The Great Zoo of China

58

Lucky soared high above the rectangular valley that contained the Great Dragon Zoo of China with CJ and Li on her back. It was almost five in the morning—an hour till dawn—and deprived of any kind of electrical power, the zoo was now just a shadowy collection of blackened landforms and buildings. The rain had stopped and the storm clouds had passed, leaving a beautiful star-filled sky and a glorious full moon above it all.

After about ten minutes of flying, CJ spotted a cluster of man-made structures a few miles beyond the northeastern corner of the zoo.

The worker city.

Seen from the air, it appeared to jut up from the plain: a few blocks of apartment buildings and office towers, warehouses and parks, and, snaking its way through them, a winding river. A couple of bridges spanned the river.

It was, to CJ, yet another example of China’s amazing ability to simply build whatever it needed. The Chinese needed a miniature city here, so they’d just built one.

Several buildings were still under construction. Hammerhead cranes towered above them while the exposed levels of unfinished towers lay open to the elements.

There was only one problem.

The city was on fire.

Fires blazed all over it: from the upper storeys of buildings, to the shops at street level and overturned cars and buses.

The master dragons had been through here.

Unlike the zoo, the worker city still had power thanks to its external main power line. Amid the many fires, building lights glimmered and the streetlights were on.

Staying high, CJ peered into the urban chasms.

It was strange to see city streets so deserted and empty. Car alarms wailed, calling for owners who would never return. There were no people in sight.

The worker city was now a ghost city.

And then she saw the first dragon.

A huge grey emperor lumbered up onto the tallest building of the worker city and perched itself on the summit. There in the orange firelight, it raised its snout to the heavens and roared.

Twenty other grey dragons—kings and princes—swarmed up the other buildings, clambering up their sides, and joined their emperor roaring into the night.

‘Grey dragons smell Lucky… smell White Head… ’ Lucky’s electronic voice said in CJ’s ear. ‘Grey dragons… mean dragons…’

‘They’re warning us off, but also…’ CJ cut herself off.

They were not all looking in CJ’s direction. Some of the greys were facing away from her, looking to the northeast.

CJ listened more closely, and with her trained ears, she detected something extra in their bellowing. There was a plaintive tone to it, a kind of keening. The keening of a dragon population that had laid claim to a territory… only to be pushed out by a bigger fish.

At that moment, two sudden flares of flame caught CJ’s eye off to the right, at the extreme northern edge of the ghost city: two billowing extensions of fire that lit up the night.

Her gaze fell on an industrial complex over that way: it looked like a power substation, with a transformer farm and high steel fences. On its outer side, it was ringed by a curving arc of fifteen evenly spaced black concrete emplacements that looked like a miniature Maginot Line.

The small army of red-bellied black dragons from the Nesting Centre—their red-and-black bodies were clearly discernible in the firelight—was gathered just beyond the power station. There were perhaps forty of them and they were led by their two masters, the superking and the superemperor.

The two bursts of fire that CJ had seen had been fire-blasts from the two master dragons.

They were blowing fire at the concrete emplacements, in particular, the very middle one.

‘No wonder the grey dragons are upset,’ CJ said. ‘The red-bellies barged into their city and took over.’

Soaring high above the scene, careful to avoid being spotted by the two packs of dragons, CJ peered at the emplacements: the laser-emitting base stations that supported the outer dome.

Illuminated by the fires and the ghostly streetlights, they did indeed look like wartime pillboxes, solid, low and sturdy.

CJ flipped down her helmet’s visor—stuck to which were her oversized UV glasses—and beheld the dazzling red grid of the outer electromagnetic dome. It slanted into the sky from the fifteen emplacements.

She flipped up the visor and looked more closely at the middle emplacement that was the object of the red-bellies’ assault.

Alone among the fifteen emplacements, it was accessed by a service road coming in from the north. That road ran alongside a ditch in which she could see a reinforced concrete pipe: the high-voltage main power cable.

The dragons were going directly for the source of the dome’s power.

‘Li!’ she called above the wind. ‘Where is the cable repair truck kept?’

Gripping CJ’s waist, Li replied, ‘In a loading shed inside that substation! What are you planning to do?’

‘Right now, nothing,’ CJ said.

‘Nothing? I don’t understand,’ Li said.

‘What I mean,’ CJ said, ‘is that in order for us to succeed in this battle, we first need to fail.’

CJ brought Lucky into a landing on a small hill overlooking the emplacements and from there, she, Lucky and Li watched the red-bellied black dragons assault the middle one.

The dragons worked together with almost frightening efficiency.

The masters blew acid-fire at the emplacement—or more precisely, at the soil under it, liquefying the soil. Then some king dragons stepped in and raked out the melted soil with their huge claws. Princes positioned behind them cleared that soil even further. Then the masters would return and blow more fire, creating more melted soil, which would then be cleared away again. It was a digging operation.

The dragons had got a good head-start. They had already created a substantial hole in front of the middle emplacement. It must have been four storeys, or forty feet, deep.

After a little more digging, the emplacement’s foundations were exposed: a thick wall of grey concrete. The master dragons turned their fire on the foundations.

The two masters blew matching tongues of fire at the concrete foundations, softening them, before four red-bellied emperors did their part by flying in and flinging some buses and trucks right at the exposed foundations.

The vehicles slammed into the concrete foundations, chipping away at them, cracking them.

Then the masters blew more fire and the circuit continued until, on the fourth go-around, with a screech of rending rebars and the crunch of cracking concrete, the foundations of the middle emplacement could resist no more.

They crumpled.

And like a slow-falling tree, the emplacement toppled into the huge hole the dragons had created in front of it, tearing itself free of its power source.

Sparks flew. Electricity flared.

And where the middle emplacement had been there was now a huge void with a thick high-voltage cable and some other minor wires sticking out from it.

The damage was done.

CJ flipped down her special glasses.

The dome was still there, only now it was not nearly as dazzling as it had been earlier. Now it was only half as bright as it had appeared before, since it was now only being emitted by the emplacements over at the airfield.

The two masters squealed in triumph and immediately took to the air.

They swept away to the southwest. Their army of red-bellied black dragons launched into the sky after them, heading in the direction of the airfield on the far side of the zoo: now the only thing standing between them and freedom.

From her vantage point on the hill, CJ watched them fly off.

She pulled out her radio. ‘Bear, this is Chipmunk. The dragons are coming to you. I need you to hold them out for as long as you can.’

‘Copy that, Chipmunk,’ Hamish’s voice replied. ‘We’re almost at the airfield.’

‘Try to stay alive, little brother.’ CJ clicked off and turned to Li. ‘Okay. Time for us to go in.’

They leapt onto Lucky’s back and zoomed down toward the worker city.

59

Hamish Cameron was driving like a maniac down the road that connected the waste management facility to the military airfield, at the wheel of an absolute beast of a vehicle.

Amid all the wreckage and debris inside the waste management facility, one truck had remained largely unscathed by the mayhem that had occurred there.

A fire truck.

It was one of the two superlong ladder trucks that had been parked in the cavernous hall when Hamish had first arrived there.

Now, driven by Hamish with Kirk Syme beside him, the huge semitrailer-sized rig thundered across the plain between the zoo’s crater and the airfield. The extendable ladder on its roof bounced with every bump as the big truck boomed through the night.

The airfield loomed before it.

It was lit up like a Christmas tree: eighty floodlights blazed with white artificial light, illuminating cargo planes and fighter jets, storage hangars, an air traffic control tower, some support buildings and…

…about thirty Chinese Army jeeps and trucks arrayed in a defensive line in front of the airfield, with over a hundred Chinese soldiers manning them, their rifles and RPGs pointed at the very road Hamish was now racing along. There were even four Type-99 tanks in the defensive line.

‘What are we driving into?’ Syme breathed.

Hamish leaned out his window and looked up into the night sky behind him.

A swarm of black shadows, perhaps forty of them, blotted out the stars, dark aerial wraiths.

It was the flock of red-bellied black dragons and they were coming for the airfield.

‘I’ll tell you what we’re driving into,’ Hamish said. ‘The last stand.’

With booming thruster-blasts, four small Chinese fighters took off from the airfield, screaming into the sky, shooting out over the plain toward the incoming dragons.

They opened fire, sending tracer rounds lancing into the dragon pack.

Three dragons dropped instantly, squealing. The rest of the pack scattered and the fighters shot through their midst.

But then a few dragons, led by the superking, banked and gave chase and suddenly it was fighter jets versus dragons—while the rest of the dragon force, thirty-plus dragons led by the superemperor, descended upon the airfield.

Hamish looked up at the incoming swarm of dragons. With their huge bat-like silhouettes, they looked positively fearsome.

But then he spotted something else about them, something odd.

All of the larger dragons—the kings and the emperors—were carrying objects in their claws.

Hamish squinted to see what the objects were and when he finally saw them, he gasped, ‘Oh, this is gonna be messy.’

In their claws, the king dragons were holding Great Dragon Zoo cars and vans. The emperors, however, were carrying much larger objects: garbage trucks, whole pieces of the revolving restaurant, a section of the concrete ring road; one emperor even carried the smashed remains of the control tower that had once stood atop the administration building.

The dragons swooped over Hamish’s fire truck—still half a mile from the airfield—and the battle began.

The Chinese launched their defensive measures.

RPGs shot into the sky. Gunfire rang out. The massive 125mm cannons on the four tanks boomed as they launched fragmentation rounds at the incoming creatures.

In the face of this fire, the dragons squealed, roared, wheeled and exploded. But they kept on coming.

Five dragons fell while the rest blasted through the wave of fire and, flying fast and low, the big ones released their improvised bombs.

Suddenly it was raining cars, vans and garbage trucks. They sailed down out of the sky and slammed into the ranks of Chinese military vehicles, crushing soldiers in an instant, bowling their vehicles over. The heavier garbage trucks caused the most damage. They were simply lethal.

Then came the larger objects.

The piece of the revolving restaurant’s roof flattened a troop truck as it landed. The section of the ring road hit the ground with a colossal boom and tumble-rolled over two tanks and three troop trucks, crushing all of them. The control tower slammed into a hangar and took down all four of its walls before the roof caved in and the whole thing was levelled.

And then, having expended their aerial weapons, the dragons themselves entered the battle zone…

…and what followed was a bloodbath.

The lead superemperor landed on a tank, crushing it with its talons before the great beast let loose with a tremendous tongue of fire that incinerated three Chinese jeeps and two troop trucks.

Chinese soldiers fell to the ground, their skin melting before their eyes.

King dragons grabbed jeeps and hurled them away. Emperors picked up the tanks and flung them down the runway, tumbling end over end.

Up in the sky, the fighter jets returned, guns blazing, only this time three dragons—the superking, one emperor and one regular king—came streaking out of the air from the side, their bodies elongated, their wings pinned back.

They flew at phenomenal speed and on a perfect intercepting course.

As the three big dragons intersected with the fighters, the superking spewed fire at two of them, lashing their cockpits, melting the pilots in an instant. The two fighters exploded in mid-air.

The emperor lashed out with a claw and tore another fighter’s right wing clear off and that fighter went screaming into the ground, crashing at full speed in a billowing explosion.

The regular king simply collided with the last fighter and latched itself onto it, and to the pilot’s horror, the fighter lost all its aerodynamics and began spiralling toward the ground. A hundred feet off the ground, the king released it and the fighter crashed into the side of the zoo’s crater while the dragon just flew off, rejoining the other two as they headed for the battle at the airfield.

Watching all of this from the safety of a bunker just outside the electromagnetic dome were Hu Tang and Colonel Bao. They had arrived there by car only fifteen minutes earlier.

Their reinforced concrete bunker—a superstrong double-storey command post—sat just behind the line of fifteen emplacements that emitted the dome.

There was movement everywhere in the bunker: technicians at consoles, soldiers on radios, officers peering through binoculars at the disaster unfolding outside. Monitors and plasma screens showed various views of the dragons’ onslaught.

A technician turned to Bao. ‘Colonel! Telemetry is confirmed: the outer electromagnetic dome is operating at half-strength. The dragons somehow disabled the emplacements at the worker city. If they knock out the emplacements on this side, the outer dome will fall.’

Hu Tang stared incredulously at the scene in front of him. He hadn’t thought this could get any worse, but it had.

He turned to Bao, panicked. ‘Did you hear that? They disabled the emplacements on the other side! Do something!’

‘Be quiet, sir,’ Bao said calmly. ‘We still have options.’ He turned to an officer behind him. ‘Major. Prepare the thermobaric bombs: airfield, worker city and at the Halfway Hut.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Hu Tang’s eyes went wide. ‘You’re going to destroy everything?’

Bao turned to face him, his eyes hard. ‘We have kept other eggs elsewhere, Minister. We have all the elements required to build another dragon zoo. What we cannot rebuild is our nation’s reputation.’

‘Will we be safe?’ Hu asked.

‘Of course we’ll be safe, you fool,’ Bao growled. ‘This command bunker stretches ten storeys below ground. It’s strong enough to withstand a thermobaric blast on its doorstep while everything outside it will suffocate in the ensuing vacuum. Minister, hear me well: the moment those dragons bring down that outer dome, I will detonate all three thermobaric devices and destroy every living thing in and around this zoo.’

60

The Chinese military airfield was crumbling under the dragons’ attack. It was mayhem, pandemonium; a maelstrom of fire, explosions, carnage and death.

And it was into this that Hamish Cameron drove his ladder truck.

Hamish gripped the wide steering wheel with white knuckles. Syme sat by his side holding a pistol he’d found in the waste management facility. Given the circumstances, it seemed pretty puny and useless but he clutched it grimly anyway.

The entire airstrip in front of them was bathed in fire. The charred remains of Chinese Army vehicles lay alongside sections of the revolving restaurant’s roof, the concrete ring road and the smashed control tower. All the Chinese jeeps, trucks and tanks were either overturned or smashed.

In the flickering orange light of the many infernos, the dragons looked like monsters from the underworld: with their fierce red bellies, black skeletal hides, slavering jaws and howling cries, they were the embodiment of the word terrifying.

‘Feels like we’re driving into Mordor,’ Hamish muttered.

‘What’s Mordor?’ Syme asked.

‘Never mind.’

Hamish floored it.

The big red truck reached the edge of the runway and banked wildly as it sped around a crushed tank and, with its immense weight, smashed right through the remains of a burning troop truck.

Hamish pointed forward. ‘They’re going for the emplacements supporting the dome!’

Indeed they were. Having dealt with the defensive human force, the dragons were gathering at the line of emplacements behind the airstrip and its hangars.

Hamish saw the flare of the superking’s fire-breath.

‘Whoa, baby!’ he exclaimed. ‘Here, take the wheel!’ he called to Syme.

The US Ambassador slid into the driver’s seat as Hamish kicked open the door and leaned out.

‘Where are you going?!’ Syme yelled above the inrushing wind.

‘CJ told me to hold off those dragons for as long as I could, so that’s what I’m going to do,’ Hamish said. ‘I’ll be on the back. Get us to those emplacements, Mr Syme!’

With those words, Hamish swept out of the truck’s cabin, slamming the door shut behind him.

The fire truck wended its way through the fiery airfield. It sped past the wreckage of troop trucks, jeeps and cargo planes.

As the long-bodied truck swept through the battlefield, the small figure of Hamish Cameron could be seen on its back, slowly making his way along its length before he arrived at the hose station at the very rear of the superlong truck.

The hose station looked like a gun turret: an open-air revolving cannon, only instead of firing bullets, this cannon fired water.

Hamish dropped into the revolving chair of the hose station, found a switch marked INITIATE PUMP and looked up just as two prince-sized red-bellies landed on his truck right in front of him and roared angrily.

Hamish swung the water cannon around and jammed down on the trigger and a powerful column of compressed water came blasting forth, slamming into both dragons, knocking them off the fire truck!

‘Take that, you reptile motherfuckers!’ Hamish yelled.

But then, with a great whump, an emperor dragon landed right in the path of the fire truck.

In the driver’s cabin, Syme yanked on the steering wheel and the truck swung right, disappearing inside a hangar.

The fire truck whipped past the shattered remains of a couple of planes and Syme ducked as the truck blasted through the rear wall of the hangar.

Syme raised his head again to see the line of emplacements now right in front of him.

‘Not exactly the route I meant to take, but we got here,’ he said to himself.

The dragons were already there.

The two masters were blowing fire at the ground in front of the middle emplacement while other dragons dug.

Syme saw them and had an idea. He searched the switches on the console above him and found the one he was looking for.

The fire truck’s lights lit up the area with strobing red rays while its siren wailed.

Blaring away with light and sound, the fire truck swept in among the gathered dragons and they all turned, surprised at the arrival of this loud, large beast.

The truck swept in front of the superemperor just as the huge animal reared back, readying itself to blow liquid fire—at the exact instant that Hamish appeared in front of it and let fly with a blast from his water cannon!

The superemperor’s fire was extinguished in its throat. It whimpered, confused, as Hamish brought his cannon around and blasted the superking in the face as well.

Then Syme was speeding away again and at a squeal from the masters, the red-bellied black princes leapt into the air and chased the troublesome fire truck.

61

While Hamish was racing around the airfield in his fire engine, CJ was speeding along in a different kind of truck.

After seeing the pack of red-bellied black dragons disable the emplacements on the perimeter of the worker city and then depart, she, Lucky and Li had flown down from their vantage point on the hill.

They headed straight for the electricity substation just inside the arc of emplacements.

The substation was deserted, its walls streaked with blood.

Lucky landed in front of a large warehouse and CJ and Li dismounted. Li threw open a sliding door to reveal several electrical repair trucks parked inside.

He went straight to the largest of them, an oversized white truck. This vehicle had a regular cabin but a specialised rear section which was filled with electrical spare parts.

‘This is the worker city’s main cable repair truck,’ Li said. He threw open one of its compartments to reveal a spool of thick copper cable, black insulation rubber and a very high-tech-looking silver box that was covered in digital displays. ‘High-voltage cable and an insulation-repair unit,’ he said.

CJ gazed at the parts.

‘These dragons are smart,’ she said. ‘Smart enough to bring down the domes. But what they don’t realise is that while they can destroy things, we can rebuild them. We can fix the outer dome. Repair it. I needed the dragons to succeed at this end and then head off to the airfield. Now, while they’re attacking the airfield, we’re going to repair the emplacements at this end. We needed to fail before we could succeed.’

‘Provided the others can hold the airfield long enough…’ Li said.

‘That’s right. Which means we don’t have much time. Here, you drive.’ CJ held open the driver’s door for Li. ‘We’ve got to get to that middle emplacement.’

They zoomed out of the shed.

It was a short drive to the middle emplacement, barely a kilometre, but the movement of the cable repair truck in the streets of the otherwise deserted city caught the attention of the eastern grey dragons.

They swooped from their perches atop some nearby apartment buildings, dive-bombing the truck.

A prince landed on top of the speeding truck, leaned over the front edge and smashed the windshield with a grey fist but, amid the hail of glass that washed over him, Li swerved, bringing the truck under a concrete overpass and the dragon hit the underside of the ramp and, with a screech of metal, was swept off the roof.

Emerging from the underpass, the truck turned onto the final stretch of road leading to the emplacement—just as a second grey prince came roaring in, only to be crash-tackled by Lucky, zooming in from above, and the grey prince thrashed in pain as it hit the road, its intestines spilling from its belly.

Only fifty metres to the emplacements.

Li risked a smile. ‘We’re gonna make it…’

As he said it, the repair truck was hit with ferocious force by a grey emperor that CJ hadn’t seen coming and which Lucky would never have been able to stop.

The immense dragon came roaring out of the sky and it lashed out at the truck, swiping it with one of its foreclaws.

The truck was lifted clear off the road and fell onto its side before it went sliding—on that side—at speed, down the road.

Both CJ and Li were wearing their seatbelts so they were held in their seats as their world turned sideways.

CJ lay against her window, with the road speeding by only inches from her face.

They slid for some time—as they did so, their truck actually spun laterally—so when at last it began to slow, they were facing back toward the worker city.

With a lurch, the side-turned truck came to a stop.

Still fastened in her seat, CJ found herself looking through her truck’s smashed windshield back down the road on which they had come.

Boom.

Four huge claws landed right in front of her: the giant forelimbs of the grey emperor.

Then the impossibly huge head of the emperor appeared outside the windshield, two feet away from CJ’s face. It opened its massive jaws and growled. Saliva stretched between its fangs.

‘We almost made it,’ CJ said. ‘Almost…’

She closed her eyes in exhaustion and waited for the end.

62

But for some reason the emperor didn’t attack. It bellowed with rage at CJ’s face.

CJ opened her eyes.

It was right there. It had them, but why wasn’t it—

CJ flipped down her visor and saw some dazzling red laser grid-lines separating her from the dragon. Her truck’s slide had ended just outside the electromagnetic dome, inches outside it.

CJ released the breath she’d been holding. ‘Now that’s what I call close.’

Beside her truck stood Lucky, also on the safe side of the dome. Since the yellowjacket no longer had the pain chip in her head, she had been able to pass through the dome unhurt.

CJ unbuckled her seatbelt. ‘Come on, Li, let’s get this truck upright again and do our thing.’

It took a little help from Lucky to right the truck, but soon CJ and Li were driving it up to the outer edge of the gigantic hole in the ground nearby, the hole into which the middle emplacement had fallen.

Frayed cables stuck out of the hole on three sides: first, the main power cable coming in from the north; and second, the two lesser cables branching off to each side, connecting that incoming cable to the other emplacements.

Thanks to the emplacements over at the airfield, the pulsing laser dome cut across the hole, separating CJ and Li from the pack of grey dragons now watching them from the other side.

Li backed the truck up to the edge of the void and got to work.

CJ helped as much as she could, unspooling replacement cable and holding insulation rubber while Li did the technical stuff.

As Li had said, reattaching the copper cabling wasn’t that hard. It was insulating the new joints that was time-consuming. If the new connections weren’t perfectly insulated, with no bubbles or imperfections, the new cabling wouldn’t transmit enough power.

That was the function of the high-tech silver box: it was the insulation-repair unit that sealed the thick rubber layer around the new joints. But it worked slowly and they had three reconnections to make.

As Li worked, CJ kept an eye on the pack of grey dragons on the inner side of the dome. They looked like a flock of giant vultures, peering at their prey.

There were perhaps twenty of them, of all sizes, and they just glared balefully at the two humans working at the cabling not ten feet away.

‘Okay,’ Li said. ‘The first reconnection is done.’

‘Only the first?’ CJ said. ‘Can’t you work any faster?’

‘I’m trying to…’ Li said, moving around the edge of the hole.

As she glanced worriedly at the grey dragons, CJ wondered what was happening over at the airfield. If the emplacements at the airfield fell before she and Li reconnected the cables here, not only would all the dragons at the Great Zoo be free, these grey dragons would pounce on Li and her in a heartbeat.

It was a race now, pure and simple.

Either she and Li succeeded or they died.

She keyed her radio earpiece. ‘Bear? You copy? How’s it going over there?’

The radio squawked. Hamish’s voice came in over the sounds of roars and explosions.

‘Hey, Chipmunk! It’s a clusterfuck of monumental proportions over here! They’re trying to bring down the middle emplacement! We’re harassing them but we won’t be able to hold ’em out much longer. You?’

‘Working as fast as we can. Out.’

CJ spooled more cable to Li as he commenced the second reconnection. This required him to stand even closer to the grey dragons and they growled at him ominously. But the young Chinese electrician kept his cool as he worked barely three feet away from their drooling jaws. He waited patiently for the insulation unit to join this connection. It beeped.

‘Second connection is done…’ he said.

Li moved over to the other side of the hole to begin the final reconnection.

‘Miss Cameron,’ he said, ‘stand by the truck, please. Once this last cable is connected, we will be ready to restart the power. To do that, you must first disconnect the truck from the main power cable: that is the switch marked DISENGAGE EXT SOURCE. Then you must throw the big blue switch labelled OPEN LINE.’

CJ saw both switches on a nearby panel. ‘Got it.’

Li kept working. He rejoined the cable. Then he stepped in with the insulation unit.

‘Almost done…’ he said.

CJ looked from Li to the dragons. ‘Come on… come on…’ she whispered.

Over at the airfield, surrounded by fire and chased by dragons, Hamish’s fire truck whooshed past an outlying hangar.

Consumed by their battle with the dragons, neither Hamish at the water cannon nor Syme in the driver’s seat saw a panel in the floor of the hangar slide aside and a platform rise up out of the ground.

On that platform was a 6,000-kilogram fine aluminium/ethylene oxide thermobaric bomb.

It was about twenty feet long with a pointed nose and tailfins.

Second in power only to a nuclear warhead, it was the most powerful conventional weapon in existence. Its blast would vaporise all things within a three-hundred-metre radius while the ensuing shock wave would suck the very oxygen from the air, asphyxiating any living thing within a ten-mile radius.

At the same time, two other thermobaric devices emerged from underground chambers around the Great Dragon Zoo, powered by independent emergency reserves: the first appeared inside the electrical substation in the worker city while the second rose up from a concrete chamber buried three hundred feet beneath the Halfway Hut, the watchtower-like cable car station situated halfway between Dragon Mountain and the main entrance building.

This device was lifted on a hydraulic elevator that rose within the struts of the hut until it came to a clunking halt just below the cable car station, the height from which it could do maximum damage.

Inside the Chinese bunker behind the airfield, a technician reported: ‘Colonel Bao, the three thermobaric devices are in place and ready for detonation.’

Bao stood. ‘All personnel are to retreat to the alternate command centre on the lowest level of this bunker.’

The colonel and his staff, along with Hu Tang, caught a secure elevator to the alternate command centre, ten levels below ground.

There, a series of display screens showed Bao real-time images of the airfield above: the dragons, the speeding fire truck, the flaming hangars. Those images were overlayed with an ultraviolet filter so that he could also see the red laser grid of the electromagnetic dome still in place.

He inserted a key into a console. Three red buttons shielded by clear-plastic safety latches illuminated.

Bao flicked open the three safety latches.

Then, as he watched the dome outside, he held his finger poised over the buttons that detonated the thermobaric bombs.

Kirk Syme brought the fire truck round for another pass at the dragons gathered around the middle emplacement. The big red fire engine came rushing in, sirens wailing, lights flashing.

The dragons had excavated a substantial hole by now, so large that the foundations of the emplacement were exposed.

Hamish had his water cannon ready to go, but then something unexpected happened.

The emplacement toppled into the hole.

Sparks sprayed outward as the emplacement tore away from its cabling and fell into the hole created by the dragons.

‘No!’ Hamish swore. ‘No…!’

He keyed his radio. ‘Chipmunk! We’re cactus! The dragons just wrecked the main emplacement here!’

Inside the underground bunker, Hu Tang saw the red grid of the dome wink out…

…and then, to his absolute horror, he saw the superking and two emperor dragons swoop out over the line of emplacements.

The dome was down.

The dragons were out.

‘God help us all,’ Hu Tang breathed.

Beside him, Colonel Bao reached for the first red button.