies also extended.

Lucky shot through the darkened cable car station in the heart of the mountain where she banked right, swooping over the smashed cable car and blasting into the eastern tunnel with the three red-bellied blacks right on her tail.

Again the tight walls of the tunnel became streaking blurs. Drawing on her experience riding horses, CJ leaned low and forward in the saddle, trying to diminish the drag effect she must have been having on Lucky’s flight.

And then—shoom—they burst out into the night sky and rain slammed against her face and suddenly CJ found herself high above the world on the back of a dragon!

A wave of vertigo struck her as she beheld the landscape far below: the smaller pinnacle was directly ahead of her, a river town lay to her right, while the rim of the crater loomed level with her.

It was simply bizarre to be this high up and not be inside an aeroplane of some sort. CJ had paraglided once before but that was nothing compared to this.

This was rocket fast.

Lucky banked hard to the right and CJ felt her stomach lurch. The world tilted and she thought she was going to fall off, but the harness held her firmly in the saddle.

The three black princes were still close behind them.

Lucky dived, down and around the pinnacle, but they stayed close. Then Lucky cut left, banking in an outrageously tight arc and CJ felt the G-forces assailing her body and she knew she was about to black out.

She did everything she could to keep her eyes open as Lucky brought them up toward the eastern wall of the crater and CJ suddenly saw the body of a yellowjacket emperor dragon rise up in front of her, filling her field of vision. It bellowed, and as CJ rushed under its bat-like wings she spun around in her saddle and saw the emperor swipe at the three pursuing red-bellied black princes.

Red Face and his gang scattered at the sight of the much larger emperor and flew off into the rain-soaked night.

CJ sighed with relief and, leaning forward in her saddle, patted Lucky’s neck.

‘Thank you…’ she breathed. ‘Thank you…’

Then she blacked out.

46

Hamish, Syme and Wolfe were still holed up in the café at the base of the curving waterfall.

They hadn’t seen any movement from the treeline for twenty minutes now. All was still and quiet, save for the pattering of the rain.

Hamish peered out through one of the windows. As he did so, he said abruptly, ‘How do you become an ambassador for America?’

‘I’m sorry, what?’ Kirk Syme answered.

‘I’ve always wanted to know. How does a guy become the US Ambassador to China? Are you, like, buddies with the President or something?’

Wolfe said, ‘Close. He was a friend of the President’s father.’

‘I was, yes.’ Syme half smiled. ‘I was a naval aviator. Flew with the President’s father in Vietnam. After the war, I stayed in Asia. Learned Mandarin, started a business in Hong Kong which I later sold for a fortune. When my buddy’s son became President and it came time to appoint an ambassador to China, he wanted a real guy, not a party hack. He remembered me.’

‘And you said yes?’ Hamish said. ‘If you’ve got all that money, why would you take up a job like that?’

‘When the President asks you to do something, you’d be surprised how keen you are to oblige,’ Syme said. The ambassador nodded outside. ‘You think they’re still out there?’

‘How about we find out?’ Hamish grabbed a nearby dinner plate and brought it over to one of the windows facing the lake.

Holding the plate ready to throw, he cracked open the window. It made the tiniest squeak. With shocking suddenness a dragon head appeared in front of him, hanging upside-down from the roof!

Hamish tumbled back in surprise.

The second red-bellied black prince appeared outside another window, also with its head upside-down.

They must have flown up into the sky and then glided down in perfect silence, landing on the roof of the building so softly that Hamish, Syme and Wolfe hadn’t even heard them.

But then suddenly the two dragons at the windows turned and took off, abandoning the café without a second thought.

‘What in God’s name is going on?’ Syme said.

‘I don’t think our Chinese friends have control of their zoo anymore,’ Hamish said, still staring out through the lake-side window.

And then he saw them. ‘Holy moly…’

Two red-bellied black emperors came swooping in over the broad lake, passing the ruined castle before banking around toward the café, and for a moment Hamish thought in horror that they were coming for him, but then they pulled to a halt beneath the rim of the waterfall. There the two gargantuan creatures crouched below the waterfall and waited, looking up expectantly at the cascading lip of the falls.

‘What is this?’ Wolfe said, leaning forward.

Hamish gasped. ‘It’s a trap.’

Right then, two red-bellied black princes came whipping over the lip of the waterfall from the north, flying low and very, very fast.

Orange tracer rounds went sizzling past them, fired from—

—two Chinese Z-10 attack helicopters that came blasting over the rim of the waterfall, pursuing the princes at full speed.

The two emperors sprang up from their hiding place below the waterfall and clutched at the two skinny attack choppers.

Hamish could only imagine what it must have looked like to the choppers’ pilots: one second you were sweeping over a waterfall, the next you were looking into the eyes of a brontosaurus-sized dragon!

The emperor on the right caught the first chopper in one of its mighty claws, crumpled it instantly and then tossed it away. The other emperor only managed to hit the second Z-10 with a glancing blow, but it was enough to dislodge the chopper’s tail rotor, sending that chopper cartwheeling into the lake. It crashed into the water with a huge splash, toppling onto its side before going under.

A third Z-10 that had been trailing behind the first two saw the trap the dragons had sprung, so it powered away, banking hard—only to find itself assailed by three red-bellied black princes, all swooping in from different sides. They latched onto it and within seconds the attack chopper was covered in the things. The extra weight was far too much for it and it began to descend at an alarming angle toward the side of Dragon Mountain. It plunged toward the mountainside and a moment before impact, the dragons took flight, leaving the chopper to slam into Dragon Mountain and explode in a billowing fireball.

‘They’re taking out the choppers,’ Hamish said.

He recalled Go-Go saying that the Chinese had four of the Z-10 choppers at the zoo, and he had just seen three of them get destroyed.

Go-Go had also said the Chinese had two Mi-17s—both of those had been taken out near the other waterfall—and a Chinook, which Hamish hadn’t seen yet. He didn’t know how many of the other helicopters at the zoo had been damaged or destroyed, but he had seen five of them taken out in the last hour.

‘The dragons are knocking out all their aerial competitors,’ Syme said, realising.

‘That’s right,’ Hamish said. ‘This place now has no electrical power and, by the look of it, no air power either. The dragons just took control of this zoo.’

47

Down on the ring road on the eastern side of the megavalley, inside the turning bay that gave access to the mountaintop monastery, lay the wreckage of two silver Range Rovers and one troop truck.

The second troop truck that had been part of the convoy speeding south—Ben Patrick’s truck—was simply gone. The awning-like roof of the turning bay had been wrenched clean off.

The attack had been as ruthless as it had been swift.

As soon as the zoo’s power had been cut and the roadway had gone dark, a gang of five red-bellied black dragons—two princes, two emperors and a king—had descended on the convoy.

The emperors had bowled over the two troop trucks, while the king had skittled the Range Rovers, flinging them into the walls of the turning bay.

The Range Rover containing Hu Tang, Colonel Bao and Director Chow slid wildly before it slammed hard into the wall beside the elevator that took visitors up to the monastery, while the second four-wheel drive containing the two Politburo members, one of their wives and the girl named Minnie, flipped entirely, landing heavily on its roof.

Hu and Bao crawled out of their car, bloodied and dazed. But Director Chow was trapped. The impact with the wall had caused his door to crumple against his leg and that leg—probably broken—was now firmly and hopelessly pinned. Chow tugged at it desperately but it wouldn’t come clear.

As Hu Tang staggered to his feet, he looked at the turning bay around him.

It had become a slaughterhouse. The two prince dragons and the king were attacking the soldiers in the back of one of the troop trucks, tearing them to pieces, while one of the emperors just flew off with the other eight-ton troop truck gripped in its claws. The second emperor was stomping toward the upside-down Range Rover.

Inside the silver four-wheel drive, Hu saw one Politburo man and the little girl with the Minnie Mouse hat. They were both hanging upside-down in their seats, held in place by their seatbelts. Both were still, either dead or unconscious.

A shout from the other side of the Range Rover made Hu Tang turn.

It had come from the other Politburo member, who was trying to drag the bloodied and limp body of his wife out of the car. The woman was obviously dead, killed by the impact, but he was pulling her clear anyway, trying to get away from the incoming emperor.

The Politburo man’s name was Sun Dianlong and he was the head of the Central Secretariat, the vast bureaucracy that controlled the Communist Party. It was a position that made him a very powerful man in Chinese internal politics.

Sun called to Hu Tang: ‘Comrade Hu! Help me!’

Hu Tang looked from Sun to the elevator near him. It wasn’t the elevator that Hu wanted to use, it was the emergency exit door inside the elevator’s shaft. That led outside the valley.

Colonel Bao was clearly doing the same thing: assessing whether he should help this very senior Party official, or cut and run.

Hu and Bao swapped a glance… and then raced for the elevator.

Sun swore at them. ‘You dirty cowards!’

Bao flicked an emergency release switch up near the top of the elevator’s doors and the doors came open easily. He and Hu slipped through them, both men stealing a final glance back at the turning bay behind them.

The three dragons that had been attacking the troop truck stepped away from it, their snouts smeared with blood. They had literally torn it to shreds.

Their hungry gazes turned to the two silver Range Rovers.

The dragons looked from Director Chow, still struggling in his car, to the other upside-down Range Rover, with the girl and the Politburo man still inside it, and Sun outside it.

As the dragons moved in on the two Range Rovers, Bao shut the elevator doors and coldly locked them.

‘We can’t help those people anymore,’ he said. ‘We must leave them to their fates.’

Hu followed the colonel as Bao went over to a heavy steel door sunk into the rear wall of the elevator shaft. He inserted a high-tech laser-cut key into the lock and the door clanked opened.

Bao pulled out a radio. ‘This is Colonel Bao. I need a helicopter at the east-side emergency exit in ten minutes.’

A voice replied, ‘I’m sorry, sir. But the beasts have knocked out all of our choppers.’

‘Then send a fucking car!’ Bao barked. ‘A jeep, a truck, anything! I have to get to the secondary command post at the airfield! Bao, out.’

He clicked off. ‘Damn it. I can regain control of the zoo from the airfield, but it’ll take us at least an hour to get there by car. Fuck.’

‘Then let’s go,’ Hu said, and the two of them took off down the long, dark concrete tunnel, one of the few tunnels that led out of the Great Dragon Zoo of China.

48

CJ dreamed.

Bizarre images flashed across her mind. She saw herself flying high above the world. Then she saw the face of a yellowjacket emperor dragon, impossibly huge, staring at her from very close range, opening its jaws—

CJ’s eyes darted open.

To find a yellowjacket emperor dragon staring at her from very close range.

She started, but the dragon didn’t attack. It was lying very casually in front of her, its chin resting on the ground, just watching her.

For a moment, CJ wondered if she was still dreaming.

Looking about herself, she was in what could only be described as another world: she lay on a wooden stage inside an ancient-looking monastery high up in some kind of chasm.

A wide wooden doorway opened before her, revealing a broad balcony that looked out at a second sky-temple mounted on the opposite side of the chasm.

It was still night and it was still raining. CJ didn’t know how much time had passed since she had blacked out.

Completing the fantastical nature of the image were the dragons.

She was surrounded by a small group of yellowjackets, five of them, forming a tight ring around her—the emperor, two kings and two princes.

Like the emperor, all the others were staring very intently and curiously at CJ.

One of the princes stepped forward, easily distinguishable from the other dragons by virtue of the saddle on her back: Lucky.

As CJ looked at them all more closely, however, she began to see that each yellow-and-black dragon bore unique patterns on its face and neck. No two dragons had the same markings.

Lucky came up to CJ and, to CJ’s great surprise, bowed her head.

CJ leaned back, confused.

Lucky brayed a series of low burring sounds from deep within her throat.

CJ looked from Lucky to the other yellowjacket dragons, unsure what was going on.

Lucky turned to the other dragons, apparently equally confused. She threw a meaningful look at one of the watching kings. The king growled deeply, a noise that sounded profoundly unimpressed.

Lucky turned back to CJ and repeated the sequence of low brays.

Lucky stepped up close to CJ so that her toothy snout was right in front of CJ’s face.

CJ remained stock still, not daring to move. The yellowjacket’s fangs looked deadly.

And then Lucky nudged the earpiece in CJ’s ear.

CJ frowned. The earpiece. The one she had taken from the body of Lucky’s handler back in the waste management facility when she had rescued Lucky from Red Face’s gang.

CJ touched the earpiece. ‘What are you trying to tell me…?’

Then she saw the metal implant on the side of Lucky’s head, the box-shaped one that had been painted yellow and black to camouflage it against the dragon’s skin, the one trailing a small but distinct wire that disappeared into Lucky’s skull.

‘No way…’ CJ breathed. ‘The Chinese figured out a way to communicate with you…’

A flurry of thoughts and images came together in her mind:

Yim, the dragon handler, giving commands to Lucky and Red Face during the trick show.

Ben Patrick saying: ‘—I have a database of over three hundred separate and identifiable vocalisations—Every squawk and screech you hear has meaning—’

And the garbled electronic female voice CJ had heard through that earpiece after she had rescued Lucky from Red Face and his gang:

‘—Run… White head… Run—’

And the male voice she’d heard before that: ‘—black dragons attack—’ And the same voice she’d heard when Melted Face had shrieked at her: ‘—Fear… me—’

Even the way Lucky had growled and grunted at Red Face and his gang in the cable car tunnel. It had been communication, deliberate and articulate communication.

Holy shit…

During the crazy chase in the pick-up truck, CJ had thought the strange voices coming through her earpiece had been crossed signals from other radios in the zoo; the voices of workers panicking in the face of the attacks.

But now as CJ’s gaze fell on the metallic box grafted onto the side of Lucky’s head, she had a different idea.

The female voice had been Lucky.

The male voice: Melted Face.

Those metallic boxes on their heads were indeed implants of some sort—implants connected to the dragons’ brains and larynxes, implants fitted with state-of-the-art data chips that somehow translated their grunts, squawks and coos into language. The Chinese had even had the sense to use separate male and female voices for the different dragons, a small but clever touch.

By the look of it, however, not all the dragons at the zoo had such implants. Only the performing ones: Lucky and Red Face and his gang. None of the other four yellowjackets surrounding CJ right now had implants on the sides of their heads.

CJ pulled out her earpiece and looked at it.

It was set to channel 4. CJ recalled switching it to that channel so she could speak with Hamish and Zhang in the garbage truck.

She tried to remember what channel it had been set to before then.

‘22…’ she said aloud. She flicked the dial on the earpiece to 22.

She looked up at Lucky and—despite herself, despite thinking that this was absolutely crazy—she nodded.

Lucky cooed and mewled…

…and the electronic female voice once again came through CJ’s earpiece, speaking in Mandarin.

It said, ‘Hello… White Head… Me… Lucky.’

49

CJ almost fainted. Her mouth fell open in shock.

This was incredible.

She wasn’t sure how the translation system worked, but it must have been extraordinarily complex.

She guessed a sensor was probably connected directly to Lucky’s voicebox; it detected the dragon’s utterances, correlated them with Ben Patrick’s database of known dragon sounds and then sent the translation via a computerised voice to CJ’s earpiece. The implant in the dragon’s brain must also reverse the process, so the dragon could understand people.

Such a device would have taken years to develop and refine; thousands of man-hours just to tabulate and interpret all the different dragon calls. But Ben Patrick, with the full resources of China behind him, had done just that.

It took CJ a moment to regather herself and reply.

‘Er… hello, Lucky,’ she said in Mandarin.

Lucky reared back, eyes widening. Her pointy-eared head was surprisingly expressive. Her eyes were sharp and focused intently on CJ. Her ears folded backwards like a dog’s: a very pleased expression.

The dragon, by all appearances, was delighted that progress had just been made.

Lucky squawked at the other dragons, turning specifically to the two kings—even though there was an emperor-sized dragon in the pack, they, it seemed, were its leaders. They grunted back with low growls.

Lucky faced CJ again and cooed.

The earpiece translated: ‘Lucky say… White Head… good human.’

‘White Head?’ CJ frowned.

And then she realised: it was her hair, her blonde hair. In a world of black-haired Chinese, Lucky had given her a perfectly obvious name: White Head.

‘Oh. Right.’ She ventured a complimentary reply, using the simplest Mandarin syntax she could think of: ‘White Head say… Lucky… good dragon.’

Lucky’s ears flew back again, her eyes positively beaming.

This is trippy, CJ thought. She was communicating with a dragon.

Lucky barked and mewled quickly. ‘Red dragons want kill Lucky… White Head help Lucky… White Head good human…’

‘Ah-ha…’ CJ said, understanding.

Lucky may well have saved CJ just now, but CJ had saved Lucky first: from Red Face’s gang inside the waste management facility. Lucky had been repaying a debt.

‘Well, thanks anyway,’ she said.

Lucky cooed. ‘Lucky no understand White Head.’

‘Never mind,’ CJ said.

Now that she was talking with the dragon—and she was surprised how quickly she accepted this—CJ started to think about other things.

‘Lucky, what is happening now?’

‘Lucky no understand White Head.’

CJ kicked herself. She needed to use simpler language, no what’s, why’s or now’s, just simple nouns and verbs. She wondered if the translator might work with English—it was a translation program after all; also, given Ben Patrick’s involvement in its development, she figured it was a distinct possibility. So she said in English: ‘Red dragons kill humans.’

Lucky seemed to comprehend that, and the electronic voice switched to English. ‘Red dragons bad dragons… Like kill humans… Like kill dragons…’

‘And yellow dragons?’

‘Yellow dragons good dragons… Yellow dragons like sleep… eat…’

‘I’m beginning to like you yellow dragons,’ CJ said, smiling.

‘Lucky no understand White Head.’

‘Never mind.’

CJ asked, ‘Red dragons want fly away?’

‘Red dragons want release red masters…’

‘Red masters?’ CJ said, frowning. She didn’t know what that meant. ‘Red masters… emperors?’

Lucky said, ‘No… Master dragon big big dragon… Two red masters… Two yellow masters… Two purple masters… Two grey masters… Two green masters… One master strong strong emperor… one master strong strong king. Black heads hold masters… in nest.’

CJ tried to process what she had just heard.

If she was White Head, then ‘black heads’ must mean the Chinese. She also guessed that the repeated words ‘big big’ and ‘strong strong’ meant extra large and extra strong.

She didn’t like the sound of this.

The notion of some kind of master dragon that was bigger and stronger than the other dragons wasn’t that surprising: it was common in the animal kingdom, from queen bees to lions. If she was interpreting Lucky correctly, each variety of dragon had two of these master dragons, one supersized emperor and one supersized king.

More worrying, however, was the idea that the Chinese were keeping them captive in the ‘nest’, which she translated as the Nesting Centre.

The Chinese knew they were special and so had kept them there, separated from the other dragons.

CJ remembered the guards at the Nesting Centre during the first attack: even in those extreme circumstances, they had flatly denied Zhang and her group entry.

This was why the Nesting Centre had been strictly off-limits.

CJ also recalled the image of the Nesting Centre she had seen earlier, with the pairs of dragons lined up neatly in a row: they must have been the master dragons.

But perhaps, she wondered, the Chinese had underestimated how special the master dragons were: it seemed the red-bellied black dragons now wanted to release their masters, perhaps even more than they wanted to escape from the zoo.

‘Masters are very strong dragons?’ CJ asked.

‘Master dragons strong strong dragons… big big… spit fire…’

‘Wait, what?’ CJ said, shocked. ‘These dragons can breathe fire?’

‘Master dragons spit fire… Fire help dig… Fire kill dragons.’

‘Oh my God.’

‘Lucky no understand White Head.’

CJ didn’t like the sound of this at all. She tried a different angle. ‘Dragons want… to kill? To fly? To be free?’

Lucky seemed to ponder this.

‘Dragons want… open big big nest…’

CJ frowned. ‘Big big nest?’

Lucky brayed again. The earpiece translated: ‘Two nests… Small nest, big nest… Dragons sleep long long time… Lucky nest small nest… Small nest open… Small nest dragons go big big nest… Open big big nest…’

The blood drained from CJ’s face.

‘Are you telling me that there is another dragon nest in this area? A bigger one? And that the nest at this zoo is actually a small one?’

‘Lucky no understand White Head.’

CJ stepped out of the monastery building, striding past the pack of yellowjacket dragons. She peered across the dark, rain-flecked megavalley in the direction of the Nesting Centre.

Then she remembered something: the battlefield display unit in her thigh pocket.

She pulled it out and looked at it. It must have been connected to some external data system—perhaps a satellite or, more likely, the military airfield outside the valley—because it was still working despite the loss of power inside the zoo.

With the falling of the inner dome, however, it had changed completely:

Whereas before most of the red crosses had been clustered around the administration building, now they were converging on the Nesting Centre. The red-bellied black dragons were going for their masters.

At the top right-hand corner of the image, grey dragons were fleeing en masse from the valley, heading off to the northeast.

As she gazed in horror at the map, a question formed in CJ’s mind.

The red-bellied black dragons had led the initial attacks. And now they were descending upon the Nesting Centre. They were driving all this and they clearly weren’t finished.

Stepping back into the monastery, she said, ‘Lucky. Red dragons want…?’

‘Red dragons like red dragons… Kill other dragons… Like rule…’

‘And if they release their masters,’ CJ said to herself, ‘they become the only dragons with fire-breathers. They become the most powerful dragons.’

She turned to face Lucky. ‘Lucky help White Head?’

‘Lucky like White Head…’

‘Lucky help White Head fight red dragons?’ CJ pointed at the Nesting Centre. ‘Lucky fly White Head to nest?’

Lucky looked off in the direction of the Nesting Centre, peering into the rainy night. The dragon seemed to be considering the question very seriously.

If anything, she seemed apprehensive about the idea, fearful even.

She pivoted and coo-barked at one of the two yellowjacket kings. The king dragon looked at CJ hard, as if evaluating her. Then it grunted at Lucky permissively.

Lucky turned back to CJ. ‘Lucky… White Head… fight red dragons.’

50

With CJ on her back, Lucky soared over the blacked-out zoo.

CJ gazed at the landscape below her: the rain had lessened to a weak drizzle now and she could see the whole megavalley. Without any man-made light, it seemed as if the valley had lost all its colour; it was now a world of blacks and greys.

She eyed the distant western rim of the crater. She could see many dragons making their way there, gliding across the sky. She hadn’t seen the inside of the Nesting Centre before and she was nervous about what she might encounter there, not least a supersized ‘master’ dragon.

She had, however, one stop she wanted to make on the way.

She brought Lucky in toward the remains of the revolving restaurant at the summit of Dragon Mountain.

The disc-shaped structure had literally been torn apart in the dragons’ attack and the later gas explosion. It looked like a tuna can that’d had its lid peeled back. Half of its roof was simply gone, wrenched away. On its entire southern side, its four broad descending levels lay open to the sky. The Chinese troop truck still lay inside it, turned on its side, nose pressed up against the central elevator bay. The corpses of Chinese troops and commandos lay all over the place, in various states of dismemberment, guns on the floor beside them.

Lucky landed lightly on an open-air part of the restaurant.

CJ dismounted quickly and hurried toward the kitchen, racing for the dumb waiter in which she had left Greg Johnson. She hoped it had withstood the gas explosion. She pulled its heavy steel doors apart.

Johnson wasn’t in it.

Swipes of blood slicked the walls of the box-like elevator.

‘Damn it,’ CJ breathed.

The CIA agent was gone.

CJ emerged from the kitchen to find Lucky poking her nose under a section of fallen ceiling.

‘What have you found there?’ CJ said, coming over.

Lucky pushed the section of plasterboard away, revealing the body of Li, the young electrician CJ had met twice before.

Li groaned, waking, only to shout in terror when he saw Lucky staring at him from so close.

CJ stepped in hastily. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay. She’s with me.’

Li blanched in surprise.

For her part, Lucky seemed a little, well, offended by the man’s terror. She hadn’t been threatening him in any way. She snorted huffily.

Kneeling beside Li, CJ switched to Mandarin: ‘Are you all right? Can you move?’

Li grimaced in pain. ‘I think… I dislocated my shoulder when the roof fell on it.’

CJ examined his shoulder. It was indeed out of position. ‘We gotta get that baby back in. Here, lean forward and stay still.’

‘Are you a doctor?’ Li said.

‘I’m better than that. I’m a vet. Vets do everything: brain surgery, heart surgery, lab analysis, dislocations—’

Whack. She shoved his shoulder back into the socket. Li yelped but then immediately began to breathe easier. His shoulder was in place again.

‘What is happening?’ he asked in slow English, taking in the scale of the destruction around him and the darkened zoo outside.

‘The dragons cut the power. They’ve brought down the inner dome—’

A groan made them both spin.

Lucky turned, too, and growled.

It had come from the cabin of the side-turned troop truck.

CJ approached it cautiously. Another section of fallen ceiling covered the top of the truck’s cabin, concealing it from view.

She scooped up an MP-7 machine pistol from the floor and aimed it at the cabin. The windshield of the truck had popped halfway out of its frame. CJ yanked it clear and, expecting to see a dragon come bursting out of it, quickly aimed her gun—

—only to see Dr Ben Patrick lying inside the cabin, his forehead covered in blood, his glasses askew.

CJ lowered her gun.

A few minutes later, Patrick sat patiently while CJ wrapped his forehead with bandages.

He kept glancing at Lucky, who watched curiously.

‘White Head… help… Big Eyes…’ Lucky’s voice said in her ear.

CJ half-laughed. Big Eyes. What else would a dragon call someone with glasses?

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Humans help humans.’

Patrick watched the exchange. ‘I see you’ve discovered Lucky’s translation chip,’ he said.

‘Found it while I was looking for a radio. It’s pretty amazing,’ CJ said. ‘But it only works for her and the four red-bellies from the trick show, right?’

‘That’s correct. That implant grafted onto the side of her head connects directly to her larynx, giving us precise readings of her utterings. The unit then compares her utterances with the hundreds of vocalisations that have been collated in my database of dragon calls and, voilà, you hear what she says,’ Patrick said proudly.

He added, ‘Lucky must like you. She’s very choosy. She doesn’t speak with just anybody. In fact, she’s always favoured women.’

‘I helped Lucky out of a nasty situation earlier,’ CJ said. ‘She has an admirable sense of gratitude.’ She turned to the dragon: ‘White Head like Lucky.’

The dragon’s ears twitched backwards again. ‘Lucky like White Head.’

CJ said to Patrick: ‘We’re on our way to the Nesting Centre. The dragons cut the power, knocking out the inner dome. Now the red-bellied black ones are gathering at the Nesting Centre. They want to release some kind of bigger dragons from there, something called masters.’

Patrick’s eyes went wide. ‘They’re going after the masters? Shit, if they get out…’

CJ showed him the battlefield display unit, with all the red crosses converging on the Nesting Centre.

‘Tell me about these master dragons,’ she said, ‘and how I can stop them.’

‘You can’t.’

‘I can try,’ CJ said.

‘No. You can’t,’ Patrick said. ‘If those masters get out, it’ll make what’s happened so far look like child’s play.’

‘Humour me,’ CJ said.

Patrick sighed, then said, ‘Out of the original 88 eggs, there were two master dragons born to each clan: one superemperor and one superking. They are kept in the Nesting Centre, bound, with their snouts held firmly shut. The reason is that these master dragons have a unique set of glands at the back of their throats that release a kind of incendiary acid. Alone among the dragons at this facility, they can project liquid fire.’

‘So what we were told on the tour about there being no fire-breathing dragons at the zoo was a lie,’ CJ said.

‘You were never supposed to see the masters, so think of it as a half-truth,’ Patrick said.

‘Seems to me that this place is filled with half-truths,’ CJ said. ‘I repeat: how do I stop them?’

‘Let me be clear, CJ. It’s not just fire that they breathe. It’s a liquid acid-based fire. If that acid-fire touches your skin, it’ll eat right through your flesh and your bone. If it sprays over you, it’ll turn your entire body to mush. It’s not a pretty sight. I’ve seen it.’

‘For the third time, Ben, how can I stop them?’ CJ said.

Patrick said, ‘There are two protocols in place in the event that we lose control of this zoo. The primary protocol for use in the event of a total security breakdown involves the detonation of several thermobaric bombs at strategic locations around the zoo. A thermobaric bomb creates an oxygen vacuum that will kill every living thing within a very wide radius. That is the last-resort plan.’

CJ didn’t feel the need to tell Patrick that she was already aware of the three thermobaric bombs held somewhere at the zoo.

Patrick went on. ‘There is a secondary protocol, however, that doesn’t go as far as that. It involves the implants in the dragons’ heads, the chips in their brains that emit an electric shock if a dragon comes into contact with one of the electromagnetic domes.

‘When we train the dragons, we use what we call “training units” to trigger those implants. Pain is a swift teacher.’

CJ recalled the trick show and the moment during it when Red Face had baulked at doing a trick. The trainer Yim had held up a yellow handheld remote and Red Face had performed. Yim had been threatening the dragon with a shock. CJ also now knew why Red Face had smashed that same remote to pieces when Yim had reached for it in the waste management facility moments before her death.

‘Lucky’s trainer had a yellow remote,’ CJ said. ‘Is that one of these training units?’

‘Yes. As you will have seen, each dragon has an alphanumeric ID code branded onto its left thigh. You enter a dragon’s code into the training unit and then you can shock that individual dragon.’

‘How many of these training units are there and where can I get one?’

‘There aren’t many, maybe five or six, kept in the Birthing and Nesting centres, since that’s where we train the young dragons.’

‘Shocking them is a temporary measure, Ben. How about killing them?’

‘Let me finish,’ Patrick said. ‘Those implants in each of the dragons’ heads were equipped with a second capability for use in the event that a dragon or dragons got excessively violent or out of control.’

‘Yes…’

‘Each implant contains two grams of the plastic explosive PVV-5A inside it; not a lot, but enough to blow a dragon’s head apart from the inside.’

‘Now you’re talking,’ CJ said. ‘So how do we detonate these implants?’

Patrick said, ‘A regular training unit can’t detonate those chips. It requires a special detonator unit. And there are only two detonator units in the whole zoo. They look exactly like the training units, only they are red, not yellow. For obvious reasons, both of these detonator units are kept inside high-security safes, the combinations for which are known only to a few senior people.’

‘Who?’

‘Director Chow, Colonel Bao… and me.’

‘Why you?’

‘Because Chow is just an administrator and Bao is simply muscle,’ Patrick said dismissively. ‘By virtue of my research, I know more about these dragons than anyone else at this zoo; more than anyone else alive, for that matter.’

‘So where are the safes?’ CJ said.

‘The first is at the military airfield to the southwest of the zoo. That airfield is basically the zoo’s second command centre; you could run the whole place from there. I imagine that’s where Colonel Bao has gone, if he’s still alive.’

‘That’ll be tough to get to. And the second detonator unit?’

‘It’s inside the Nesting Centre.’

‘Of course it is,’ CJ said. ‘Where exactly?’

‘Bao has an office there, inside the observation booth overlooking the main chamber of the Nesting Centre. The main chamber houses the master dragons and the opening to the dragons’ original nest.’

‘What’s the combination to the safe?’ CJ asked.

‘9199,’ Patrick said.

CJ nodded, memorising the code. She started walking around the side-turned truck, peering at some objects on the floor near it.

As she did so, she said, ‘Ben, they knocked out the inner dome by trashing the generators and cutting the main power cable. If they go after the outer dome, how will they go about bringing it down?’

Patrick said, ‘The inner dome only had one set of laser-emitting emplacements. Since it’s a back-up barrier, the outer dome has two sets. The first set of emplacements is at the airfield. The second set is over by the worker city to the northeast, on the opposite side. Both sets of emplacements are fed by separate main power lines, so if one set of emplacements is cut, the other set still maintains the dome.’

‘Tell me more,’ CJ said from behind the truck. ‘Describe them for me, so I know them when I see them.’

Patrick shrugged. ‘There are fifteen emplacements in each set. They project the outer dome both into the sky and into the ground, forming a diamond-like shield around the zoo. Each emplacement is made of nine-foot-thick concrete. They are each about the size of a house but they look like World War II pillboxes.’

‘Is there, like, a central pillbox?’

‘Yes. Of the fifteen laser emplacements, one is paramount: the middle one. It alone is connected to the external main power line—it then onsends power to the other emplacements. If that central emplacement is destroyed, all the emplacements on that side of the zoo will lose power.’

CJ reappeared from behind the truck, carrying a helmet, some weapons and a roll of duct tape.

‘These dragons can sense electrical impulses,’ she said. ‘They’ll be able to spot the large amounts of electrical energy entering those central emplacements. They’ll go for them.’

She put on the helmet. Taken from the body of a Chinese commando, it was a lightweight model with a flashlight mounted on one side and a flip-down visor. CJ tore off the arms of her special UV glasses and duct-taped the glasses onto the fold-down visor.

She also held a Russian-made ROKS-5 flamethrower. She wriggled the flame unit’s propane tank onto her back while she gripped its gun-like nozzle in her left hand. She taped an M79 pump-action grenade launcher to her MP-7 and slid the combined weapon into a thigh holster. Finally, she used the duct tape to crudely affix her battlefield display unit to the left forearm of her leather jacket.

It was an ad-hoc uniform to say the very least, but CJ Cameron suddenly looked ready for battle.

Patrick said, ‘A flamethrower? You ever used one before?’

‘No. How hard can it be? You aim it and pull the trigger. Hell, I made my own earlier,’ CJ said. ‘And since I can’t talk to the dragons in the Nesting Centre, I thought fire might be a language they understand.’

‘You’re not seriously going into the Nesting Centre right now?’ Patrick said.

‘Somebody has to. And I’m going to need help.’

‘You want me to go with you? Are you out of your fucking mind? There must be forty red-bellied black dragons in there! Plus the masters! We won’t last ten seconds. I won’t go—’

‘I will go,’ a soft voice said.

CJ turned to see the young electrician, Li, stepping forward.

‘I will go with you,’ he said in English.

‘Thank you, Li,’ CJ said. ‘Grab yourself a gun, a helmet and a flashlight.’

She stepped over to Lucky and placed a foot in one stirrup.

Patrick said, ‘Don’t do this, CJ. You’ll be dead inside half an hour.’

‘Then at least I won’t be scared anymore,’ CJ said.

Li returned wearing a flashlight-mounted helmet and carrying an MP-7. CJ pulled him up onto Lucky behind her. ‘Hold on tight. This is gonna feel weird.’

Li wrapped his arms around her waist like a motorcycle passenger riding pillion.

CJ leaned close to Lucky’s ear. ‘Lucky. Go nest.’

Lucky keened and the electronic voice replied: ‘Lucky… go nest.’ Then she turned slightly and grunted something else. ‘Lucky… no like… Big Eyes. Big Eyes… bad human.’

‘What’s she saying?’ Patrick asked.

CJ looked over at Patrick, standing there in his broken glasses and dirty lab coat.

‘She’s saying she doesn’t want to go to the nest either, but she’ll go anyway,’ CJ lied.

‘Good luck, CJ. You’re gonna need it.’

51

Lucky took to the sky from the smashed-open restaurant with CJ and Li on her back. She soared out over the zoo, wings spread wide, gliding.

As Lucky banked westward, CJ saw the shadows of the last few red-bellied black dragons ahead of them: all flying west, out over the rim of the crater toward the Nesting Centre.

Staying high, Lucky swept over the rim and the Nesting Centre came into view.

CJ caught her breath at the sight that met her.

The Nesting Centre was covered in dragons.

Red-bellied black dragons of all sizes—princes, kings and emperors—crawled all over it, a writhing mass of leathery bodies and bat-like wings.

The Nesting Centre was no small structure either. It was perhaps the size of four aeroplane hangars, square in shape but with a circular cage-like structure on its roof, a hemispherical steel-barred dome.

As they came closer to the Nesting Centre—but not too close—CJ saw six emperors attacking the steel dome from the outside, tearing it apart. The squeal of rending steel cut the air as the immense dragons, working together, wrenched the girders away, creating a huge ragged opening in the great metal dome.

When the opening they’d created was wide enough, prince-sized red-bellies slithered into the Nesting Centre. When it became wider still, the kings entered, and then finally the emperors dived in as well, tails slinking behind them.

CJ swallowed hard. She couldn’t believe she was doing this, literally going into the dragons’ den.

Okay, she thought. How do I get in there?

She gazed off to the right and saw the Birthing Centre, and she recalled that there was a tunnel that connected it to the Nesting Centre. That was the way in and hopefully an entrance that the multitude of red-bellied black dragons wouldn’t be watching. She checked her battlefield display unit, but it was hard to tell if the dragons shown on it were inside the Birthing Centre or above it. She had to take the chance.

She guided Lucky down to the right, toward the ring road and the entrance to the Birthing Centre.

The Birthing Centre was deserted.

CJ and Li entered it on foot. Li held his MP-7 raised, while CJ led with her flamethrower. Lucky loped along behind them, eyeing their rear.

CJ saw the smartboard with the map on it again and the dead bodies. The female crocodiles down in the water pit still bellowed and groaned. Looking down into the pit, CJ saw the corpse of the red-bellied black dragon she had encountered before—it was in the process of being eaten by the olive-coloured swamp dragon that had attacked it. The swamp dragon glanced up at CJ and Li, growled, then continued its feast.

CJ saw a glass cabinet attached to the wall. It had been smashed and battered. On the floor beneath it were the shattered remains of five yellow training units. The dragons, keenly aware of the shocks the remotes gave, had taken care of them when they’d come through here.

‘Clever things,’ CJ said.

She approached the doorway in the far left-hand corner, moving silently and cautiously.

The door was open.

A corridor stretched away beyond it. From the end of the corridor, she could hear dragon calls and roars. It sounded like a gladiatorial arena.

With great trepidation, CJ edged down the corridor, leading with her weapons. Li and Lucky crept down it behind her.

At the far end of the corridor was a door. It dangled off its hinges. It had been smashed open at some point. A large dark space was beyond it.

CJ came to the end of the corridor just as a deafening chorus of dragon roars echoed out from within the Nesting Centre and, to her horror, a great, hundred-foot-high column of yellow flame extended into the sky, lighting up her corridor.

She slammed herself against the wall.

Then, holding her breath, she peered around the doorframe.

‘Mother of Mercy…’ she gasped.

52

If she somehow managed to survive this, the sight CJ beheld inside the Nesting Centre would be one she would remember for the rest of her life.

Her doorway was positioned three storeys above the floor of the main chamber, so she had a good view of it. To her immediate left was a small building with glass windows, also three storeys tall. It was the only man-made structure in the chamber and it overlooked the space: it must’ve been the observation booth Ben Patrick had mentioned.

The floor of the chamber was a broad expanse of concrete, like the floor of an aeroplane hangar, except that in the exact centre of it was an extraordinarily wide circular hole that was at least forty feet in diameter.

The hole looked like a monstrous well and it bored down into the earth.

The dragons’ original tunnel, CJ realised. The tunnel they dug themselves and through which they’d emerged from their nest deep within the Earth.

This was where the Chinese had built their trap to capture each dragon as it had emerged from the nest two kilometres underground.

But it was the terrifying scene around the great hole in the centre of the chamber that had made her gasp in shock.

It looked like Hell itself—fiery light, prisoners bound in chains, squawking dragons surrounding them like a crowd of demonic spectators, roaring and beating their wings in approval of what was going on.

And what was going on was not pleasant at all.

CJ saw nine ‘master’ dragons lying in a long row, but they were not lying there by choice.

Each was bound by thick steel bands that were bolted to the concrete floor. The sturdy bands held down the animals’ necks, bodies, wings and walking limbs, keeping them rigidly immobile. Special metal sheaths kept their snouts tightly shut.

And they were, quite simply, enormous.

There was one king and one emperor of each type: two yellowjackets, two purple royals, two green river dragons, two eastern greys. There were no olive-coloured swamp dragon masters: CJ guessed that was because they were a new species created by the Chinese using the crocodile-breeding program. Each master was slightly bigger than the regular kings and emperors.

There were also two red-bellied black master dragons, but only one of them, the superemperor, still lay on the floor. The other, the superking, stood free, released from its bonds, bellowing at the sky. It blew a blazing column of fire up into the night.

As it raged, three red-bellied king dragons attacked the steel bands restraining the still-bound superemperor. Suddenly, the bonds broke and the superemperor reared onto its hind legs and it, too, roared at the sky, releasing a towering burst of liquid fire.

The assembled crowd of red-bellied black dragons shrieked in delight.

Their two masters were free.

CJ watched in awe as the mass of red-bellied blacks fawned before their masters.

Like queen bees in a hive, the two masters were visibly superior to the other dragons. Their crests were higher, their necks longer, their chests broader, their wingspans wider, and of course, they could breathe fire.

The superemperor was beyond enormous. It towered above the chamber looking like something from another world. Every time it sprayed the air with a column of fire, its minions roared appreciatively.

The superking struck CJ in a different way.

Not only was it slightly larger than the other king dragons, it was also somehow more sinister. It had a sharpness to its eyes, suggesting an extra level of intelligence that sent a chill through CJ. It surveyed the chamber with cool calculation.

Its gaze fell on the other captive masters and it screamed a furious, ear-piercing shriek.

All the watching dragons fell silent. An eerie stillness fell over the chamber.

The two red-bellied masters stomped over to the two yellowjacket masters bound to the floor. The yellowjackets were utterly immobile. They could not even open their snouts. They were totally defenceless.

Without so much as a pause, the red-bellied superking lowered its head, opened its jaws and vomited forth a horizontal column of blazing liquid fire.

The superemperor did the same.

The twin streams of fire enveloped the yellowjacket masters and the two pinned-down beasts immediately caught fire.

They squealed and writhed in their bonds as their hides ignited. The chamber echoed with their cries as the two creatures were burned alive.

The crowd of spectating dragons erupted in roars of demented joy.

‘Oh, God,’ CJ breathed.

Behind her, Li stood with his mouth open.

Lucky whimpered softly at the sight of her own master dragons being killed so cruelly.

The two yellowjacket masters were now covered in flames. They tore at their bonds, twisting with all their might, but they were held fast to the floor. They could do nothing but burn, and burn they did.

The two red-bellied masters stepped along the line of captive superdragons and stopped in front of the next pair, the two grey masters. Another tongue of liquid fire enveloped these two.

They’re eliminating the competition, CJ thought. One pair at a time.

She stood. She didn’t have to watch this and, indeed, while the crowd of dragons was distracted by the grotesque spectacle, it might give her the opening she needed to get to the observation booth unnoticed.

‘Lucky, stay,’ she said. ‘Li, come with me.’

As the two grey masters writhed in flames, CJ and Li hurried toward the observation booth.

Moving low and fast, they scurried unseen across an exposed catwalk and clambered up some steel stairs, entering the booth.

No sooner were they inside it than the world outside lit up again and there were more roars and CJ peered out the booth’s viewing windows to see the next pair of masters—the purple ones—come alight. The yellowjacket masters now lay still, their corpses smoking.

Then the last pair of defenceless masters, the green river dragons, were set alight by more sprays of fire, and now the whole Nesting Centre really resembled Hell: squeals of pain, flaming bound creatures being tortured, roars of sneering delight from the crowd of dragons, all of it ruled over by the two merciless red master dragons.

‘We need to find the detonator unit,’ CJ said to Li as she began searching. ‘It’s in a safe somewhere in here.’

The booth looked like a mine office. It contained desks with computers and printers, plus cupboards and lockers. Several Taser units of different lengths and sizes dangled from hooks; the smallest ones were handheld, the biggest ones were the size of cattle-prods. Helmets hung off coat-hooks beside four thick industrial-yellow heat suits—they were made of a bulky fireproof material and had hoods with Lexan glass faceplates. Each looked like a cross between a HAZMAT suit and the blast suit that a bomb-disposal specialist wears.

CJ flung open the cupboards. Li did the same.

No dice.

There were a couple of offices adjoining the observation booth. CJ disappeared into one of them.

Inside it, she found a shelf on which sat a compact yellow remote identical to the one she had seen Yim holding during the trick show: it was one of the training units that could give a shock to any of the dragons. She grabbed it.

But still no safe.

She came to another office. It had a wide mahogany desk, nice carpet and an open window overlooking the main chamber. The office of a senior person like Colonel Bao. CJ could hear the roars and the whooshing of flames outside, frighteningly close.

Then she spotted it, under the mahogany desk.

A little safe.

It had a small battery-powered digital screen and a ten-digit keypad. Inside it—hopefully—was one of the red detonation units.

CJ crouched in front of it and punched in the code Ben Patrick had given her: 9199.

The safe beeped angrily: INCORRECT CODE ENTERED.

‘What?’ CJ frowned.

She punched in the code again.

INCORRECT CODE ENTERED.

CJ’s brow furrowed. Had she punched in the wrong code? Or had Patrick got it wrong? Or was this perhaps the wrong safe—

At that moment a different kind of scream from outside interrupted CJ’s thoughts.

The scream of a little girl.

CJ snapped up and looked out the window.

There on the floor of the main chamber, surrounded by the horde of snarling dragons, were four captive human beings: Director Chow, two of the senior Communist Party officials—still wearing their outdoorsman clothing—and the little girl named Minnie.

53

‘It’s a feeding ritual…’ CJ whispered as she stared out at the scene.

A gang of four princes pushed the human captives forward, toward the two master dragons.

It was indeed a feeding ritual, like the one CJ had witnessed earlier on the ring road, when the red-bellied black princes had offered the Chinese workmen to their king. These junior dragons were presenting their superiors with a food offering.

The two master dragons peered imperiously down at the four quivering people in front of them.

The superemperor lunged forward and took Director Chow in its mouth, and the zoo’s director disappeared in an instant, taken in one swallow.

The superking took more time. It lowered its head to examine the two Communist Party men and cocked it to the side. The two men shook with fear. The dragon grunted, then it snorted with its nostrils and both men were knocked to the ground by the rush of air.

They tried to get back to their feet but the superking just scooped them up in its jaws and gulped them down with a jerking movement of its chin.

And suddenly all that remained before the two dragons was the little girl, Minnie.

She stood before the pair of giant beasts, impossibly small, sobbing, still wearing her Disney mouse ears cap.

The crowd of dragons hissed and snarled. It was a child’s ultimate nightmare become real.

The superemperor lowered its mighty head. Minnie shook before its gigantic slavering jaws, quivering and crying.

It opened its jaws.

Strings of saliva extended from the upper fangs to the lower ones.

Then a stream of horizontal fire suddenly extended between the dragon and the girl, cutting across them, and the superemperor recoiled, startled.

Indeed, every dragon arrayed around the wide chamber reared in surprise as a human on the back of a yellowjacket prince appeared in the middle of the space and stood defiantly before the two red-bellied black masters.

CJ Cameron and Lucky.

CJ looked like a knight on a stallion, only instead of a lance she held a flamethrower, and instead of armour she wore an industrial-yellow heat suit with the hood flung back.

As soon as she’d seen Minnie, CJ had moved, abandoning her difficulties with the safe.

She wasn’t concerned for Director Chow or the Communist Party big shots. They had known the risks of this place when they’d come here.

But Minnie was different. She was innocent. She didn’t deserve to die this way: abandoned, alone and in total fear.

And so CJ had dashed out of the office, holding the yellow training remote and snatching a heat suit off a wall-hook.

She’d slid into it, then mounted Lucky and swooped down to the floor of the chamber and fired her flamethrower across the face of the superemperor.

Now, she sat astride Lucky, in front of the two enormous master dragons. The bulky heat suit made her look like the Michelin Man and with the hood flung back, her helmeted head was exposed.

The two master dragons glared down at her, their eyes furious.

CJ leapt off Lucky’s back and placed herself squarely between them and Minnie.

‘Get back!’ she yelled.

The masters growled.

The army of surrounding dragons began to hiss ominously… and slowly move in.

Maintaining eye contact with the superking, CJ loosed another spray from her flamethrower.

The masters arched back. CJ hoped they figured that any other fire-breathing animal was to be respected. The ring of dragons paused, wary of the flames.

She pushed Minnie toward Lucky.

‘Hi, Minnie,’ she said. ‘Get on.’

The little girl’s face was streaked with tears, but she nodded. She edged toward Lucky—

—when suddenly the superking raised its head to the heavens and sent a geyser of fire shooting up into the sky.

Then the big animal swung its head down so that it stared directly at CJ…

…and it opened its jaws…

…and CJ’s eyes boggled as she saw the dragon’s giant mouth yawn wide, saw its many teeth, its pink tongue and the depths of its throat—and rising from those depths, a surging ball of flames.

The next second, the dragon sent a horizontal pillar of fire spraying right at CJ and Minnie.

54

CJ flipped her hood over her helmet and pushed Minnie hard toward Lucky before she herself spun on the spot, turning her back to the dragon.

Superhot flames slammed into her, lashed around her. It was unbelievably hot, unbearably hot. The flames totally consumed her body.

Then the inferno stopped and in the smoke haze that followed it… CJ remained standing.

The master dragons reared back in surprise, stunned that CJ could possibly still be alive. Clearly, no animal had ever survived such a blast.

‘Still here, motherfuckers,’ CJ said.

As she said this, CJ saw the superking’s left thigh, saw the brand on it: R-02.

She quickly pulled the yellow training unit from her suit and punched its touchscreen display with a gloved hand: R-02 then SHOCK.

The superking immediately squealed in agony and clutched at its head, causing all the dragons ringing the confrontation to look at each other in confusion.

CJ dashed over to Minnie and threw her onto Lucky’s back. ‘We can’t stay here.’

No sooner was CJ in the saddle than Lucky sprang into the air—a nanosecond before a horizontal tongue of fire lanced out from the superking’s mouth and liquefied the floor where Lucky had been standing.

CJ didn’t care where Lucky went so long as it was somewhere else, but with dragons flanking them on every side, it turned out there was only one direction Lucky could go: down.

Lucky dived into the vertical tunnel and shot down it at rocket speed.

With Minnie seated between her thighs, CJ quickly clipped herself in. She also attached a clip to Minnie’s belt, but as she did so, she lost her grip on the training unit and it went tumbling away into the tunnel.

‘Shit!’ CJ reached after it, but it fell into the darkness, never to be seen again.

CJ spun in her saddle to see three red-bellied black princes sweep into the tunnel behind them in hot pursuit.

The two masters, she noted, didn’t follow.

The walls of the circular tunnel swept by at phenomenal speed. There were dim orange lights spaced along its length: ageing military-grade glow sticks.

At first the tunnel was dizzyingly vertical, then it bent at a forty-five-degree angle. CJ held on to Minnie while Lucky streamlined her body to get maximum speed.

CJ flung back the hood of her heat suit, revealing her commando helmet. She flicked on the flashlight mounted on its side.

Then, without warning, the walls of the tunnel simply disappeared and CJ found herself flying out in wide open space above a vast underground cavern.

Hundreds of glow sticks illuminated the cave in a faint orange glow. Mainly used by the military and by cave explorers, glow sticks were a clever choice of light source by the Chinese: powered by a mild chemical reaction, they required no external power or cabling and, importantly, they made no noise, so they would never have disturbed the dragon eggs. These glow sticks, however, were at the end of their chemical lives and many had gone out. The ones that still worked gave off a sickly orange glow.

The cavern itself was shaped like a gigantic funnel, wide at the top, narrow at the bottom. Sweeping down its flanks in a wide spiral was an irregular shelf-like path on which sat dozens and dozens of oversized leathery eggs. At the very base of the funnel CJ saw a small steaming pool of water, a natural spring of some sort that had kept the cavern moist for millennia.

The dragons’ original nest, CJ thought.

The eggs, she noticed even in her haste, were of different sizes: the larger ones, she assumed, were for the emperors and kings, the smaller ones for the princes.

All were hatched, open.

A small demountable booth had been erected at the top of the cavern beside the exit tunnel, but it looked long abandoned, covered in dust and dirt. Once all the dragons had hatched, it had lost its usefulness and, like the glow sticks, the Chinese must have simply left it here.

With three whooshes, the three pursuing red-bellied black princes sped into the cave. Two covered the exit tunnel, while the third hovered in the air and bellowed a roar of the utmost fury at CJ, Lucky and Minnie.

CJ recognised the dragon instantly.

It was Red Face.

‘Not you again,’ she said.

Lucky landed on the spiralling path on the side of the cave and said, ‘White Head… off…’

CJ hesitantly obeyed. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Lucky… fight… red princes… Lucky help White Head…’

Before CJ could protest, Lucky took to the air and, hovering in front of CJ and Minnie, she roared back at the red-bellied black princes, a terrifyingly fierce shriek that CJ had not thought her capable of.

The electronic voice in CJ’s ear said: ‘…Begin challenge…’

CJ stared at the scene in amazement: there was Lucky, hovering on one side of the cavern, while high up on the other side, guarding the exit tunnel, were the three red-bellied black princes, also hovering.

Red Face snarled at Lucky, then nodded at one of his companions and it flew forward.

It was another red-bellied black prince that CJ knew. She recognised its hideously melted snout. It was Melted Face. She had to hand it to the dragon: he was a survivor.

Melted Face shot down toward Lucky.

Lucky answered the roar and flew up at Melted Face.

The two dragons raced toward each other and CJ realised that she was seeing what Zhang had called a ‘joust’.

The two prince-sized dragons raced at each other at shocking speed and as they passed they lashed out with their claws.

There was a cry of pain—CJ couldn’t tell if it had come from Lucky or Melted Face—and then suddenly they were past each other and hovering again, ready for another pass.

They sped toward each other again, faster this time. Lucky streamlined her body, beat her wings. Melted Face flexed his claws.

And they clashed again… only this time Lucky rolled at the moment of impact… and again there was a shriek of pain… and once again they both kept on flying… only this time, Melted Face did not pull up into a hover. He just went careering into the opposite wall, smashing into it—lifeless, dead—before his body dropped down the length of the cavern and splashed into the little pool at its base.

CJ snapped round to look at Lucky.

Lucky held a ragged chunk of flesh in her right foreclaw. She had landed a killer blow on the second pass.

Red Face squealed and flew into a jousting position.

Lucky readied herself for battle again.

But then the third red-bellied black dragon took up a position beside Red Face.

CJ looked on in horror. It was two against one.

‘Lucky!’ she called.

The dragon turned.

‘White Head and Lucky fight!’ she yelled.

In answer, Lucky swooped around in a tight circle and allowed CJ to leap onto her back before resuming her face-off with the two red-bellies.

CJ felt her heart beating loudly in her head. She reached inside her heat suit and pulled out her MP-7. She couldn’t believe she was doing this.

She was partaking in a dragon joust…

The three dragons sprang forward, racing toward each other, two against one.

CJ had never felt Lucky accelerate so quickly. She saw the two red-bellied black princes speeding toward her across the massive cavern. They were going to pass by on either side of Lucky and double-team her.

Then she saw Lucky extend her left foreclaw—Red Face was coming at them from that side, so CJ levelled her gun at the dragon on the right. It wasn’t exactly a lance but in this aerial joust, it was the next best thing.

They all came together in a blur of claws and roars—Lucky shooting in between the two oncoming dragons—and CJ loosed a burst of fire from her MP-7, aiming as best she could at the right-hand dragon’s head.

She saw blood-spurts erupt from its snout, mouth and eyes—while on the other side, Lucky and Red Face extended their claws and slashed at each other and then—swoosh!—the two red-bellies rocketed past.

The right-hand dragon, hit in both eyes by CJ’s gunfire, crashed at full speed into the far wall in a starburst of rocks, breaking its neck with the impact.

Red Face squealed as he banked away and CJ saw a trail of blood dripping from his ribcage and he landed on an egg-shelf, whimpering and wounded. He cried to the heavens, a squeal of agony.

Lucky continued flying, wings beating powerfully—

—before she jerked unexpectedly, faltering, and lost speed.

Worried, CJ looked down to see that Lucky’s entire left flank was slicked with blood.

‘Oh, no…’ she gasped.

Lucky may have wounded Red Face, but Red Face had also landed a serious blow on her.

CJ tried to figure out what to do now.

Then it hit her: the infirmary in the Birthing Centre. If she could get Lucky there, maybe she could patch her up. But that would mean getting past all the dragons upstairs.

CJ rolled back the sleeve of her heat suit and looked at the battlefield display unit duct-taped to her left forearm, to check on the dragons up in the Nesting Centre.

What she saw surprised her:

The crowd of red crosses was no longer massing around the Nesting Centre. There were now only three red crosses at the Nesting Centre. CJ figured they represented Red Face and his two buddies.

The rest of the red-bellies were flying like a coordinated flock to the northeast, in the direction of the worker city.

Their plan was now clear to CJ: having freed their masters, they were heading for the first of the two sources of the outer electromagnetic dome, the worker city.

This was bad. This was very bad.

CJ turned back to Lucky.

‘Lucky hurt?’ she asked.

‘Yes…’

‘Lucky fly?’

‘Lucky… fly…’

CJ said, ‘If Lucky fly now, White Head help Lucky later…’

In response, the wounded yellowjacket beat its wings with extra strength.

CJ brought Lucky around to where they had left Minnie and scooped her up. Then as Red Face remained on the egg-path licking his wounds, they flew over to the exit tunnel and swooped up into it, heading back to the surface.

After a short time, the mouth of the tunnel came into view.

CJ slowed Lucky. She was cautious even though the BDU said there were few or no dragons still here.

Rising to the rim of the tunnel, CJ peered out.

The Nesting Centre was deserted.

Apart from the smouldering remains of the eight dead master dragons, their wretched charred corpses still fastened to the floor, there was not a single dragon to be seen.

A shout made CJ turn and she saw Li running from the stairs near the observation booth.

CJ landed Lucky on the floor near him.

‘They all took off as soon as you flew down into the nest!’ Li said.

CJ gazed off into the distance. ‘They freed their masters and now they’re going after the outer dome. They’re heading for the emplacements at the worker city.’

Lucky groaned painfully and CJ looked back at her, concerned. She saw the wound on Lucky’s side: a gaping bloody gash.

‘We have to stop them bringing down the outer dome,’ she said to Li as she dismounted. ‘But first I have to mend this brave dragon. Come on.’

55

In the café at the base of the curving waterfall, Hamish Cameron stood. ‘We’re no good to anyone just sitting around here. We’ve got to find a radio and get in touch with CJ.’

‘If she’s still alive,’ Seymour Wolfe said sourly.

‘My sister’s a tough nut, Mr Wolfe,’ Hamish said, ‘and surprisingly hard to kill. Ask the bull alligator that tried.’

‘We also have to be out of this valley by the time the Chinese regain control of it,’ Ambassador Syme said. ‘If we’re not, they’ll just hunt us down and kill us.’

Hamish peered out through the window beside him, gazing westward across the lake. The rain had diminished to a light drizzle and the lake’s surface was eerily calm. Hamish saw the ruins of the administration building beyond the castle on the opposite shore.

‘There was an exit in that waste management facility,’ he said, thinking aloud. ‘That’s our way out. We cross this lake and make for the waste management facility.’

‘And how exactly do we cross this lake?’ Wolfe asked.

Hamish nodded at one of the six wide-beamed, glass-roofed boats tied to the dock near the café. ‘On one of those.’

‘Won’t that make us an instant target for any dragon that’s watching?’ Wolfe said.

Hamish said, ‘It will. But I have a plan for that. Let’s move.’

Five minutes later, the three of them dashed out of the café, running across the dock toward the six parked boats.

No dragons pounced.

Each man powered up two boats, untied them and set them off from their moorings. Then they all jumped aboard the last boat and sped away from the dock.

The six boats fanned out from the café, heading onto the lake in a star-like pattern.

Still no dragons attacked.

From the controls of his boat, Hamish scanned the dark sky. It was entirely empty of dragons.

The boat they’d jumped on was specially designed for sightseeing cruises. Not only did it have a broad glass-domed roof to allow for easy viewing of the dragons, it also, he now saw, had a glass bottom. Running up the middle of the boat’s hull was a long glass trough about eight feet deep. It had curved glass walls and clear plastic seats on which visitors could sit and look out at the underwater world of the lake.

Right now, in the deep of the night, that world was inky black.

Hamish kept looking up at the sky. ‘Where have they all gone?’

‘Maybe they got out?’ Syme asked.

‘Fine with me,’ Hamish said. ‘If they’re not here, it’ll give us a clear run across this lake.’

As he said this, one of the five other boats puttering along beside theirs suddenly cracked in the middle, folded into a V-shape, and was violently pulled under the surface by some unseen force. It shattered, spraying glass, before disappearing into the lake.

‘Shit!’ Syme yelled.

Hamish’s face went pale. ‘They’re not above us, they’re below us.’

He searched his control panel for a switch, found the one he was looking for—UNDERWATER FLOODLIGHTS—and hit it.

Instantly, the eerie underwater world outside the boat’s glass hull came alive and Hamish saw the enormous head of a green-skinned emperor dragon not far away, gripping the boat that had just been yanked under the surface and looking back at Hamish like a child who has been spotted with a stolen candy bar.

It was crouched on the bottom of the lake, wings flat on its back, tail curled. A king-sized green dragon lay beside it—also looking right at Hamish’s lights—while three green princes slithered through the underwater haze like oversized lizards, their four walking limbs hanging beside their bodies while their tails propelled them powerfully through the water.

Then the emperor moved.

It opened its jaws and Hamish saw two rows of terrifying teeth, and then the animal heaved upward, pushing off the lakebed, and Hamish’s stomach lurched sickeningly as the surge of water created by the beast’s movement lifted his boat high into the air.

The massive green emperor dragon rose out of the lake in all its terrifying glory.

Framed by the beautiful curving waterfall behind it, the colossal creature rose to its full height, standing two hundred feet tall and spreading its wings. As it did this, it sent a huge wave of water flowing outward from its body, a wave that pushed Hamish’s boat—infinitesimally small compared to the mighty dragon—away from the animal, toward the ruined castle on the western shore.

Hamish held on tight as the boat sped away from the dragon like a surfer on a wave. The dragon, unaware that it had aided their escape with its sudden movement, spun where it stood, snatched up the nearest decoy boat in one of its foreclaws and crushed the entire boat in an instant.

It roared as it flung the boat away.

Then the rest of the pack of green dragons—river dragons, Hamish guessed—started attacking the other boats. Princes boarded them. Kings smashed them. The emperor rampaged among them, standing waist-deep in the lake.

Hamish’s boat powered westward and as the force of the wave behind it diminished, Hamish turned off the underwater floodlights and hit the gas.

The shore was only fifty metres away.

‘Faster! Faster!’ Wolfe urged.

Hamish was peering forward when one of the decoy boats landed with a splash right in front of his boat, missing the bow by metres, thrown by the furious emperor.

He banked around it.

‘Faster, man!’ Wolfe yelled.

‘We’re going as fast as we can!’ Hamish said. ‘This thing isn’t built for speed!’

They were twenty metres from the shore when the boat simply stopped moving. Hamish pushed the throttle all the way forward. The boat revved loudly, but it didn’t respond.

‘Why aren’t we—?’ Syme shouted, turning.

He cut himself off when he saw the answer: the emperor stood behind them, gripping their stern.

‘Jump!’ Hamish yelled, pushing open one of the forward windows and diving out through it.

Syme and Wolfe did the same and they all leapt clear as the boat was pulled wholly out of the water. They landed with matching splashes as the emperor lifted the boat seventy feet into the air and shook it like a broken toy. It peered inside it, looking for them.

Hamish swam for the shore. So did Syme.

Wolfe swam for a jetty off to their right. He arrived at it, reached up and began hauling himself onto its wooden slats when something grabbed his leg and wrenched him downward. Wolfe was pulled so forcefully, his head smacked against the edge of the jetty.

Hamish saw Wolfe’s neck snap as his head struck the jetty, the blow killing him instantly. It was a horrible way to die, but still better than being eaten alive by a dragon.

Hamish swam harder. He wasn’t ashore yet.

With every stroke, he waited for the talons of a dragon to clasp around one of his legs and yank him backwards, but then he hit the shore, scrambled to his feet and ran for the treeline beside the ruined castle. Syme also made it and joined him in the trees.

They both looked back as a prince-sized green river dragon threw Wolfe’s lifeless body onto the jetty and began eating it with foul bone-cracking bites.

Beyond that grisly image, the huge green emperor sank back into the lake, slowly sliding under the surface until all that remained were a few sets of ripples. Not one of the six boats they had launched from the café could be seen.

Every one of them had been destroyed.

56

CJ led Lucky, Li and Minnie through the tunnel that connected the Nesting Centre to the Birthing Centre.

They emerged inside the Birthing Centre to find it empty—except of course for the crocs down in the pit and the olive swamp dragon. Having finished eating the red-bellied black prince it’d killed earlier, it had wrenched open one of the cages and was now halfway through devouring a crocodile.

A digital clock on the wall read 3:30 a.m.

Is it that late? CJ thought. She felt desperately tired but pure adrenalin was keeping her going.

She found a medical examination room. It had a stainless steel exam table with gutters and a drain plus a few carts filled with surgical equipment. It reminded CJ of her veterinary clinic back at the San Francisco Zoo, only it was bigger in every respect, dragon-sized.

She got Lucky to lie down on the exam table, left side up. In the light of her helmet flashlight’s beam, she peered at the wound on the dragon’s torso.

It looked terrible: it was a hideous slash, ragged at the edges, at least two feet long. Blood and pus oozed over exposed flesh.

CJ threw on a pair of rubber gloves and some anti-spray goggles and then grabbed a suture kit from one of the supply carts. She set about cleaning the wound. Li found a flashlight in a nearby cupboard, switched it on and held it over CJ’s shoulder, providing more much-needed light.

Minnie watched. ‘Are you a doctor?’

‘I’m an animal doctor, yes,’ CJ said as she found an ampoule of local anaesthetic in one of the cupboards and injected it near the gaping wound.

She frowned. She had to close the wound. But the gash was so wide and Lucky’s hide so thick, simple stitches wouldn’t be strong enough: she would have to use staples.

Which would hurt, despite the anaesthetic.

‘Lucky. White Head sorry… big big pain…’ she said before, shwack, she punched in the first staple.

Lucky howled.

Twenty-four staples later, the wound was secure and Lucky lay with her head pressed on its side against the steel table, panting, exhausted.

CJ stroked the dragon’s brow. Lucky looked up at her plaintively.

‘This’ll make you feel a little better.’ CJ gave her a jab of Xylazine, a muscle relaxant, and the dragon sighed and visibly relaxed.

CJ ran her fingers over the small box attached to the left side of Lucky’s skull. She gazed at the wires that ran from it into her brain.

It got her thinking.

Lucky’s implant was special. It allowed for communication between her and humans.

But like all the other dragons, when she’d been an infant, Lucky would have had the other standard chip inserted into her brain, the one that sent an electric charge into the pain centre when she touched the domes and which also contained a small wad of plastic explosive. CJ recalled the x-ray images of a dragon skull she had seen during the tour, showing the chip behind the dragon’s left eye.

She leaned close to Lucky’s side-turned head, peered at her left eye.

Lucky’s eye was the size of a softball, a huge aqueous orb with a splotchy iris and a slit pupil.

CJ’s gaze moved from the dragon’s eye to its yellow-and-black skull. With her spiky crest and osteoderms, Lucky’s head was heavily armoured even before you got to the skull. Getting a chip inside it would’ve been difficult.

‘Unless they went through the eye socket…’ CJ said aloud.

She snatched up another ampoule of local anaesthetic and jabbed it near Lucky’s eyebrow. Then she grabbed a pair of scissor-like reverse-pincers and a curved silver surgical instrument.

Lucky saw it and grunted in panic. ‘White Head… hurt Lucky?’

‘White Head like Lucky. White Head help Lucky. Lucky trust White Head,’ she said.

The dragon didn’t reply. CJ wasn’t sure the word ‘trust’ was in its vocabulary. But Lucky did relax, gruffly exhaling as she tilted her head slightly lower, allowing CJ to work.

Trusting her.

CJ used the pincers to hold open Lucky’s eyelid, before she reached in with the curved instrument and…

…gently popped Lucky’s eyeball out of its socket!

Li gasped.

Minnie clutched her mouth to stop herself from throwing up.

The eyeball dangled from the optic nerve, still connected. CJ laid the huge eyeball carefully on Lucky’s snout and not even noticing the indescribable grossness of what she had just done, grabbed a penlight and peered in through the exposed eye socket into Lucky’s skull.

‘There you are…’ she said.

She could see it on the front of Lucky’s brain, directly behind the eye socket: a small metal chip the size of a quarter. It looked like a spider, with eight wires stretching out from it, latching onto the brain.

Beyond that, it was quite crude. It had some circuitry on it plus a tiny silver cylinder that CJ guessed was the plastic explosive.

CJ grabbed a pair of long-armed surgical scissors.

‘Stay still,’ she said to Lucky as, leading with the scissors, she reached inside the dragon’s eye socket.

Her hand fitted easily, the socket was so wide, and with a few deft snips, she cut the eight wires. Then she reached in with some forceps and, looking more like a bomb defuser than a vet, ever-so-gently removed the chip.

It came out of the eye socket.

CJ placed it gently on a bench top on the far side of the examination room.

Then she returned to Lucky’s side and carefully reinserted the dragon’s eyeball, manoeuvring the optic nerve gently back into the skull first. The huge eyeball slotted back into place, rolling around in the socket before Lucky blinked a few times and it was back in place.

‘You, my yellow friend,’ CJ said, ‘are no longer susceptible to any electromagnetic domes. Nor can those Chinese bastards blow your head off anymore.’

Lucky just exhaled loudly, braying like a weary horse.

As she removed her rubber gloves, CJ turned to Li. ‘Now. Li. I need a lesson in main power lines.’

While Lucky recovered in the infirmary, CJ and Li sat down in a nearby office.

It was 4:15 a.m.

Working by the light of their two flashlights, Li grabbed a sheet of paper and drew a quick sketch of the zoo and its surrounds… to which he added some prominent dotted lines.

‘Here is the zoo,’ he said in Mandarin, ‘with the military airfield at the bottom left and the worker city at the top right. The two dotted lines entering the map from the corners are the main power lines.’

‘Got it,’ CJ said, also in Mandarin. ‘What I want to know is: if the dragons cut a main power cable, can it be repaired?’

Li said, ‘In theory, yes, if you have some replacement high-voltage cable and an insulation-repair kit. You see, it’s not really the cable that is difficult to fix, it’s the insulation layer around it.’

‘How so?’ CJ asked.

‘Main power cables are not regular cables; you don’t just solder them back together. They’re heavy-gauge HVDC—high-voltage direct-current—cables with a thick insulating layer of cross-linked polyethylene. Because of the voltage flowing through them, they get very hot, which is why you need an insulation layer around them.

‘It’s the insulation layer that must be repaired correctly, without any air pockets or impurities. That’s why you need the insulation-repair kit: it lays down a new insulation layer around the HVDC cable without any imperfections. If you don’t get that right, you get no power.’

‘Do you guys keep any high-voltage cable and insulation-repair kits here at the zoo?’

‘Not inside the zoo, no,’ Li said. ‘As you can imagine, cuts in the main are rare, almost unheard of. But we have fully-equipped cable repair trucks at both outer power junctions, at the worker city and at the airfield. Those trucks have spools of HVDC cable and insulation-repair kits.’

‘Okay, right.’ CJ thought for a moment. ‘Damn it, I need more people…’

As if on cue, there came a crackling sound from a nearby battery-operated CB radio, hanging from a hook.

‘Chipmunk, this is Bear. Do you read me? This is the 20 at 20 call. I tried at 3:20 but got no answer. Do you copy?’

It was Hamish.

57

CJ snatched up the radio. ‘Bear, I’m here!’

The voice at the other end lit up. ‘Chipmunk! You’re alive!’

‘Only just. Where are you?’

‘I’m in the waste management facility. Syme is still with me but we lost Wolfe. We had a couple of close calls and our escapes weren’t exactly works of art, but you know what Dad used to say, you’ve got to fail a few times before you succeed.’

CJ blinked suddenly at his words.

‘You’ve got to fail before you succeed…’ she said absently.

An idea began to form in her mind.

She snapped out of it. ‘You called at just the right time, Bear. The dragons are about to bring down the outer dome and we have to stop them.’

‘How about we just leave this clusterfuck of a zoo to the punks who built it and get the hell out of here? I don’t particularly like the idea of saving their asses while they’re trying to kill me.’

‘There’s another nest, Hamish. A bigger one,’ CJ said.

There was silence at the other end of the line.

CJ added, ‘The Chinese only found a small nest. If the dragons get out, they’ll go and wake the other nest and then there’ll be a whole lot more dragons. The entire populations of any towns or cities near here will be slaughtered. Then the dragons will fly away and open more nests and it’ll be an exponential expansion, a plague of dragons. We can’t let that happen.’

Over in the waste management facility, Hamish swallowed hard.

‘Okay. What do you need me to do?’ he said.

‘Can you get to the military airfield?’

Hamish was standing near the huge barred external gates of the waste management facility. Through them he could see the many lights of the military airfield a few miles away across a flat plain.

He turned back to face the waste management hall, searching for a vehicle he could use… and he found one.

‘I think we can do that, yes,’ he said with a grin.

‘I need you to get to that airfield and protect the emplacements there. There’ll be about fifteen of them and apparently they look like concrete pillboxes. You won’t be able to hold the dragons out forever, but I need you to hold that dome up for as long as you can.’

‘What about you? What are you doing?’

‘I’m going to the worker city,’ CJ said. ‘Oh, and Hamish?’

‘Yeah?’

‘There are two new dragons and they, well, breathe fire,’ CJ said.

‘Of course they do,’ Hamish said wryly. ‘CJ, how do you know about this bigger nest and all that?’

‘I’ve been talking to a dragon,’ CJ said simply. ‘Gotta fly now. Out.’

CJ clicked off, thinking. ‘Sometimes you have to fail before you succeed…’ she said.

She pursed her lips in thought. Then she turned to Li. ‘You,’ she said.

‘Me?’

‘I need you and one of those cable repair trucks. And I need you to come with me to the worker city. You up for it?’

Li thought for a moment. ‘You really think the dragons will grow in number if they get out of here? That they will open other nests?’

‘Yes,’ CJ said. ‘And then the dragons they release will open more nests. The numbers will get very big, very fast.’

Li nodded. ‘Then I will come with you to the worker city.’

CJ turned to Minnie. ‘As for you, little one, we have to keep you out of harm’s way till this is over.’ She took the little girl’s hand and led her to a barred cage in the corner. ‘You’ll be safe here. Just do not leave this cell until I come back to get you, okay?’

‘Yes, CJ,’ Minnie said.

CJ grabbed another flashlight, some food and some water from a nearby office and gave it to Minnie before she closed the barred door over her face.

Then CJ returned to Lucky in the exam room.

The dragon was standing now, testing the staples and stretching its wings. When expanded, the great leathery things almost filled the room.

‘Lucky good?’ CJ asked.

Lucky mewed. ‘Lucky strong… White Head good human…’

‘Lucky… fight?’

The dragon turned to face CJ, a look of steely determination on her expressive face. ‘Lucky… White Head… fight.’