The Great Zoo of China

15

The cable car swayed wildly, swinging through almost ninety degrees, such was the force of the emperor’s blow.

CJ and Hamish grabbed hold of a railing as the world around them rocked crazily.

Beside them, Greg Johnson managed to get a grip as well and he held on to Ambassador Syme.

The others were less lucky.

The CCTV reporter, Xin, screamed as she was hurled sideways. Her cameraman went flying across the car and slammed against a window—a split second before the window shattered under the weight of an incoming red-bellied black dragon, this one a prince.

Like the lead emperor before it, this prince had no ears, so it was unaffected by the sonic shields enveloping the cable car and the individuals inside it. The prince exploded through the window with its jaws bared and before anyone knew what was happening, it grabbed the cameraman with its claws and swept him out of the cable car with a stifled yell.

‘Holy fucking shit!’ Hamish shouted as wind rushed into the cable car.

The whole car continued to rock dramatically on its cable, like a child’s swing out of control.

Xin and Wolfe tumbled past CJ and Hamish, sliding toward the smashed-open window. CJ and Hamish reacted in exactly the same way: they both reached out, CJ snatching Xin’s outstretched wrist while Hamish caught Wolfe’s hand a moment before he fell out of the cable car.

The New York Times columnist came to a sudden halt a few feet short of the open window and gasped with relief just as the gigantic head of the emperor appeared right below his feet.

The dragon roared. It sounded like a jet engine, it was so loud.

The animal tried to stick its snout inside the window but the opening was too small and only its flaring nostrils got inside.

CJ’s eyes went wide.

Then suddenly the emperor’s jaws chomped, biting off a whole section of the cable car, in doing so catching hold of Xin’s right leg! The giant creature yanked her out of CJ’s grip.

Xin screamed as she was pulled into the creature’s gaping jaws.

The dragon bit down on her stomach.

Blood and organs shot out of Xin’s mouth, expelled by the sheer force of the bite. CJ felt sick at the sight of it. Then the dragon extracted its snout, taking the TV reporter with it.

Hamish was speechless.

CJ wasn’t.

‘Get away from the window!’ she yelled, scrambling over the bar. ‘Before it comes back!’

It came back a few seconds later, jamming its huge teeth in through the shattered windows. But everyone had taken CJ’s advice and they were out of range. When it came up with nothing, the emperor roared and pulled its snout from the cable car.

Silence.

The cable car’s swinging slowed until it was almost still again.

Everyone waited, tense, expectant, not daring to move.

Nothing happened.

‘What the fuck was that?’ Ambassador Syme said, glaring at Hu.

Hu made to reply, but he never got a word out, for at that moment the entire car was wrenched from its cable and thrown through the air.

16

If CJ and the other occupants of the cable car could have seen their cable car from the outside, what they would have seen was the emperor dragon hovering above it, its vast wings outstretched, gripping the cable car with its massive talons, wrenching it from its cable and hurling it into the waters of the lake.

The cable car rolled as it flew and it landed in the water roof-first.

It now bobbed upside-down in the water, fifty metres from the waterfall in front of the ruined castle.

And then it started to move, carried by the current toward the surging lip of the fall.

Inside the cable car, the world had gone totally crazy.

Everything was upside-down. The bar stools bolted to the floor now hung from the ceiling. Every bottle behind the bar had been smashed. Water was gushing in through the cable car’s smashed and cracked windows.

CJ and the other occupants came down hard beside the ceiling lights.

CJ was on her feet first. Crouched in the ankle-deep water, she took in the scene quickly.

‘We’re moving and we’re sinking,’ she said.

With a roar, an eighteen-foot-long crocodile suddenly burst through one of the windows in an explosion of glass and water.

CJ dived away from it and the reptile’s slashing jaws missed her by centimetres. The croc hit the floor—or rather, the ceiling—of the cable car, landing on all fours, searching for the nearest prey. It found it in Hamish, lying flat on his chest in the water right in front of it.

CJ saw the equation instantly and it didn’t look good.

A memory flashed in her mind.

Another place, another time.

A swampy enclosure in the Everglades. Alligators in a pen. School children laughing and eating lunch, having just watched a presentation. CJ is eating her own lunch nearby. She has nothing to do with the school group. She is here doing research.

The teachers know nothing about alligators. They do not know that alligators will always take an opportunity to snatch the young of another animal. They turn their backs…

…as a little boy climbs up onto the fence of the alligator pen.

CJ sees him too late.

The boy is skylarking on top of the fence, showing off for the other kids. He never sees the bull alligator launch itself from the water.

The gator snatches the boy’s leg, hauls him off the fence and takes him under.

CJ is over the fence like lightning, diving into the water after the kid.

Splashing and slashing.

Her world is a blur of muddy water, flailing limbs, the boy’s cries and the alligator’s tooth-filled mouth. And then in a sudden shining instant, she is looking right into one of the alligator’s eyes.

It is terrible and cold, unnerving. It is without mercy or remorse.

CJ stabs the fucker in the eye with the fingernail of her thumb. It jerks and releases the boy and she throws the kid clear, onto the muddy shore, where a teacher grabs him. She clambers out after him on all fours, spent and exhausted, but clear of the—

The bull explodes from the water and grabs her head in its mouth.

CJ is yanked hideously backwards. The pain is excruciating. The gator’s teeth tear apart her left cheek. Her fingers leave claw marks in the mud of the shore as she is pulled back into the water, her head bent at a terrible angle.

And no-one does a thing.

She goes under with the bull.

CJ blinked out of the memory, came back to the present.

The croc had Hamish dead to rights. Her brother had nowhere to go and CJ was too far away to be of any help.

The croc lunged—

—just as a red-bellied black prince swooped in through the window behind the crocodile, grabbed the reptile in its foreclaws and bit down on its neck. The crunching sound that followed was sickening. The dragon had broken the crocodile’s neck with one bite. The croc went limp.

CJ was gobsmacked.

An eighteen-foot-long saltwater crocodile. The biggest croc in the world. An animal without predators. And the dragon had killed it in an instant.

The dragon spat the remains of the crocodile onto the floor. CJ saw that this one also had no ears.

The cable car around her continued to flood. The water was now up to her knees.

‘We have to get to the other level!’ she yelled to the others as she sloshed through the water toward one of the two stairwells that connected the cable car’s upper and lower levels.

The others followed suit, racing for the stairwells.

The prince roared, swinging its gaze back and forth, not sure which way to go. It eventually snapped at Hamish as he dived, last of all, into the small stairwell at the aft end of the cable car.

Running on pure adrenalin, CJ arrived at the upper, formerly lower, level of the overturned cable car and peered forward.

‘Oh, you have got to be kidding me…’ she gasped.

The waterfall dropped away mere metres before her, a surging cascade of water shooting out over the lip.

She searched for options.

Maybe there was a rock on the lip that they could jump over to: no, nothing.

Maybe they could jump across to the landing platform jutting out from the ruined castle: she saw it off to the right, just outside the still-intact windows on that side of the cable car, but that wasn’t an option either because it was too late.

The cable car was already at the edge of the waterfall, and with a sudden sickening tilt, it went over.

17

CJ’s world tilted wildly yet again and for a moment everything went vertical…

…and then the cable car fell.

It plummeted through the air, nose-first.

But then after only a short fall, it stopped with a loud crunching noise and everyone was thrown downwards.

The forward windows of the car smashed inward, spraying glass.

The cable car had slammed down into one of the rock ledges that jutted out from the face of the waterfall.

From the outside, the cable car looked totally bizarre.

It was perched vertically on the face of the curving waterfall, its forward end smashed against the wide rock ledge, its aft end pointing skyward with the gushing water of the falls pouring down over it while two red-bellied black prince dragons clung to its outer walls.

Inside the vertical cable car, CJ was doing her best not to freak out. Too much was happening, too much to take in.

Stay calm, she told herself. Gotta think clearly…

She looked up and saw an escape route: the landing platform leading to the ruined castle. It was right above the upper end of the upturned cable car, only a few feet away from it. If they could climb up to the top end of the perched cable car, maybe they could—

‘Everyone!’ she called. ‘Climb! Get to the top and then jump across to that platform!’

No-one was in a state to argue: Seymour Wolfe was whipping his head this way and that in a panic; Aaron Perry was clinging desperately to a seat; Greg Johnson was holding up his boss, the ambassador. Hu Tang kept stammering, ‘Oh God, oh God’ in Mandarin while Deputy Director Zhang wore the blank despairing expression of a man who had just seen his entire future go up in flames. Hamish seemed okay, but then, he’d been in war zones before.

They all followed CJ, using the bolted-down seats as a kind of ladder, and soon they were up at the sliding doors at the top end of the cable car.

Hamish and Johnson yanked them open—and immediately a torrent of water came rushing in, slamming into their faces, almost knocking them back down the car. The waterfall was now gushing directly into the upturned cable car.

‘Go!’ CJ yelled. ‘Hurry!’

Hamish went first, then Johnson. They stood on top of the car and began helping the others out.

One by one, the group climbed through the column of water streaming down into the cable car, with Johnson and Hamish pulling them up from above: Wolfe, Perry, then Ambassador Syme, Hu Tang and Zhang. They all emerged from the cable car before jumping tentatively across to the landing platform.

Only CJ, Na and the bartender remained inside the cable car. Water rushed into the car through the upper doorway in a thick unbroken gush. Smaller cascades tumbled over the seats.

Climbing up beside CJ, Na was sobbing, shivering.

Then CJ heard a groan.

It wasn’t an animal or human groan, however, but the sound of rending metal.

Filling with water, the cable car was literally bursting at the seams.

Abruptly, a window exploded under the weight of the water and the whole car jolted… and began to tilt slowly away from the waterfall.

‘CJ! The car’s about to fall off the ledge!’ Hamish yelled through the pouring water. ‘Come on!’

CJ hauled ass, clambering up the last few seatbacks, with Na and the bartender moving desperately beside her.

‘Move it, people!’ Hamish called from the doorway.

CJ, Na and the bartender reached the doorway just as something large and black came rushing in through it, borne on the water, and collided full-on with the poor bartender who was hurled down the length of the vertical cable car.

The impact with the bartender had halted the dragon’s fall and suddenly there it was in his place, right in front of CJ and Na!

It was a prince-sized red-bellied black dragon.

It hissed at them, right in their faces, and CJ saw the deep bloody wounds where its ears should have been.

It was a creature of another time, a terrible serpent-like thing. It was everything that human beings—soft and clawless—feared. Its fangs were long, its talons scythe-like, its hide armoured. No human could fight such a thing. And you couldn’t reason with it either.

This red-bellied black prince, CJ saw, had an almost entirely red head and a small camouflaged box grafted to the left side of its skull… and suddenly she realised that she had seen it before: it was one of the dragons from the amphitheatre, the sullen prince that had reluctantly performed for the female trainer—

The dragon moved before CJ could react. It snatched Na’s throat in one powerful claw and bit her head off with a shocking tearing bite. Blood sprayed all over CJ’s face.

CJ was horrified—not just by the savageness of the act but by the speed of it. It had happened so fast!

The red-faced dragon dropped Na’s headless body and turned its gaze on CJ.

Others might have been stunned motionless in such circumstances but CJ had fought nasty things before. Instinct kicked in and she lashed out at the creature with her right boot.

The kick connected and she caught the dragon square in the mouth.

The dragon recoiled at the kick and in doing so fell back into the column of water gushing into the cable car and was swept away, down to where the bartender was.

The red-bellied black prince landed with a splash at the base of the cable car. The dragon squealed and thrashed beside the hapless bartender.

CJ looked down at them, at first too stunned to move.

The red-faced dragon shrieked again, looking directly up at her.

There came another metallic groan and suddenly someone—Hamish—was grabbing her by the collar, calling, ‘You can’t help him!’ and CJ was yanked up through the column of pouring water and all of a sudden she was standing in daylight beside her brother and Zhang on the top end of the upturned cable car, on the face of the curving waterfall, in front of the elongated landing platform that led to the ruined medieval castle.

Bizarre.

The cable car was still tilting slowly away from the waterfall. CJ saw the landing platform only a short jump away, but then she caught sight of a shadow moving behind the curtain of water just a few feet from her.

A second black prince, also earless.

At first CJ couldn’t figure out what it was doing there. Its head was bent over something. Then she saw it wrench something off the roof of the cable car with its jaws and with horror CJ realised what that something was.

It was the cable car’s snub antenna.

The device that generated the cable car’s sonic shield.

‘CJ! Come on!’ Hamish yelled.

Just then, the dragon pushed its head through the curtain of water.

It took a step forward, moving like a tiger, emerging from the wall of water one claw at a time, its head bent low.

The cable car groaned again. It was leaning ever further, about to topple off the ledge on which it was so precariously balanced.

Zhang leapt away to safety.

‘Jump!’ Hamish yelled.

And they jumped, together…

…just as the second dragon lunged at them, but it missed, and as they dived off the cable car at the very last moment—grabbing onto the end of the landing platform with their fingertips, their legs flailing behind them—the cable car toppled off the face of the waterfall, taking the two black princes and the unfortunate bartender with it.

The big double-decker car fell a full eighty feet down the face of the waterfall before it landed with a great splash in the roiling whitewater at the base and went under.

18

CJ and Hamish dangled from the end of the landing platform, high above the dizzying drop.

Greg… reached down and hauled CJ up.

‘We can’t stay here!’ he shouted over the din of the falls, showing more coolness under pressure than CJ would’ve given him credit for.

Within moments, she and Hamish were on their feet and running with the group along the length of the landing platform as dragons wheeled and shrieked and shot by overhead. They dashed into the ruined castle just as the red-bellied black emperor that had started the whole thing rushed by in a hurricane of wind and fury.

Hamish slammed the doors of the castle shut behind them.

Silence, save for the muffled sound of the waterfall outside.

Wolfe and Perry both fell to the floor, breathless. Hu and Zhang just looked shell-shocked. Greg… checked on the US Ambassador, who leaned against the wall, soaking wet.

CJ peered up at the interior of the castle around them.

They were in a high-ceilinged entry atrium. It was the size of an aeroplane hangar and it looked old and decrepit, with gaping holes in the ceiling and charred walls. Torn tapestries hung from crossbeams. Two sweeping staircases ran in matching semicircles on either side of the hall, leading to a chamber of some sort. But one of the staircases was useless: it had a ragged void in its middle, presumably created by an angry dragon.

There were no dragons in sight.

There was, however, one out-of-place feature: high up near the ceiling, a modern black catwalk ran around the wall.

There was no ladder to it. It entered the hall from the north and exited to the south. At first CJ couldn’t figure out what it was. Then she realised: it was for guests to walk on and observe the dragons in their castle home.

‘Well, this isn’t going to look good in The New York Times,’ she said. ‘Okay, what do we do now? Where can we go?’

No-one replied.

She jerked her chin at Hu. ‘I said, what the hell do we do now and where the hell can we go!’

Hu was still in shock. His jaw quivered. He couldn’t speak.

‘The administration building,’ Zhang said quietly. ‘It’s on the western wall, right behind this castle—’

Boom!

The big door behind them shook, struck from outside.

Boom!

Again.

An enraged roar assaulted their ears.

The emperor.

‘We gotta move, people,’ CJ said, running for the intact sweeping staircase. ‘We gotta move now…’

More shrieks rang out from outside. Two shadows whipped by overhead, shooting past one of the holes in the ceiling: red-bellied black princes.

The group hurried up the curving staircase.

They were almost at the top of the stairs when the main doors to the atrium blasted inwards in an explosion of splinters.

The red-bellied black emperor stood in the doorway, giant and menacing. It bellowed, its jet-engine roar shaking the walls of the castle.

‘Hurry!’ CJ called as the emperor thundered through the doorway, stomping into the atrium with great, whomping strides.

They dashed up the last few steps just as two red-bellied black princes smashed through a pair of stained-glass windows on the other side of the hall and landed at the top of the other, broken staircase.

‘This way! Into the throne room!’ Zhang called, leading them into the chamber directly behind the atrium.

They all hurried into it… only to stop dead in their tracks.

An absolutely gigantic yellowjacket emperor dragon lay before them, curled in a ball in the throne room of the castle.

Velvet curtains and torn tapestries hung around it. CJ saw some black steel spiral steps nearby that led up to another guest catwalk running around the ceiling of this room.

The massive yellowjacket was the picture of calm repose. Its colouring was magnificent, brighter than the colouring of the little female CJ had seen earlier, the one named Lucky. This one’s yellow stripes were the most vivid yellow; its black stripes, the deepest black.

It raised its gigantic head and stared at the group curiously. Its slit eyes were huge and unblinking. And it still had ears, CJ noticed immediately.

Then, suddenly, two yellowjacket princes popped up from within the emperor’s embrace. They had been sleeping inside its massive limbs and although they themselves were nine feet tall, they looked positively tiny beside the emperor.

Ever the loyal lieutenants, they leapt to their emperor’s defence, placing themselves between it and this group of intruders.

One of the princes hissed at CJ and approached—

—only to recoil with a piercing squeal.

It had struck the sonic shield emitted by her watch and CJ saw that the princes also still had their ears. The shield generated by her watch still worked.

And then the yellowjacket emperor growled.

It was a sound of the most intense malevolence and it came from deep within the giant creature. The ultimate animal warning. The walls of the throne room quivered, so great was the sound.

CJ held her breath.

They had stepped into its lair, its territory, and it wasn’t happy about it.

CJ found herself wondering: could their little sonic shields really withstand an emperor’s charge? It didn’t seem to her that they could.

Then, with surprising speed, the giant yellowjacket sprang from its position and leapt at them!

There was nothing CJ could do. Nothing any of them could do. It was too fast.

But the yellowjacket thundered over them and with a mighty thwack of flesh against flesh, it slammed into the red-bellied black emperor that had appeared in the doorway behind CJ’s group.

Territorial behaviour, CJ recalled. That some puny little humans might have encroached upon the yellowjacket’s territory was one thing. But another emperor dragon, well, that could not be tolerated.

The entire castle trembled as the two airliner-sized dragons went rolling back into the enormous entry atrium. For a few moments, the two beasts were a single entity, a mass of yellow-and-black limbs intertwined with red-and-black ones with two flailing tails added to the mix.

The ground rumbled as they fought, jaws snapping, claws tearing.

The two yellowjacket princes leapt to the aid of their emperor and joined the fight with the earless red-bellied black emperor—at the same time as the two red-bellied princes from the atrium charged in to defend their massive brother.

CJ didn’t need to be offered another chance. ‘Come on!’ she called. ‘Get up onto that catwalk and follow it out of this place!’

The group obeyed.

Within moments they were up on the catwalk, running south. Sure enough, it led out of the castle, to a long pedestrian bridge that stretched over to a vehicle turnaround attached to the ring road.

It was all designed, CJ figured, so that guests could be dropped off here, walk through the ruined castle on the elevated catwalks, and then be picked up later at another turnaround.

Right then, she didn’t care. She hoped by now that some kind of security force or rescue team had been dispatched to come and get them. If she couldn’t get her group to the administration building, then at least she had to get them out in the open where they could be spotted by a closed circuit camera or a rescue chopper.

Running out in front of the others, she dashed across the pedestrian bridge and arrived at the turnaround. About two hundred metres to the south, down the black bitumen ring road, was a tunnel that bored into a sloping section of the western crater wall. At the moment, the mouth of the tunnel was sealed by a thick-barred gate. Towering above the tunnel, built into the sloping hillside, was the administration building.

Zhang saw it, too. ‘There is an internal entrance to the admin building inside that tunnel! Go!’

19

The eight desperate humans—six Americans and two Chinese—bolted down the roadway, running as fast as they could toward the gated tunnel.

As he ran, Hu Tang’s mind swirled with a mix of incomprehension, fear and outright fury. He could hardly think. This was a disaster. A disaster. How had it happened? How had it been allowed to happen? Some of the dragons had ripped out their own ears from the roots to outwit the sonic shields. How had no-one seen this coming? When they regained control, he swore, heads would fucking roll.

He looked about himself. He was running alongside CJ and Zhang and the two New York Times men. Behind them, Greg Johnson ran with the ambassador.

They were about a hundred metres from the tunnel when the grilled gate sealing it began to open.

It slid upward and three armoured vehicles came speeding out of it: two Shorland four-by-four armoured personnel carriers and a white-painted six-wheeled Hotspur field ambulance.

The Shorlands were painted olive-green like army vehicles while the white Hotspur looked like the UN peacekeeping vehicle that it usually was.

The thick-barred gate guarding the mouth of the tunnel slid closed behind the three vehicles.

Relief flooded through Hu when he saw them. ‘An Emergency Response Team! They’re coming for us!’

The three armoured vehicles boomed down the ring road, coming toward the group…

…and sped right past them.

Hu’s jaw dropped. ‘What the—?’

The cars zoomed away down the ring road, racing off into the distance before entering another tunnel about a kilometre to the north. That was just a regular tunnel, with no gate sealing it.

‘We’re not the most important VIPs here today,’ CJ said wryly. ‘They’re going to save those other guys. We gotta do this ourselves, on foot.’

Hu was beyond furious. ‘This is outrageous…’ he fumed.

‘Wait, look!’ Hamish yelled.

He was pointing up the ring road in the direction the rescue team had gone.

Two hardtop jeeps were coming back down the road, coming toward them at considerable speed.

‘That’s our ride!’ CJ called. ‘Wave them down!’

The group stepped out into the middle of the road, waving at the jeeps.

The oncoming jeeps showed no sign of stopping. They just kept speeding wildly down the road.

Hu Tang could make out two men in each of the cars: workmen of some kind, no doubt fleeing the dragons. He stepped out in front of the others, raising one arm, palm outward. He knew with his distinctive patch of white hair, the workmen would recognise him and render assistance.

The two jeeps didn’t stop. Like the rescue team before them, they just swerved wildly around the group and kept on going.

Hu was stunned. ‘What—’

‘You cowardly motherfuc—’ Aaron Perry shouted, but he was cut off by a loud crash as two red-bellied black princes shot out of the sky and slammed into the two jeeps from the side.

The two jeeps were lifted fully off the road by the stunning impacts, and they flipped and tumbled as their inertia carried them a further twenty metres down the ring road. One jeep ended up upside-down, on its roof, while the other landed with an awkward thump back on its wheels, seventy metres from the barred tunnel but now facing the wrong way.

As the dust settled around them, Hu saw no movement within the two crumpled cars.

But the two dragons weren’t done. They wrenched off the jeeps’ doors and reached in with their claws to extract the bloodied but live occupants: four Chinese zoo workers in overalls.

These two princes, Hu noticed, were also earless, so the cars’ sonic shields were useless against them.

‘Quickly!’ CJ hissed, grabbing Hu by the sleeve. ‘Get off the road!’

They hurdled the low guardrail at the edge of the ring road and dived in among the shrubs on the slope below it. The others hurriedly followed.

From the cover of the bushes beside the roadway, CJ stared at the two crashed jeeps, the two prince dragons and the four Chinese workmen.

The princes were fearsome-looking things: nine feet tall, with high crests and blazing red bellies. With brutal efficiency, the first dragon pinned a workman under one of its forelimbs and proceeded to bite down on the man’s left arm, wrenching it off in a fountain of blood.

The man screamed in agony.

The second dragon promptly did the same to a second and then a third workman, while the first black prince ripped the left arm off the last worker. This last worker tried to flee but the dragon just knocked him to the ground casually and held him down with one of its hind legs.

‘What are they doing?’ Hamish whispered.

‘They’re biting off the workers’ watches…’ CJ said, ‘… to remove their shields. Quick, move,’ she hissed. ‘We don’t want to be here in the next few seconds—’

With a blood-curdling shriek, a much larger red-bellied black dragon arrived on the scene, landing on the ring road with a weighty whump.

If the princes looked fierce, and the emperor had been simply gigantic, the king looked absolutely terrifying. Terrifying, cruel and yet somehow regal. Its long neck was arched, rearing back before it curved forward, giving the creature a real sense of majesty.

It was as long as a city bus and each spike of its magnificent crest was taller than a man. Its tail appeared to have a mind of its own: it swept up behind the massive beast, slithering back and forth, a sinister barb at its tip.

Crucially, CJ noted, it had ears. Hence the need for the removal of the workmen’s watches.

‘The princes are giving the king a food offering,’ she said.

‘A what?’ Johnson said.

‘It’s a feeding ritual, a hierarchical feeding ritual. The lesser pack members catch the food and give it to the pack leader to eat first. They only eat after he does.’

One of the princes pushed two of the workers toward the king. The workers, clutching their recently amputated arms and screaming in terror, could hardly stand. One dropped to his knees, wailing.

The king dragon peered down at the workers imperiously.

Then it lunged forward and CJ heard a hideous crunch and then the dragon lifted its head again and suddenly one of the workmen was only half as tall as he had been.

CJ’s eyes widened in horror.

It had bitten the man in two with a single bite!

The dead workman’s legs toppled to the roadway.

The king then tilted its head sideways, scooped the legs up and gulped them down, too. Then it turned its gaze on the second, kneeling workman.

Its huge mouth opened at the edges as it glared down at the man, revealing its fearsome fangs. It looked like a smile, the cruel smile of the ultimate predator toying with its prey.

The kneeling workman held up his remaining hand pathetically, as if that would do him any good.

It didn’t.

He simply exploded in a spray of blood as the king’s jaws clamped down on him like a bear trap.

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God…’ Syme breathed.

Hamish came up beside CJ. ‘Sis, excuse my language, but what the fuck do we do now?’

CJ was wondering the same thing.

She turned to look at the nearby tunnel, the one giving access to the administration building, currently resealed by the thick-barred gate.

‘Those workmen were trying to get to the admin building,’ she said. ‘Which means they could open that gate…’

Hamish said, ‘You think—’

‘Yep. There’s a remote control in one or both of those jeeps. A remote that opens the gate.’

Hu heard them. ‘You want one of us to go out there and get into one of those cars?’

‘Yes,’ CJ said, ‘while the rest of us run down to the tunnel, to be there when the gate opens.’

Wolfe said, ‘And how exactly are we going to choose who goes on this suicide mission?’

CJ ignored him, turned to Hamish. ‘We have to do this now, while they’re feeding. I was always quicker than you. Just be ready to close the gate behind me when I get there, okay?’

‘You got it,’ Hamish said.

CJ made to move, but then she remembered something. She tore off her Great Dragon Zoo watch and thrust it into Hamish’s hand. ‘Here, take this. I don’t want any of those dragons spotting me out of the corner of their eye with a big blue sphere of light around me.’

Hamish took the watch, frowning. ‘Then you won’t be protected—’

But CJ was already off, leaping over the low guardrail and crouch-running across the road while the three dragons looked the other way, consumed by their meal.

Hamish pushed the others through the scrub that ran along the edge of the road, heading for the tunnel, every now and then turning back to check on CJ.

He had gone thirty metres when he saw her—unseen by the dragons—slip through the open door of the upright jeep.

The hardtop jeep was facing away from the tunnel, having flipped that way when it had crashed, and through its rear window, Hamish saw CJ search for the remote until she found it up near the rear-view mirror. She turned and gave Hamish a thumbs-up.

Huddled in the jeep, CJ didn’t hit the remote straight away. She was waiting for the others to get to the gate. She slouched below the dashboard, staying low, trying to remain unseen by the dragons only ten yards away.

The king dragon ate the third workman while his two lieutenants looked on.

She saw Hamish and the others reach some bushes next to the tunnel just as the king stepped back and allowed the two princes to have the last sobbing workman. They tore him apart, one taking his upper body, the other his lower half.

At which point, CJ hit OPEN on the remote.

With a dull mechanical clunking, the gate sealing the mouth of the tunnel slid upward, opening.

Hamish and the others didn’t need any prompting. They hurdled the guardrail and dashed inside the tunnel.

The three dragons spun at the movement.

Hamish found a panel on the wall, hit CLOSE and the gate slid back down, closing with a soft whump.

20

Inside the jeep, CJ exhaled with relief. They were safe.

Now she had to get herself to the tunnel. She figured if she lay low in the jeep, the dragons would eventually take off and then she could just sneak down to the tunn—

Beep-beep… beep-beep.

A soft electronic beeping sound made CJ turn to see the huge head of one of the princes on the other side of the driver’s window, staring right at her!

CJ sprang back. ‘Ah!’

She turned the other way—to see the second prince peering at her through the passenger side window!

‘Ooh, shit…’

The first dragon roared, loudly and furiously, and CJ saw it more clearly: it was the one with the red face and the box-shaped implant grafted onto the side of its head. Now, however, it had a Bluetooth earpiece wedged between two of its bloody teeth. To her horror, CJ recognised it as Na’s earpiece.

The Bluetooth earpiece was making the beeping sound as it searched for a device to pair with.

This was the same red-faced dragon CJ had kicked in the mouth inside the cable car and which had last been seen falling to the bottom of the waterfall inside the car.

It must have got out.

Red Face bellowed again and, glaring malevolently at CJ, punched the driver’s door with its foreclaw. The door dented inward. The car rocked.

The second prince roared as well and with nothing else to call on, CJ turned the key in the ignition and miraculously the battered jeep started.

The two dragons withdrew at the revving of the engine.

CJ jammed the jeep into reverse and floored it.

With a squeal of tyres, the jeep took off, shooting back toward the gated tunnel.

The king dragon turned idly at this sudden movement, seemingly more intrigued than disturbed. It didn’t move.

But its two earless princes did.

They bounded after the jeep and as CJ sped backwards in reverse, Red Face launched itself onto the bonnet of the car and roared fiercely at CJ through the windshield.

The second dragon landed on the roof of the backward-speeding jeep and the roof bent inwards under the animal’s weight, almost crushing CJ.

Leaning low, CJ kept her foot on the gas and the jeep raced down the ring road in reverse.

Riding on the bonnet, Red Face punched through the windshield and CJ ducked as glass exploded all around her and suddenly a massive black forearm with razor-sharp claws was right there in the jeep’s cabin with her, trying to get at her.

One claw slashed across CJ’s left shoulder, slicing through her leather jacket, drawing blood.

CJ screamed in pain.

Then she yanked left on the steering wheel and the car swerved crazily, forcing Red Face to withdraw his claw to keep himself from falling off the speeding jeep.

Her shoulder burning with pain, CJ turned to look through the rear window of the jeep: the tunnel was now only thirty yards away.

Then the entire rear door of the jeep was wrenched clean off and the second dragon swung in through the opening and snarled at CJ from point-blank range.

At the same time, on the bonnet, instead of reaching in with his claw, Red Face jammed his head through the shattered windshield and suddenly CJ found herself staring into the open jaws of that dragon, too.

CJ gritted her teeth in determination.

‘You guys wanna go for a drive? All right, then…’

She jammed the gas pedal all the way down, yanked the steering wheel hard right, causing the reversing jeep to swing that way and then she dived out the driver’s side door just as the speeding jeep crashed through the guardrail separating the ring road from the hillside.

The jeep shot off the road, with the two black princes on it, and it bounced and jounced for fifteen metres before it slammed into a tree, sending the two dragons flying off it. Red Face slammed into a thick tree trunk, wrapping around it. The second dragon tumbled further down the hill, end over end over end.

Up on the road, CJ rolled to a halt, grazed but alive, only ten metres from the gate.

‘CJ!’ She saw Hamish on the other side of the barred gate. ‘Move your butt!’

He hit an unseen button and the thick-grilled gate slid up a couple of feet. CJ scrambled forward on her hands and knees, rolled under it, and the gate came down and she exhaled with relief, safe.

Smack!

Red Face slammed against the bars of the gate, inches away from her, and she fell back onto her butt. The enraged dragon reached through the bars—frenzied and furious—desperate to grab her, but CJ scuttled backwards, away from its grasping claws.

The dragon hissed.

But it couldn’t get past the gate, and as she sat on the floor of the tunnel, her chest heaving, tears welling in her eyes, CJ looked up at Hamish.

‘Now that’s character building,’ she said.

21

Safely behind the grilled gate, CJ wiped her eyes clean and stood. ‘All right, folks. Let’s go find someone who can get us out of here.’

‘Aye-aye to that.’ Hamish handed her back her Great Dragon Zoo watch. ‘Here, you better put this back on.’

The group headed down the tunnel. It was modern and well lit, with a high curving ceiling that spanned a two-lane bitumen road. Two full-sized semitrailer rigs could pass through it side by side. It stretched ahead for about five hundred metres where it met another barred gate through which daylight shone.

Seymour Wolfe’s lower lip was quivering. He was, CJ could tell, visibly coming to terms with what they had just endured. ‘This is just… just unbelievable.’

Aaron Perry had already progressed to anger. ‘It’s FUBAR, is what it is: Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.’

CJ noticed that Hu Tang was saying nothing. He just walked along with his head bent, lips pursed, deep in thought. Deputy Director Zhang walked beside him, desperately avoiding eye contact.

Glancing behind her, CJ saw the grim silhouette of Red Face at the northern gate. He had been joined by the other black prince and the two dragons paced back and forth on the other side of the bars.

It’s only the red-bellied black dragons that are attacking, she thought. She wondered why. Was there something about them that was different to the other dragons?

Then, abruptly, the two dragons stopped, turning to face something that had caught their attention, and took to the air.

CJ was happy to see them go.

About a hundred metres down the tunnel, her group came to a set of oversized garage doors embedded in the wall.

‘This is our waste management facility,’ Zhang said.

As the group arrived at the doors, one of them rumbled open and three Chinese men in suits came running out. They raced straight to Hu Tang, babbling with concern, but he brushed them off with a few sharp words.

CJ entered the waste management facility.

A fleet of twenty-four brand-new garbage trucks were parked in perfect rows. They were big Isuzu trucks, with large hydraulic compacter units at their rears and THE GREAT ZOO OF CHINA painted on their white sides.

Clearly the Chinese hadn’t got around to changing the logos on them yet, CJ thought. After today’s attack, she wondered if they ever would.

Beyond the fleet of garbage trucks was a gigantic concrete pit—sixty metres by fifteen metres—that was partially filled with refuse. Along one of its long walls were several huge piston-driven compacters, designed to compress the waste against the opposite wall. Overhead cranes then lifted the compacted waste into dump trucks that were parked in loading docks on the opposite side of the great pit, facing some more oversized garage doors that led westward, out of the crater.

On the left-hand side of the space, parked by some diesel pumps, was a collection of fire trucks. Painted bright red and glistening with newness, there were four mid-sized water pumpers and two superlong ladder trucks.

It was an impressive facility, even if the whole massive place did stink of garbage.

There was one other thing about the hall that struck CJ.

There was a dragon here.

But it wasn’t on the loose or on a rampage. Indeed, quite the opposite.

It was the yellowjacket prince that CJ and the others had seen do tricks in the amphitheatre: the one named Lucky.

Right now, Lucky sat obediently, if a little nervously, inside a caged trailer that was coupled to a Great Dragon Zoo pick-up truck. The dragon still wore the saddle on its back.

Its female handler, the young woman with yellow-streaked hair—CJ recalled her name was Yim—stood beside the cage, stroking Lucky through the bars. Yim was still wearing her black bodysuit and her radio earpiece but not her armoured black-and-yellow leather jacket.

‘What’s happening, sir?’ Yim called to Hu in Mandarin.

‘Some of the dragons have become… aggressive,’ Zhang replied as he kept walking. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Lucky is hurt. After we did our fly-by past the cable cars, she landed on a loose rock and rolled her ankle. I hope it isn’t broken. Our truck was here getting refuelled. I was about to take her to the Birthing Centre when all the alarms sounded.’

‘Just stay here,’ Zhang said, not stopping.

Looking very confused, the handler stayed with her caged yellow dragon.

CJ didn’t care. She just followed Zhang and Hu, who were drawing a crowd as they strode toward a pair of elevators in the right-hand wall.

‘Where to, Chipmunk?’ Hamish asked.

‘I need to find a suture kit,’ CJ said. The entire left shoulder of her brown leather jacket was now stained with blood. ‘Then I want to get on a plane, go back to the hotel in Hong Kong and take a long hot fucking bath.’

She jerked her chin at one of the suits fawning around Hu Tang and said curtly in Mandarin: ‘Where is the infirmary?’

The suit nodded quickly. ‘Level three,’ he said in English. He then spoke into a radio in Mandarin.

An elevator arrived. CJ got in. The others followed.

Greg Johnson stood close beside CJ.

Amid the noise of all the others talking, he said softly: ‘Dr Cameron, in your professional opinion, what just happened here?’

CJ glanced sideways at Johnson. ‘You move well… for an embassy aide. You’re not just an ambassador’s assistant, are you?’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s not relevant right now. What is relevant are our chances of survival. What just happened?’

CJ said, ‘These animals are clearly smarter than our Chinese friends have given them credit for. The Chinese came up with what they thought was an ingenious system to protect their cable cars—the sonic shields—but the dragons scratched off their own ears so they could attack the cars. They also know about our watches. They’re problem-solvers, Mr Johnson, and that’s what I find most worrying.’

‘Why?’

‘Because intelligence in the animal kingdom is directly proportional to brain size. As a percentage of body size, humans have the biggest brains of any creature on this planet, hence we are the dominant species. Chimps and apes and whales and dolphins come next, and all of them exhibit problem-solving skills: the ability to use X to achieve Y.

‘Crocodiles have medium-sized brains, but the reptilian brain doesn’t waste space with notions of empathy or conscience. When a crocodile looks at something, all it is thinking about is how it will go about hunting it and eating it. Crocodiles also exhibit problem-solving skills both in their trap-setting and in their evasion techniques: it is well known that you will never capture a crocodile with the same technique twice.

‘What worries me is these dragons have really big brains. The sonic shields on that cable car and on our watches were preventing the dragons from getting to us. So they solved the problem: they tore off their own ears or wrenched off those workmen’s arms, removing their watches.’

Johnson looked at her for a long moment. Then he spoke in a low voice. ‘There could be other problems for us here as well.’

‘What do you mean?’ CJ said, wincing. Her shoulder burned.

‘I mean—’

Just then the elevator doors opened onto the third floor of the administration building. After the artificial underground light of the tunnel and the waste facility, CJ was assaulted by brilliant daylight.

A wide bank of floor-to-ceiling windows met her, windows that opened onto a glass-domed balcony overlooking the valley. CJ could see the rear of the ruined castle and beyond it, Dragon Mountain.

A female Chinese secretary hurried up to CJ and, bowing, handed her a shrink-wrapped first-aid kit.

CJ took the kit and walked out onto the glass-domed balcony, followed by Hamish.

Seymour Wolfe’s traumatic reaction had progressed to anger. He yelled at one of the Chinese suits: ‘You are gonna get me on the first fucking flight out of here! You cannot imagine what I am going to write about this in the Times when I get back! Go! Make it happen!’

Aaron Perry was also shouting, ‘Get me out of here right now so I can get on the fucking Internet!’

Hu Tang was speaking animatedly to the other suits, giving orders and directions, pointing at Ambassador Syme and the two journalists.

‘Bring my plane here from Hong Kong,’ Syme said to Hu. ‘We’ll fly direct to Beijing from here.’

Hu nodded in reply and began walking off with his people. ‘Stay here. I’ll take care of everything.’

While all this was happening, CJ sat down on a bench on the broad balcony and opened the first-aid kit. She slipped off her jacket and hiked up the sleeve of her T-shirt. Her shoulder was a bloody mess. She was reaching for an antiseptic swab in the kit when Greg Johnson sat down beside her.

‘Here, let me help you with that,’ he said, taking the swab from her.

CJ eyed him closely. ‘You have experience field-dressing wounds, Mr Johnson?’

‘Maybe.’ He dabbed the gash on her shoulder, cleaning away the blood.

‘Bullet wounds?’ Hamish asked.

‘Maybe.’ Johnson tossed away the swab and picked up a needle and thread. ‘You might want to bite down on something. This is gonna hurt.’

CJ grabbed her leather jacket and bit down on its collar. She grunted sharply as Johnson pierced her skin with the needle and started sewing up the wound.

While Johnson worked, CJ gazed out over the valley.

The dragons, she saw, were flying with extra speed now. It wasn’t the lazy gliding she’d seen before. It had purpose. Gangs of red-bellied black dragons flew in coordinated packs, while the other types of dragons clustered together defensively.

After a couple of minutes, Johnson tied off the last stitch. ‘You’re done. All patched up.’

‘Thanks,’ CJ said. The needlework was good. The scar would be small.

‘What are you thinking?’ Johnson asked.

CJ nodded at the red-bellied black dragons flying around the valley in their groups. ‘I’m wondering what they’re thinking. I’m wondering why they attacked our cable car? Why today? Why now? Wait a second…’

She pulled her oversized UV glasses from her fanny pack. Amazingly, they were unbroken. She put them on. The electromagnetic dome still glowed green above the crater, lancing up from its emplacements on the rim. Beyond it, much higher up, the second red dome remained in place, while a pale-blue sonic shield pulsed around the admin building.

‘Patterns,’ she said to no-one. ‘What pattern were they exploiting?’

‘Huh?’ Hamish said. ‘What do you mean?’

CJ turned to face Hamish and Johnson, still wearing the glasses. Their sky-blue sonic shields pulsed around them. Gazing around her, CJ noticed that many of the Chinese workers inside the admin building bore no such spherical shields. Given that the building had its own shield, they probably saw no need to wear individual ones.

She took off the glasses and chewed on one of the earframes, thinking.

Then she blinked.

‘The two o’clock fuel run,’ she said.

‘The what?’ Johnson said.

CJ’s head snapped left, scanning the valley and the sky above it.

‘Reptilian predators like crocodiles and alligators love patterns, repetition. If you do something every day at the same time, they’ll notice it. And if it helps them hunt you, they’ll use that pattern against you. Just before the attack on our cable car occurred, I saw some fuel tankers doing a standard refuelling run at two o’clock. The dragons were waiting for those tankers to appear at the usual time—’

CJ cut herself off and turned to Hamish. ‘This isn’t over yet.’

Almost in response, a terrifyingly loud shriek could be heard from across the valley.

All three of them turned.

And their mouths opened.

‘Oh, you have got to be kidding me…’ Hamish gasped.

Three red-bellied black emperors were flying through the air, banking toward the administration building. Each dragon carried something large in its massive claws.

Hamish said, ‘Are those—?’

‘Yes,’ CJ said.

‘Holy shit…’ Johnson said.

The two lead dragons carried fuel tankers in their clutches. The long silver tanks of the semitrailer rigs glistened in the sun while the cabs dangled limply from them.

The third emperor dragon carried a different cargo.

It held a dripping-wet cable car that was covered with reeds. It was their old cable car, resurrected from the base of the waterfall. All its windows were smashed, and inside it CJ could make out shapes, moving shapes, lots of them.

Red-bellied black princes.

‘We took refuge in the wrong building,’ she said flatly. ‘Brace yourself.’

But by the time she said it, it was too late.

22

The two lead emperor dragons swooped in toward the administration building—with its airport-like control tower at its summit—and like dive-bombers in World War II, released the tankers.

The first fuel-filled tanker slammed into the control tower with tremendous force. Something must have sparked because then the fuel inside the tanker ignited and the whole tower exploded in a gigantic billowing fireball.

Then it fell.

CJ looked up in horror as the great tower toppled like a slow-falling tree off the summit of the admin building and fell down the face of the structure!

For a moment she thought it was going to fall right on top of their glass-domed balcony, but it tumbled and bounced southward. Parts of it broke off as the flaming tower crashed down the slope until, with a colossal noise, it slammed down onto the ring road to the south of the admin building, right in front of the tunnel there.

‘Fuck a duck…’ Hamish said.

The second tanker was hurled into the top floor of the administration building, right underneath an array of antennas situated on the corner of the roof.

That tanker exploded, too, and the whole top corner of the building simply fell away in one massive chunk. It freefell down the face of the building, heading right for the glass-domed balcony on which CJ and the others stood.

‘Run!’ CJ called, the quickest to react.

They dashed inside, followed by the others, running for all they were worth, as behind them the corner chunk of the building smashed down onto the glass dome. The dome shattered as the chunk of building blasted down through it and the balcony was suddenly open to the elements.

CJ dived to the floor as shards of glass landed all around her. They’d got clear, just.

She rolled, facing upward, held her UV glasses to her eyes…

…and saw that the blue sonic shield around the admin building was no longer there.

By destroying the antenna array, the dragons had knocked it out.

She was on her feet in seconds.

‘Move! Move!’ She raced for the elevator.

‘What? Why!’ Wolfe called, still taking cover on the floor.

CJ kept running. ‘They just brought down the sonic shield protecting this building! Now they’re bringing in the attack troops!’

Wolfe turned and saw what CJ had foreseen.

For right then, in came the third red-bellied emperor dragon, carrying in its claws the wrecked cable car filled with princes.

The emperor swooped in low and released the cable car directly at the smashed-open dome of the admin building’s balcony.

With a deafening crash, the huge double-decker cable car came flying in through the broken dome and slid for a full thirty metres before it ground to a halt inside the building, right near the spot where CJ and the others had been standing only moments before.

Dragons burst out from it.

There were maybe fifteen of them, all prince-sized red-bellied blacks. The five leading dragons had no ears while the rest did.

They sprang out of the cable car like a rampaging army, heads low, tails high, foreclaws spread wide, searching for prey.

23

CJ didn’t bother waiting for the elevator. It wouldn’t get there in time.

Instead, she just threw open a heavy door beside the elevators labelled FIRE STAIRS in both Mandarin and English.

Closely followed by the five other American guests plus Zhang, she bolted down the stairs three at a time, swinging round the corners.

Loud booms echoed out above her: the dragons were ramming the fire door.

Then there came a sharp cracking noise and suddenly a furious roar rang out in the stairwell.

‘They’re in!’ CJ called.

She came to the base of the stairwell, hurled open the door there, and found herself once again inside the vast waste management hall.

She glanced to her right and saw the massive external garage doors—and she realised why the dragons had stormed this building: those huge doors led outside.

Her group really had taken refuge in the wrong place.

This was what the dragons had wanted all along. They hadn’t been after the people inside her cable car. They had just wanted the cable car.

For this.

For this assault on the administration building: one of the few places in the Great Dragon Zoo of China with an exit.

In an academic corner of her mind, CJ found herself marvelling at the ingenuity of the dragons. This wasn’t just problem-solving behaviour. This was complex combination planning.

Misguided though their plan was—even if they somehow got past the inner dome via the loading dock, there was still the second electromagnetic dome outside the first one, and how could they possibly bring that down?—it was still a plan.

These creatures, CJ realised, were more intelligent than any animal she’d ever encountered.

‘They’re coming!’ Johnson called from the rear of the group.

‘Hamish, block the door!’ CJ yelled.

Hamish climbed up into the cab of a nearby garbage truck, started it up, jammed it into reverse and backed it up against the stairwell door—

—just as the first prince arrived there with a shrill squeal and poked its head through.

Hamish rammed the big garbage truck against the door, slamming it, and the dragon’s head, sticking out from between the door and its frame, was sliced off, guillotined. Then the door slammed shut, held closed by the weight of the garbage truck.

There came a series of loud bangs from the other side as more dragons arrived there and started ramming it. But they couldn’t get it open—yet.

Bang!

The garbage truck jolted slightly.

Bang!

Again.

As the banging continued, CJ spun to check her options.

The waste facility was just as she had left it: the wide refuse pit, the external doors leading outside, the inner doors leading back to the ring road tunnel, a couple of dozen garbage trucks and the pick-up truck with the yellowjacket dragon inside its trailer.

At that moment, one of the elevators arrived with a ping and fifteen Chinese office workers in shirtsleeves and slacks hurried out of it, panic-stricken.

A dozen Chinese workmen in blue waste facility coveralls raced to a locked steel cabinet on the northern wall of the hall. Their leader fumbled with a set of keys before managing to open the cabinet’s padlock and fling its thick doors wide.

It was a gun cabinet.

CJ saw guns on racks inside it—handguns and a few assault rifles that looked like AK-47s. The Chinese workmen started handing them out.

CJ turned again and saw the external doors. ‘Seems to me that the safest place to be right now is outside those doors and outside this valley. How do we open them?’

‘That control panel over by the elevators,’ Zhang said, pointing. ‘But immediately outside those doors are heavy safety gates. We’d have to open them, too.’

Two of the Chinese workmen evidently had a similar idea about the external doors. They were already running for the control panel beside the elevators that Zhang had indicated.

They were ten steps short of the panel when CJ realised.

It was quiet.

The banging had stopped.

The dragons weren’t trying to get through the stairwell door anymore.

She turned slowly.

‘Where will they—?’ she said as it happened.

The two elevator doors suddenly burst open from within and red-bellied black dragons poured out of them!

They’d come down the elevator shaft.

First there were two dragons, then eight, then twelve. They fanned out rapidly. Some were earless though most still had their ears—but then CJ recalled that most of the Chinese workers in the admin building weren’t wearing their protective watches. There was plenty of prey for all of the dragons, earless or not.

The two workmen who had been running toward the control panel beside the elevators were attacked first.

Two earless dragons tackled them, hurling the men to the ground before leaping on top of them and tearing out their windpipes, almost ripping off their heads in the process.

CJ’s face fell.

‘We’re not going that way now,’ Hamish said.

‘Got any other ideas?’ Perry asked.

It was at that moment that the Chinese workmen opened fire with their guns.

Within seconds, there was mayhem all over the waste management hall.

Dragons shrieked. Gunfire clattered. Sparks bounced off the walls.

The Chinese workmen took cover and fired their guns at the oncoming dragons, but just as a man hid behind a garbage truck and opened fire, a dragon would fly over the truck and fall on him from above and it ended in screams and blood.

CJ saw one dragon ruthlessly slash one of its foreclaws across the front of a workman’s body. Four lines of blood exploded from his chest and the man fell.

She saw another dragon rip a man in two with its foreclaws. Blood and intestines poured out from the corpse.

A third dragon flew past and bit the head off another man. His headless body kept standing for a few seconds—the gun in its hand still firing—before the decapitated body finally collapsed to the ground.

The Chinese workers’ gunfire seemed to have little effect on the dragons. Sparks pinged off their armoured hides and foreheads. Occasionally, CJ saw a gout of blood spray out from an unarmoured section of one of the dragons’ bodies and the animal would shriek, more in annoyance than pain. Then it would just continue its forward charge.

The Chinese office workers were jumping into any kind of car or truck they could find.

CJ saw three office workers dive into a Great Zoo of China hatchback, only for two dragons to grab the car from either side and fling it against the wall. The little car slammed into the wall roof-first, crumpling instantly, its occupants crushed.

‘Get into the garbage trucks!’ CJ called. ‘They’re heavier! They’ll give better protection!’

The group split up, hurrying for the nearest garbage trucks.

Zhang climbed into one truck, while CJ clambered into the cabin of another with Hamish and Ambassador Syme. Johnson joined them but not before risking a dash to grab a pistol that had been dropped by one of the Chinese workmen. CJ glimpsed Wolfe and Perry disappearing inside the thick-doored gun cabinet and slamming the door shut behind them.

‘You know, we’re lucky it’s just the little ones,’ Syme gasped. ‘The princes.’

There came an almighty muffled roar and suddenly the brickwork above the elevators broke out into a spider web of cracks. A moment later, the entire wall above the elevators was smashed open from within and an enormous—earless—red-bellied king dragon burst out from it, bellowing furiously.

‘Mother of God…’ Hamish said.

The bus-sized animal reared up on its hind legs. It absolutely dominated the space. It bounded forward, sweeping garbage trucks out of its path with its forelimbs.

Six-ton garbage trucks were flung away like children’s toys.

One skidded down the length of the hall before slamming into the concrete wall. Another two bounced end over end before disappearing into the refuse pit.

The king roared and with its every booming stride, the floor shook.

There was movement everywhere now. Workmen ran for their lives. Office workers in about seven Great Zoo–emblazoned hatchbacks sped out of the hall into the ring road tunnel, fleeing. Prince dragons hunted between the upturned vehicles.

CJ turned to face the imposing external doors. While she was sure they could contain the prince dragons, she wasn’t certain they could withstand an assault by a king or an emperor.

The king wanted to know as well.

With a deafening bellow, it wrenched away one oversized garage door, revealing a thick-barred gate beyond it.

The dragon hurled its shoulder against the gate…

…but it held.

The dragon roared with fury, tried again, but again the gate withstood the mighty impact.

‘They can’t get out this way,’ Syme said with relief.

‘And neither can we,’ CJ said. ‘Not without letting them out with us.’

As she said this, she thought she glimpsed two prince dragons stealing away to the left toward a small red door over in the far corner of the hall; it looked like an electrical booster room of some sort.

But it was only a fleeting glimpse, because it was cut off a second later when the king dragon stepped right in front of CJ’s windshield and stared into her eyes.

Then the great animal lunged forward and grabbed hold of her garbage truck and CJ’s world spun crazily again as the truck was flung through the air.

24

The garbage truck sailed through the air for a full three seconds before it landed on its side with a bone-rattling thud.

Then it slid for twenty feet across the slick concrete floor, stopping right on the edge of the refuse pit. It finished with its cabin protruding out over the pit, twenty feet above the base. There was only a modest pile of garbage in the pit, since the zoo was not yet fully operational.

Its occupants all now lay awkwardly on top of the driver’s door. Hamish lay squished on the bottom with Greg Johnson on top of him and CJ and Syme on him.

‘Is everyone oka—’ CJ began to say just as the upper door to the cabin was wrenched away from the outside and a red-bellied black prince peered inside, hissing.

‘Hamish!’ CJ called. ‘Open your door!’

‘But then we’ll—’

‘Now, Hamish!’

Hamish did so, just as the dragon reached down to grab CJ. As the driver’s door swung open, Hamish, then Johnson, then Syme and CJ fell down through it, dropping into the refuse pit, landing on the small pile of rubbish there.

The dragon came a moment later.

As she hit the pile of garbage, CJ rolled, a split second before the dragon’s claws landed right where she’d been. Now, CJ was lying on her back and the dragon was standing over her, roaring into her face—

Blam!

The dragon’s chest was hit by a bullet. The dragon recoiled, but was unhurt.

Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!

More gunfire. More rounds hit the beast, in the chest, in the snout, even in one eye.

Now the animal wailed in pain and a final shot—from Greg Johnson, levelling the pistol he’d found—went up into the dragon’s mouth, through its brain, and the big beast flopped backwards, squealing and convulsing before finally it lay still on the stinking trash heap, dead.

‘Nice shooting,’ CJ said.

‘Thanks.’ Johnson checked his clip. ‘Don’t expect much more, because I only have one round left.’

Just then, CJ caught sight of something in her peripheral vision, something big and red flying through the air.

‘Duck!’ she called as a fire truck went soaring overhead in a high arc. It was one of the huge ladder trucks. It sailed down into the pit, presumably flung by the king, and slammed into the opposite wall.

‘Jesus!’ Syme yelled.

‘We can’t stay here,’ Johnson urged.

‘I know—wait a second.’ CJ sniffed. ‘Do you smell that?’

‘We are in a trash heap,’ Hamish said flatly.

‘No. It’s not trash. It’s gasoline…’

Her eyes fell on the newly arrived fire truck. It lay at the edge of the hill of rubbish, crumpled and broken.

And a small fountain of gasoline was spraying from its gas tanks. The tanks must have ruptured as the big fire truck had smashed into the pit. The leaking gasoline was forming a pool around the big red truck.

With a shriek another black prince landed on top of the fire truck, its wings spread wide.

CJ snatched the pistol from Johnson, but instead of firing it at the dragon, she fired its final bullet downward, at the pool of gasoline.

A spark ignited… and the pool around the fire truck came alight and a wall of fire sprang up around the dragon!

The dragon was engulfed in flames and it squealed before flying off.

‘Not bad,’ Johnson said.

‘Yeah,’ Hamish said, ‘only now our pit is on fire.’

He was right. Choking black smoke began to fill the pit.

‘Okay, boys, here’s the plan,’ CJ said, climbing up the rubbish heap, heading for the rim. ‘We find ourselves a garbage truck and we run the blockade out of here.’

‘Aye-aye to that,’ Hamish said, taking off after her.

They arrived at the rim of the pit to find that the waste management facility now looked like a battlefield.

Where once all the garbage trucks had been parked in neat rows, now they lay crumpled against the walls or upside-down, wheels pointed skyward. Red-bellied black princes variously crouched on top of the upturned trucks or prowled around them. Low afternoon sunlight lanced in through the thick bars of one external gate. The king dragon stood over by the southwest corner, roaring.

There was no gunfire anymore and less movement. The dragons had taken care of the gun-wielding Chinese workmen and all the office workers were either dead or had fled onto the ring road in the hatchback cars.

‘That truck over there!’ CJ pointed at a garbage truck over by the inner doors. It was even aimed at the open doors of the ring road tunnel, ready to go.

The four of them made a break for it, running fast, keeping low, dashing from garbage truck to garbage truck.

Johnson scooped up an AK-47 from beside a dead Chinese workman’s body and threw CJ a Glock pistol.

As they hurried past an overturned garbage truck, they heard a groan.

CJ ducked to see Zhang huddled inside it. Hu Tang, she recalled, had stayed up in the building earlier.

‘Come on, Zhangman,’ Hamish said as he leaned in and dragged the zoo’s deputy director out.

CJ, Hamish, Johnson, Syme and now Zhang hastened toward the garbage truck by the inner doors.

At one point, Hamish and the other three ducked left around an overturned truck while CJ went right… and suddenly stopped.

Beep-beep… beep-beep.

She knew that sound.

Slowly, very slowly, CJ peered around the corner of her upturned truck.

She saw the yellowjacket dragon—Lucky—inside its caged trailer behind the pick-up truck, looking extremely agitated.

CJ came further around and she saw why.

Lucky’s handler, Yim, in her black bodysuit and with her yellow-streaked hair, stood in front of Lucky’s cage, facing four red-bellied black princes arrayed in a threatening semicircle around her.

‘Get back!’ she yelled in Mandarin, waving a broom at the four dragons. ‘Back, I tell you! Stay away from her!’

The lead black prince lowered its head, extending its long neck, and hissed at her, a deep low hiss of anger.

It was Red Face. He still had Na’s beeping earpiece lodged between his teeth.

Beep-beep… beep-beep.

But there was more to this scene than just a confrontation between rival dragons, CJ realised.

She saw small camouflaged boxes attached to all four of the red-bellied black princes’ heads, and she realised that these four dragons, including Red Face, were the same four dragons that had performed alongside Lucky earlier, up in the amphitheatre.

It appeared that they didn’t like their fellow performer.

They circled Lucky’s cage like hungry wolves.

‘Stay back!’ Yim yelled. CJ saw that she still wore her earpiece with its inbuilt microphone—

Suddenly Yim moved, reaching for the yellow remote on her belt but, quick as a whip, Red Face launched himself at her and suddenly Yim was on the ground and the dragon was astride her and her hand holding the yellow remote was pinned to the floor.

With a sharp stomp, Red Face smashed the remote to pieces.

Then he hissed into his trainer’s face, drooling into her eyes.

Yim screamed and Lucky shook the bars of her cage—straining to open them, crying out—as Red Face’s claw came rushing down again, this time at the handler’s head.

There was a foul burst of blood and brains as the dragon’s claw came down and the trainer’s head exploded and a pool of blood fanned out beneath Red Face’s claw. Yim’s body went limp.

Lucky roared with helpless rage and then, to CJ’s surprise, began to whimper, a soft keening that seemed like genuine grief.

It’s pining, CJ thought in amazement. Pining for its handler.

But then the four red-bellied black princes turned their attention to Lucky and the yellowjacket stopped whimpering and took a wary step back, even though it was still inside its cage.

The yellow dragon, with the saddle on its back and with its bright yellow colouring, suddenly looked very different from the other dragons: it looked tamed, civilised; a collaborator who had been caught.

Red Face swatted at the cage, his razor-sharp claws clattering across the bars. The other three male princes hissed, surrounding the cage.

CJ watched, horrified and captivated.

The red-bellied black dragons, she noticed, didn’t just hiss and snarl: they made distinct burring sounds plus long exhalations. It sounded to CJ like—

Jesus, she realised. They’re communicating with each other.

CJ also had to admit that she felt sorry for the yellowjacket. The lone female dragon had just lost her human companion and now, outnumbered and surrounded, she was about to be slaughtered.

‘CJ…!’ Hamish whispered urgently. ‘Come on…!’

She turned. Hamish and the others had reached the garbage truck by the inner doors.

CJ frowned, looking back at the four red-bellied black princes surrounding the yellowjacket. One of them punched the cage, making it rock. They were toying with Lucky.

Surprising herself, CJ waved Hamish away.

‘Go!’ she whispered. ‘I’ll catch up!’

Hamish frowned, not quite understanding. But then he must have seen something in her eyes—a stubborn conviction that he’d seen before—because he just said ‘Okay,’ and keyed the ignition on his garbage truck.

At the vibration of the garbage truck firing up, the four dragons surrounding Lucky whipped around. But after deciding that it was of no concern to them, they turned back to face Lucky.

Only when they did so, they found someone standing between them and the yellowjacket.

CJ.

She stood between the four dragons and Lucky, Glock pistol held in one hand and something that looked like a thick plastic suitcase in the other.

It must have made for a strange sight, she thought: her—five foot six inches tall and armed with a single handgun—facing off against four red-bellied black princes, each of them nine feet tall, huge and menacing.

The imprisoned Lucky seemed the most surprised of all. She appeared to watch this unexpected development in shock.

Red Face glared at CJ, lowered his head and growled.

Beep-beep… beep-beep.

The dragon stepped forward—

Blam!

CJ fired her pistol into the concrete floor at the dragon’s feet. The round sparked as it pinged away.

The dragon paused in mid-stride.

CJ was standing beside the pool of blood that had been Yim’s head, and, glancing downward, she saw something: the dragon handler’s earpiece. It must have been expelled from Yim’s ear when Red Face had stomped on her skull.

Still aiming her gun at the dragons, CJ put down the suitcase-like object and scooped up the earpiece with her spare hand. If she got out of here alive, she might need to get in radio contact with Hamish and the others.

She put it in her ear—and immediately heard a garbled electronic voice come through it, a man’s voice speaking in Mandarin.

CJ translated: ‘—black dragons attack—’

The rest of the zoo must be under attack. Jesus.

Red Face growled again, a sound laced with menace.

Then, without warning, one of the other dragons lunged at CJ from her left. But she was ready for it and she swung around, scooping up the suitcase-like object and flinging it at the incoming prince.

That object was a jerry can, half-filled with gasoline.

The jerry can hit the dragon in the snout just as CJ pivoted with the gun and fired, hitting the fuel can, and the container exploded into flames.

Liquid fire flew in every direction. All four of the dragons were hit and they recoiled, while some of the flames hit CJ herself and the sleeve of her jacket caught fire.

But the biggest victim had been the incoming dragon. That dragon squealed as flames engulfed its head and the animal immediately began rolling around on the floor, trying to extinguish the gasoline-fuelled fire raging on its face.

CJ flung off her flaming jacket and took the opportunity to fire at a fuel tank mounted on an overturned garbage truck behind the dragons.

Her shot hit its intended target and the fuel tank exploded, issuing a massive fireball that billowed out all around her foes.

The dragons leapt away from the flames as CJ bolted, dashing down the side of the caged trailer and diving into the cab of its pick-up truck.

She keyed the ignition and floored the gas pedal and the truck-and-trailer shot off the mark.

The pick-up blasted out of the waste management facility, racing into the ring road tunnel with CJ at the wheel, driving hard and not daring to look back.

The pick-up swept into the tunnel.

CJ wanted to go right—to the south, to get to the main entrance building and out of this fucked-up zoo—but no sooner was she in the tunnel than she realised that that wasn’t an option.

The remains of the fallen control tower filled the road in that direction. It looked impossibly huge, out of scale with the two-lane road: the multi-level tower lay crumpled across the roadway, completely blocking it.

Tyres squealing, CJ swung left—north—accelerating quickly to eighty, then ninety kilometres per hour, the caged trailer behind her bouncing wildly. Inside it, Lucky was tossed against its barred walls like a rag doll.

One hundred metres ahead of her, CJ saw Hamish’s garbage truck arriving at the tunnel’s northern entrance. The gate there was still closed, but Hamish must have had a remote in his truck, because as the truck arrived at it, the big gate began to rise.

CJ needed to get in contact with him. She touched her earpiece. Like a cell phone earpiece, it contained a microphone as well.

She went to press the TALK button on the earpiece, but as she did so, a garbled woman’s voice came through it, speaking in Mandarin.

CJ translated. ‘—Run… White head… Run—’

She didn’t know what the hell that meant. Busy channel. Clearly, the dragons were running amok all over the zoo.

The fluorescent lights of the tunnel flashed by outside.

She keyed the mike: ‘Zhang! Hamish! Anyone! Can you hear me?’

No reply.

She stole a glance in her rear-vision mirror and to her relief saw that the tunnel behind her was empty.

She scanned the cab for weapons or anything else she could use. On the seat beside her, she saw Yim’s black-and-yellow leather jacket, with its armoured spine and neck.

That can only help, CJ thought, so she wriggled into it as she drove.

The truck-and-trailer sped through the tunnel.

Still no dragons behind it.

CJ came to the tunnel’s mouth and burst out into bright sunshine. She immediately brought the pick-up to a skidding halt.

Then she leapt out of the cab and ran to the back of the trailer, glancing down the tunnel—

—when, like bats out of Hell, the four red-bellied black princes came banking out of the waste management facility, flying low and fast.

CJ ignored them.

With Lucky looking on curiously from the other side of the bars, she fumbled with the bolt securing the dragon’s cage.

She flung open the gate.

‘Go on! Out! Get out of there!’ CJ yelled at the yellow dragon. ‘Do you understand me? Out!’

The dragon just stared at her in what appeared to be amazement.

Then, glancing at the dragons roaring down the tunnel behind them, it clambered out of the cage.

The yellowjacket—still wearing its saddle—slunk up onto the roof of the cage and with a final look at CJ, took to the air.

Then CJ was moving again, sliding back into the pick-up’s cab and jamming down on the gas pedal. The truck shoomed off down the ring road as the four black princes burst out of the tunnel a bare second later.

They immediately looked skyward—to see Lucky soaring away toward Dragon Mountain, out of reach.

But CJ wasn’t out of reach.

They took off after her.

25

CJ drove fast. Faster than she had ever driven in her life.

Her truck-and-trailer combo shot down the ring road, gaining on Hamish’s heavier garbage truck.

Ahead of the garbage truck, she could see one of the Great Zoo of China hatchbacks that the Chinese office workers had sped off in, fleeing from the waste management hall.

That was strange, she thought. She could have sworn she had seen six or seven of the little white hatchbacks speed out of the—

Wham!

A white hatchback landed on the road right in front of her pick-up!

CJ swerved instinctively, avoiding the falling car by centimetres. The car had come flying out of the sky from the right and it went bouncing away to her left where it slammed against the rock wall on the outer side of the ring road.

CJ peered upward to see a pair of red-bellied black princes soaring away, having dropped the car at her.

She saw a second pair of princes coming in toward her, carrying another hatchback in their talons. They swooped in low and released the little car.

This car flew across CJ’s bonnet in a flash of white, missing by millimetres. Then it was gone, smashing into the rock wall and exploding.

CJ’s pick-up was rocked by the blast, but she managed to keep it going down the ring road.

Holy shit, she thought. The dragons are throwing cars at me!

There came a sudden shuddering whump and her speeding truck was lifted momentarily off the ground. CJ turned to see that one of the four red-bellied black princes from the waste management hall had landed on the roof of her trailer.

CJ saw its head and she gasped.

Its black-and-red face was horrifically melted and blistered, exposing its jaw muscles and tendons. Some of the spikes of its crest had also melted, causing them to bend over. It was the black prince who had been closest to the jerry can when CJ had shot it, the one whose face had been engulfed in the fuel fire.

It roared at CJ, a shriek of unadulterated rage. Then, one claw at a time, it made its way forward along the top of the empty trailer, coming for her.

As it shrieked at her, CJ could have sworn she heard a garbled electronic voice coming again through her earpiece. It said in a stilted male voice in Mandarin: ‘—Fear… me—’

It was almost as if… no… CJ shook the thought away. That was crazy.

Ahead of her, she saw Hamish’s garbage truck swerve around something, which she quickly realised was an overturned hatchback lying on the road, and suddenly she was almost on it herself, with Melted Face on the trailer behind her.

CJ hit the brakes, causing her pick-up to fishtail past the overturned hatchback, at the same time causing her trailer—with Melted Face on it—to slide right into the overturned hatchback.

The trailer hit the upturned car with a mighty bang and the impact stopped it dead in its tracks, separating it from CJ’s pick-up and sending Melted Face flying forward onto the roadway, tumbling and rolling in a squealing mass of wings, tail and claws.

Never stopping, CJ hit the gas again, righting her pick-up from its dry skid, and now free of the weight of the trailer she zoomed off at greater speed. Within seconds, she was right behind Hamish’s garbage truck.

She pulled up alongside its driver’s door and waved at Hamish, indicating her earpiece.

‘What channel?’ she called.

Hamish pulled Zhang over and asked him, and the deputy director—still wearing his own earpiece—looked over at CJ and held up four fingers.

CJ grabbed her earpiece and flicked it from 22 to 4.

‘Zhang! Can you hear me?’

‘Yes, Dr Cameron,’ his voice came through loud and clear.

‘Where can we go to that’s safe?’

‘About three kilometres up this road is the Nesting Centre, the site of the original dragon nest. It’s secure. We can take shelter there.’

‘Good enough for m—’

CJ’s truck jolted violently and she turned to see Red Face land in the tray of her pick-up, right behind her!

The dragon punched through the cab’s rear window and CJ was showered with glass and suddenly a giant claw was clutching around the cabin trying to get at her.

CJ ducked low, lying flat on the seat of the cab. She couldn’t stay here.

‘Zhang!’ she yelled into her mike. ‘Tell Hamish I’m coming over!’

‘What?’

‘Just do it!’

CJ reached up and hit the pick-up’s cruise control. It now sped along beside the garbage truck as dragons wheeled and banked overhead.

She wriggled across the cab, underneath Red Face’s scrabbling claw, and pushed open the passenger-side door.

Wind rushed into the cabin. CJ saw the garbage truck’s running board only a couple of feet away, the road rushing by beneath it.

Do it now, before you think about what you are doing! her mind screamed.

Then Red Face rammed his head through the rear window of the cabin. His splotchy red head all but filled the little space, and the Bluetooth earpiece in his mouth was still bizarrely beeping, but by the time his head was inside the cabin, CJ was jumping out of it, diving out its right-side door, hands outstretched, hoping to catch hold of—

26

—her fingers latched onto the garbage truck’s running board and they clung on tightly as her boots hit the roadway and bounced wildly.

The now driverless pick-up truck—with Red Face half inside it, half outside it—peeled away toward the rock wall on the left-hand side of the road. The dragon yanked its head out of the cabin and took to the air an instant before the pick-up hit the wall at speed and exploded in a ball of flames.

With CJ dangling from its left-hand side, the garbage truck thundered down the ring road.

‘CJ! You still with us?’ Hamish’s voice came through CJ’s earpiece. He must have appropriated Zhang’s.

‘Just!’ CJ called over the rushing wind.

Whump!

A dragon landed on the garbage truck right above her.

It was another red-bellied black prince. Its hind legs gripped the roof of the garbage truck while it hung upside-down on the side of the big truck, glaring at CJ. It opened its saliva-filled jaws in what could only be described as a broad, self-satisfied grin.

‘CJ! I see it!’ Hamish’s voice called. ‘Go under! Now!’

CJ didn’t bother to discuss her brother’s plan. She grabbed a pipe underneath the running board and swung herself under the speeding garbage truck, the Kevlar backplate of her jacket skimming against the roadway as—

—the garbage truck swept into another tunnel and—

—whack! Hamish swung the truck in close to the tunnel’s mouth, so close that the truck’s left flank hit the mouth of the tunnel, taking the dragon clean off it while the garbage truck continued on into the tunnel, with CJ safely underneath it!

The dragon fell to the roadway, bruised and confused, as the garbage truck sped away.

Then it shook its head, got back to its feet and took off, heading back into the fray.

In the garbage truck’s cabin, Hamish peered at his side mirror.

The creature was gone. But he couldn’t see CJ.

‘You still with us, Chipmunk?’

‘I’m still here,’ CJ’s voice replied. ‘Thanks, little brother.’

‘Can you get to the cab?’

‘I’ll try.’

Hamish said, ‘You know, this is some seriously crazy shit—’

The windshield in front of him exploded inwards. The black-fisted foreclaw of a dragon appeared immediately afterward, quickly followed by the upside-down head of a fourth red-bellied black prince.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Hamish yanked his head back, involuntarily pulling on the steering wheel as he did so, causing the speeding garbage truck to slam against the side wall of the tunnel and kick up sparks.

On the underside of the running board, CJ swung wildly with the unexpected swerve and a blaze of sparks flew up all around her.

‘Hamish! What are you doing?!’ she called.

‘I got a dragon problem of my own up here!’ Hamish yelled.

The dragon in front of him was trying—in a furious frenzy—to tear away the windshield and get inside.

Beside Hamish, Greg Johnson levelled his AK-47 at the dragon and fired a short burst.

The bullets pinged off the animal’s armoured forehead. The dragon barely noticed.

It roared and lashed out, knocking the assault rifle from Johnson’s hand.

As the garbage truck sped on, CJ used all her strength to haul herself out from under it and swing up onto its running board.

The running board—on which the zoo’s garbage men would stand as they went about their work—ran down the rear half of the truck.

CJ saw a steel ladder at the rear. If she could get to it, then she could climb up onto the roof and work her way forward to the cab.

As the garbage truck raced through the tunnel, swerving and weaving, she edged down the running board toward the ladder.

The fluorescent lights of the tunnel whizzed by beside her as she made her way down the side of the speeding truck.

CJ arrived at the ladder, grabbed a rung and hauled herself quickly up it.

She poked her head up over the roof—to find herself staring into the sinister smile of the dragon that had been knocked off the side of the truck earlier!

It was perched on the roof of the garbage truck, tail slinking behind it, its chin pressed against the roof so that its huge head was perfectly level with CJ’s face. It had been waiting for her. It was again grinning its smug, self-satisfied smile.

The dragon sprang forward, snapping, but CJ was quicker. She slid back down her ladder, dropping as the dragon’s jaws came together with a chomp, catching nothing but air.

CJ gasped as she hit the bottom of the ladder.

But she couldn’t stay here. The dragon on the roof would come over the side at any moment.

She turned to look forward just as—whack!—another dragon landed on the side of the speeding garbage truck, its claws piercing the steel wall like can-openers, blocking her path that way.

It was Melted Face.

This is insane, she thought. There were now three dragons on the speeding garbage truck.

And she herself literally had nowhere to go.

Nowhere, except—

‘Hamish!’ she yelled into her earpiece. ‘Open the rear loader!’

‘What?!’

‘Just do it or I’m toast!’

‘Okay!’

CJ edged back along the running board, just as the smiling dragon slunk down the same ladder she had used to escape it. Only two feet ahead of it, CJ swung around the rear of the garbage truck, hurling herself into its rear loader.

The rear tray stank. A hydraulically-operated steel plate—the truck’s compacter—lay before her. Right now it was closed, sealing off the truck’s internal hopper.

Smiley poked his head around the side of the truck, grinning malevolently.

‘Hamish…!’

Up in the cabin, Hamish was leaning as far back as he could in his seat. An inch in front of his nose, his dragon’s claw snatched and clutched, trying to get at him.

He scanned the controls of the cabin, looking for the switch that operated the rear compacter.

He saw it—a red button—and ducking under the snatching claw, quickly hit it.

With a mechanical clanking, the compacter began to open, creating a narrow opening at its base.

CJ dived for the gap as Smiley leapt around into the rear tray. CJ rolled through the small opening, through the remains of some stinking garbage. The gap was big enough for her but not for the dragon. She was clear.

‘Okay, Hamish! Now close it again!’

The dragon attacking the cabin rammed its head through the smashed windshield and roared loudly at Hamish.

Zhang recoiled. Syme ducked. Greg Johnson was frantically trying to regather his AK-47 from the floor. And with the dragon now right in his face, Hamish couldn’t reach the button that operated the rear compacter.

At the back of the garbage truck, to CJ’s horror, the compacter’s steel plate continued to open.

CJ was sitting inside the dark steel box that was the truck’s hopper, pressed up against some compacted rubbish, powerless to do anything about the door that was opening further every second.

The dark silhouette of the dragon outside grew larger.

If Hamish reversed the door now, the dragon wouldn’t be able to get in, but in a few seconds, the gap would be big enough for it to enter and then CJ would be trapped in here with it.

‘Hamish! I need you to close the compacter door right now!’

With CJ’s cries ringing in his ears, Hamish twisted in his seat, narrowly avoiding the snapping jaws of the dragon hanging off the front of the speeding garbage truck.

Then suddenly it managed to thrust its snout through the cracked hole in the windshield and it lunged for his face—

Blam!

Blood exploded from the back of the dragon’s head and the animal snapped backwards.

Hamish turned to see Greg Johnson with his assault rifle levelled in one outstretched arm. He’d fired it into the dragon’s left eye from point-blank range.

The dragon toppled backwards and fell off the speeding truck, dropping to the road beneath it.

The garbage truck bumped as it ran over the corpse.

‘Hamish…!’ CJ ’s voice came in over the radio.

‘Oh, no, CJ…’ Hamish gasped as he hit the red button again, closing the rear compacter.

But he did it too late.

At the exact moment that Hamish hit the switch, the compacter’s door had come fully open, and CJ—her back pressed against the wall of compacted garbage—found herself facing the dragon she had christened Smiley, standing in the rear loading tray of the truck. Smiley had her.

Clenching her teeth, CJ yanked out her Glock pistol, levelled it and—

Click.

‘No!’

Click.

Out of ammo.

Smiley grinned.

And then—thanks to Hamish—the door began to close again.

Smiley saw it lowering, so he just stepped inside the hopper, now only a few feet away from CJ.

CJ couldn’t believe it. Out of bullets and out of options, she was now stuck in here with the dragon.

‘Oh, this is not fair,’ she muttered. ‘Not fucking fair…’

And then she saw it.

A small plastic bottle lying on the heap of compacted trash, one that had somehow avoided being completely crushed in the compacting process. A bottle of turpentine-based solvent.

The door was halfway closed, the gap at its base only four feet high and getting smaller by the second.

CJ grabbed the solvent bottle, unscrewed its cap and threw it at the advancing dragon.

Turpentine sprayed all over Smiley’s face, splattering the dragon’s eyes.

Smiley shrieked, clutching at its eyes.

CJ dashed forward, running low, and scuttled around the reeling dragon before dive-sliding on her belly under the slowly-closing compacter door.

She slid back out into the artificial light of the tunnel—back out into the rear tray—just as the thick compacter door closed with a resounding boom and the squeals of the dragon became muffled.

‘CJ!’ Hamish’s voice came through her earpiece. ‘Are you inside the truck?’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘But one of our dragon friends is. Crush it!’

‘Sure thing!’

A moment later, the compacter door shifted slightly, beginning a powerful pushing motion—a compacting motion that was designed to compress its load of trash against the front wall of the hopper.

The squeals of the dragon inside became high-pitched wails as it realised what was happening.

Those wails reached a crescendo as the compacter closed in on the hapless beast. And then CJ heard a hideous crunching sound as Smiley was crushed to nothing by the compacter.

CJ exhaled a deep sigh of relief. ‘Goddamn.’

27

It was time to get to the driver’s cabin and rejoin the others. But after her previous experiences on the side of the truck, there was only one way she wanted to go: over the top.

‘Hamish, I’m coming to you via the roof!’ she said into her earpiece mike.

‘Roger that. We’re about to come out of the tunnel. There’s another one up ahead. Zhang says there’s a side tunnel inside it that leads to the Nesting Centre. He says if we can get to that, we’re golden.’

CJ didn’t waste any time. She climbed out of the rear tray and hoisted herself up so she could see the roof of the speeding garbage truck.

The roof was clear of dragons. It lay before her flat and empty. The ceiling of the tunnel whooshed by overhead.

CJ leapt onto the roof and, lying on her belly, edged forward along it. The steel roof of the truck was slightly corrugated, allowing her to gain fingerholds.

Then, with a great whoosh, the speeding truck blasted out into brilliant sunshine—and CJ looked up in time to see Red Face swoop in toward her like a dive-bomber and release a hatchback car from its talons!

The little car shot downward through the air and CJ dived forward an instant before the hatchback slammed down onto the roof of the garbage truck and bounced off it, hitting the rock wall on the outer side of the ring road with terrible force.

CJ looked forward: the second tunnel that Hamish had mentioned was still about five hundred yards away.

‘Hamish! Get us to that tunnel before I get pulverised!’

CJ was looking at the approaching tunnel when suddenly the disgusting blistered head of Melted Face appeared right beside her. He was still on the garbage truck, clinging to its left-side wall.

Melted Face rose up from the side of the truck, forelimbs tensed, eyes deadly.

‘CJ, hang on!’ Hamish’s voice called through her earpiece.

The truck swerved wildly, avoiding a smashed hatchback on the road ahead.

Gripping the roof with her fingertips, CJ’s legs were thrown sideways.

The dragon beside her never lost his balance.

‘Hamish! Hit the brakes!’ CJ called.

In the cabin, Hamish slammed his feet down on the brakes.

The garbage truck skidded.

On the roof, CJ grabbed a nearby strut as the inertia of their sudden stop flung her forward.

Melted Face wasn’t so fortunate.

He was flung forward, clear off the side of the truck, and went tumbling end over end onto the roadway.

Hamish saw a sudden blur of black and red fly off his truck and hit the road in front of him. He jammed down on the accelerator pedal.

The garbage truck took off again, burning rubber.

Melted Face—grazed and skinned from the ungainly fall—looked up in time to see the truck’s headlights rushing toward him and he leapt to the side at the last moment as the truck’s front bumper clipped his wing. The dragon was knocked to the ground, flailing but alive.

Now finally free of dragons, the truck sped into the next tunnel.

A hundred metres inside this new tunnel, the garbage truck skidded to a halt in front of a barred gate buried in the outer wall.

This gate’s black iron bars were, if it were possible, thicker than the bars they had seen on any gate so far.

CJ leapt down from the roof and joined Hamish, Johnson, Syme and Zhang at the gateway.

Hamish looked CJ up and down. ‘Got all your fingers and toes?’

‘Haven’t had time to check,’ CJ said. ‘I think so.’

Zhang raced to the barred gate and spoke to two soldiers on the other side. They were dressed in Chinese Army attire, carried modern Steyr assault rifles and their faces were entirely blank.

‘Let us in!’ Zhang said in Mandarin.

The two soldiers said nothing—and did nothing—in reply.

‘I said, let us in!’ Zhang cried.

One of the soldiers said in an emotionless tone: ‘You know they can’t come in here, Deputy Director. The Nesting Centre is off-limits to all unauthorised personnel.’

‘Unauthorised personnel…’ Zhang repeated in astonishment. ‘Are you joking? We’re in the middle of an emergency here—’

‘Not even you can come in here, Deputy Director. You are not authorised.’ The soldier jerked his chin at CJ, Hamish, Syme and Johnson. ‘And we certainly will not allow them in. We have orders from Colonel Bao himself on this matter.’

‘Have you no decency!’ Zhang shouted. ‘We’re going to die out here—’

‘Forget it,’ CJ said, pulling Zhang by the arm and glancing back down the tunnel.

It stretched away, empty and bare.

The dragons hadn’t entered it yet.

She swapped a glance with Johnson before saying to Zhang: ‘If we can’t get in here, where else can we go?’

Zhang was shaking with fury, but he regathered himself. ‘The Birthing Centre, maybe.’ He threw the guards a withering look. ‘If it is not guarded by lowly dogs!’

‘Er, Cassandra…’ Hamish said flatly. He only ever called her that when it was serious.

CJ spun and saw what he was looking at.

The enormous shadow of a king-sized dragon stood in the tunnel entrance behind them, blocking out the light.

The dragon roared, the terrible noise echoing down the tunnel.

‘Come on!’ CJ called. ‘We try for the Birthing Centre.’

28

They all jumped back into the garbage truck and, once again driven by Hamish, it zoomed down the second tunnel. A few seconds later it burst out into daylight.

The road ahead bent to the right, following the curve of the crater wall. They were now at the northwestern corner of the valley. In fact, CJ realised, they were on the section of the ring road hidden behind the screen of cliffs near the casino. She wondered what was back here, what those artificial cliffs concealed.

She scanned the road ahead: there were no tunnels here; the freeway-like road was open to the sky. Two reinforced steel gates, however, bored into the outer wall.

The first of those gates was about three hundred yards ahead of them and it was open.

Zhang pointed at it. ‘That’s the entrance to the Birthing Centre!’

The garbage truck raced toward it.

As it did so, CJ leaned out the passenger-side window to look at the valley behind them, or at least the western half of it.

She saw a red-bellied black emperor perched atop the wreckage of the administration building, bellowing triumphantly. The building was almost completely destroyed: its tower was gone, its front windows were shattered and its domed balcony was in ruins.

Three kings circled the air in front of it, as if guarding the building.

They now consider it their territory, CJ thought.

Right then, however, four Z-10 attack helicopters shoomed over the top of the crater wall, blazing away with tracer fire at the emperor, causing it to take flight.

The Z-10 is the Chinese equivalent of the AH-64 Apache, a gunship with a stepped cockpit, a nose-mounted 30mm cannon, and stub-wings from which hang a variety of anti-tank and air-to-air missiles.

The three dragons surrounding the emperor sprang to his defence and zeroed in on the Z-10s. But the attack choppers unleashed their missiles and suddenly the dragons were exploding.

Two of the choppers hounded the emperor, chasing him across the zoo, their tracers sizzling across the valley like lasers, until one of the choppers loosed an air-to-air missile that banked and swerved after the fleeing emperor, hit it and detonated.

The airliner-sized dragon blew apart in a monumental spray of blood and pulp. Great chunks of flesh the size of boulders rained down from the sky.

‘The empire is striking back,’ Ambassador Syme observed, peering out the window beside CJ.

CJ nodded. ‘This is now a fight between two territorial animals: dragons and humans.’

And human technology, she thought, unleashed in brutal fashion by the Chinese, would ultimately win this battle.

At that moment, the garbage truck skidded to a stop in front of the open gates to the Birthing Centre.

‘Quick! Inside!’ Greg Johnson called, jumping out and ushering them all through the entrance.

They hurried inside. Johnson slid the thick barred gate shut behind them just as another red-bellied black dragon smacked against the bars, screeching wildly.

As the dragon raged at the gate, the group dashed down the darkened tunnel.

CJ ran out in front.

For some reason, the ceiling lights here were out. The tunnel was almost completely dark: the only illumination came from the daylight behind them and from some dim artificial light coming from the other end of the tunnel. The dragon at the gate behind them continued to fume.

About twenty metres down the tunnel, CJ saw a thick steel door sunk into the left-hand wall. It was open. A warning sign on it read DIESEL GENERATORS—NO NAKED FLAMES in English and Mandarin. Inky darkness lay beyond it.

‘I don’t think we’re going in there,’ CJ said. She preferred the dimly lit space at the far end of the tunnel. When it came to fleeing from creatures that could see in pitch darkness, even a small amount of light was better than total blackness.

They kept running and eventually came to a pair of wide security doors, also open.

They passed through them and emerged inside the Birthing Centre. They all stopped dead in their tracks.

CJ swallowed. ‘We shouldn’t have come here.’

29

CJ stared in horror at the Birthing Centre—at what it was and at what had clearly happened in it over the last hour or so.

The centre itself was a broad two-storey-high hall with glistening white-tiled walls and floors. The whole place had a feeling of antiseptic cleanliness.

But it wasn’t clean anymore.

The Birthing Centre was bathed in blood and gore. Dead bodies dressed in lab coats littered the floor; Chinese technicians who had been torn apart by rampaging dragons. Equipment had been smashed. Wires hung everywhere. Lights hung askew from the ceiling, giving off sparks.

The whole space—no doubt usually brightly lit—was cloaked in grim semidarkness.

In the middle of the hall was a broad rectangular pit, about the size of two Olympic swimming pools. A series of catwalk bridges spanned the pit while rung-ladders led down into it.

Two levels of glass-walled offices ringed the perimeter of the hall. They were variously filled with computer servers, microscope labs and centrifuges. There were even a few cages and some rooms fitted with surgical tables and medical equipment.

CJ stopped at the edge of the huge pit and peered down into it.

At its base, about seven feet below CJ, were dozens of rectangular cages packed tightly together in long rows, all half-submerged in a couple of feet of water.

CJ winced at what she saw inside the cages.

Saltwater crocodiles.

Big ones. Huge. And there were a lot of them, maybe seventy all up.

The usually fearsome reptiles, however, didn’t look fearsome at all. Rather, they looked pathetic and miserable, for not only were they being held captive in the tiny cages, but their limbs were manacled to the cages’ walls, immobilising them. At the rear of their cages were flaps that appeared to allow any eggs the crocodiles laid to fall into catching trays. The trays were then taken away on conveyor belts.

The crocs bellowed plaintively.

CJ recognised the vocalisations. She had heard them many times before. They were female calls, the kind a mother croc made to gather her offspring to her. But these calls got no reply.

As she gazed at the wretched crocodiles, CJ thought: They look like battery hens.

The saltwater crocodile was one of the deadliest predators in the world, cunning and intelligent, cold and ruthless. It was hard to feel sorry for one, but CJ found herself feeling sorry for these crocs now.

She saw a smartboard nearby, a kind of high-tech whiteboard. It featured a map of the zoo and some handwritten notes which, curiously, were written in English:

CJ read the handwritten notes. It seemed that the dragons at the Great Dragon Zoo had been doing unpredictable things.

One note asked: Why are they digging?

An arrow beside it pointed at the map, and at a series of randomly arranged Xs marked on it.

The dragons were digging and their keepers didn’t know why.

Other notes referred to the red-bellied black dragons—questioning whether they were of higher status than the other dragons and that perhaps they and the yellowjacket dragons were rival clans. CJ recalled noticing earlier that all of the dragons involved in the initial attacks had been red-bellied blacks.

A rather ominous notation at the bottom of the smartboard read: They are starting to figure us out.

One note, however, captured CJ’s attention: Brain defects in croc-born variants—why are they so aggressive?

‘The croc-born variants…’ she said aloud.

And suddenly the full horrific meaning of the name ‘Birthing Centre’ became clear.

These crocs were battery hens.

CJ now also understood the answer to one of her previous questions: how the zoo could have 232 dragons when the Chinese had at first only found 88 eggs.

The answer was right here in front of her: to breed more dragons for their zoo, the Chinese had been using the ova of saltwater crocodiles—the archosaur’s closest living relative—as hosts for dragon embryos. All the high-tech equipment around the perimeter of the Birthing Centre—the microscopes, computers and centrifuges—was for the purpose of nuclei insemination and fertilisation.

But one needed lots of ova to get just a few viable embryos, hence the water pit filled with female crocodiles.

The scientists of the Great Dragon Zoo had created a donor egg–making factory.

But the smartboard revealed that all had not been well with the Great Dragon Zoo even before the events of today.

‘CJ? CJ, we need you.’ Hamish’s voice snapped her out of her thoughts and she returned to the present.

Hamish said, ‘Which exit do we take?’

CJ saw two possible exits from the Birthing Centre: security doors at each of the far corners of the lab. The one off to her right was closed. The one to her left, open.

She stared at the open door. She wasn’t certain but she thought she could hear a muffled whumping sound coming from the tunnel beyond it.

‘Which one, Chipmunk?’ Hamish asked.

‘We could go back—’ Johnson said, glancing down the tunnel behind them.

They could see the dragon still scratching at the barred entrance, seventy metres away, but then Johnson cut himself off as a new shadow slunk out of the side door halfway along the tunnel and snarled at them. It was another red-bellied black prince with no ears and it was inside the tunnel!

‘Whoa, shit…’ Hamish breathed.

‘Hey! CJ!’ a voice called. ‘Don’t stay out in the open! Get to one of the cages now!’

CJ spun, surprised to hear someone shouting her name in English, and she saw three people cowering inside a cage recessed in the right-hand wall.

The speaker was Go-Go, the pony-tailed Chinese guy she’d seen in the revolving restaurant on Dragon Mountain. With him in the cage was the twenty-something female Chinese grad student he’d been dining with.

The third person in the cage was a handsome Caucasian man wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a lab coat.

They must have sought refuge inside the cage when the dragons had stormed this place and now they were all waving frantically at CJ and her newly arrived group.

CJ peered at the Caucasian man and for the second time that day, found herself recognising someone here at the zoo.

‘Ben?’ she said. ‘Ben Patrick?’

‘Go!’ the man in the lab coat yelled urgently. ‘Before they smell you! There are two of them in the tunnel leading to the Nesting Centre and if they catch your scent—’

A long low hiss made them all turn.

Two red-bellied black princes stood in the open doorway on the far left-hand side of the pit.

They were earless.

Their snouts were smeared with blood. Rags of human flesh dangled from their teeth.

They sprang forward, moving with astonishing speed around the rim of the croc-filled water pit. They ran like jungle cats, with fluidity and balance, their heads held low, their tails held high, their wings folded onto their backs.

CJ calculated her best move in a nanosecond.

She was at the front edge of the water pit. The nearest escape was the heavy door in the right-hand corner on the other side of the pit, if she could get it open.

‘That door!’ she called to the others. ‘Go!’

She broke into a run across the nearest catwalk spanning the pit. Hamish followed. Johnson, Syme and Zhang dashed around the pit.

As she ran, CJ called, ‘Go-Go! What’s the code for that door?’

‘6161!’ Go-Go yelled back.

One of the black princes veered toward CJ and Hamish, bounding onto the catwalk bridge after them.

But the bridge wasn’t designed to carry its weight and as it leapt onto the narrow span, the whole catwalk dropped into the water pit, taking the dragon, CJ and Hamish down with it.

CJ landed flat on her chest on top of a cage containing a very angry female saltwater crocodile.

Only inches away from her face, the croc bellowed and bucked. But there was a thin mesh of steel between them, plus the crocodile’s limbs were shackled.

Hamish landed on the cage next to CJ’s. Being heavier, he created a dent in his and the crocodile inside it roared.

CJ rolled off her cage and leapt to her feet, and standing in the knee-deep salt water, searched for a ladder leading out—

The red-bellied black dragon rose up before her.

Nine feet tall, with its long swooping neck, spike-like crests and fangs protruding from its snout, it towered over her, blocking the way to a rung-ladder on the wall of the pit.

There was nowhere for CJ to go.

The dragon was crouching to lunge when a greenish-brown blur slammed into it from the side and the dragon went flying into the water.

There was a great thrashing and splashing and at first CJ didn’t know what was going on. Then amid all the spraying water, she saw that there were not one but two dragons in it: the red-bellied black prince and another prince, a greenish-brown one.

The greenish-brown dragon was quite possibly the ugliest thing she had ever seen in her life. Where the black prince had a majesty to it, this animal was something else entirely. It was mud-coloured and looked like a cross between a crocodile and a giant salamander.

But it was equal in size to the black prince and a match for it, and the two dragons fought with terrible violence, exchanging blows and slashing at each other with their teeth as they rolled around in the water.

‘Come on!’ Hamish hauled CJ toward the rung-ladder and within seconds they were out of the pit and running for the door in the right-hand corner.

Johnson and Syme were already there. Johnson, ever cool under pressure, was punching in the code and the door unlocked, popping open with a gaseous hiss. They both slid inside it.

Zhang, slower than Johnson and Syme, was still running around the edge of the pit, with the second red-bellied black prince closing in on him. It flew fast and low across the broad hall.

CJ and Hamish hurried for the same door.

They bolted side by side, stride for stride. The dragon saw them, switching its gaze back and forth between them and Zhang, as if trying to choose which prey to go for.

And suddenly Zhang slipped on a puddle of blood and he went sliding clumsily onto his butt across the tiled floor.

It sealed his fate.

The dragon made its choice and descended on him. It all but enveloped Deputy Director Zhang as it came down on him with its claws raised. Zhang screamed as the dragon mauled him, raising his arms in defence, but the dragon just tore his chest apart before biting his throat out.

CJ and Hamish squeezed through the open doorway and Johnson slammed the door shut behind them. The lock clicked. They were safe.

Fifteen feet away from them, through a small window in the heavy door, they saw the dragon feast on Zhang’s body, his still-warm blood dripping from its jaws.

30

CJ turned away from the grisly sight.

Still breathing hard, she took in the dark tunnel in which she now found herself.

The door they’d all just slid through was actually a seriously secure door: it was big and solid—even the glass in its little window was thick—and it had a rubber lining at its edges that created an airtight seal.

As the dragon feasted on the other side of it, cracking Zhang’s bones, CJ could barely hear it. The door was almost soundproof.

‘Everybody all right?’ she asked.

‘Only just,’ Hamish said.

CJ looked down the tunnel on her side of the door.

All the lights were out. The grim passageway ran for about a hundred metres or so, ending at a doorway that stood rather ominously open.

The glare of daylight came through that distant doorway.

CJ started walking down the tunnel toward it.

‘Where are you going?’ Syme asked.

‘Down there.’

‘Why not just stay here where it’s safe?’

‘Because we don’t know it’s safe.’ CJ peered down the tunnel. ‘And we won’t know that till we know what’s on the other side of that door down there.’

She kept striding down the long, dark tunnel. The others took off after her.

The door at the other end of the tunnel was just like the one at the Birthing Centre—thick and rimmed with air-sealing rubber—only it lay wide open.

CJ peered through it cautiously and found herself looking at a compact room with black-painted floors and black-painted walls. A lone door on the opposite wall stood open, allowing daylight to come in.

The black floor and walls left CJ with an odd sensation: she felt like she was backstage at a theatre. Two black-painted side-tunnels branched away to the left and the right, disappearing into darkness.

‘I don’t like this,’ Johnson said, looking around the empty space.

‘What is this place?’ Hamish asked. ‘I’m guessing it isn’t on the regular tour.’

CJ wanted to know the same thing.

She stepped out from the tunnel, heading for the open outer door.

‘Dr Cameron…’ Johnson said. ‘I think you should come back inside the tunnel and get behind this door.’

CJ arrived at the outer door and looked out through it.

She saw a small yet very beautiful valley enclosed by high rocky walls. It had lush savannah grass, a river and a forest. In the exact centre of the little valley was a grass-covered hill on the summit of which was an opulent-looking wooden building. It oozed wealth and privilege. It looked like a golf clubhouse or a hunting lodge.

CJ ’s eyes narrowed.

Stepping out through the door, she looked back—and saw that the entrance to the small room was superbly camouflaged. Its doorway was sunken into a rocky cliff and the door—still open—had rock-camouflage material on its outer side, camouflage that made it blend in perfectly with the cliff.

Hamish came alongside CJ and he saw the camouflage, too.

‘I repeat,’ he said. ‘What is this place?’

CJ was thinking quickly. ‘It’s like a—’

With a squeal, a grey prince-sized dragon came charging out of some nearby bushes, bounding directly for CJ and Hamish.

It spread its wings and swooped at them, doubling its speed in an instant, and CJ glimpsed that it had no ears.

She and Hamish ducked back inside the doorway and slammed the camouflaged door shut and, through a little window in it, saw the dragon pull up short, foiled. It screeched at them, furious.

CJ and Hamish caught their breath, looking out at the raging dragon.

Then the grey dragon’s head exploded, spraying blood all over the little window, and CJ and Hamish yanked their heads back in shock.

‘Dr Cameron,’ Johnson whispered from the doorway to the tunnel, ‘come back here right now.’

CJ turned at his tone and as she did so she saw a shadow emerge from the left-hand side-tunnel: another grey prince, head bent low.

It shrieked as it broke into a run and suddenly CJ and Hamish were sprinting, racing back to the tunnel door. They dived, sliding across the last few feet of floor as Johnson slammed the airtight tunnel door shut behind them and the dragon skidded to a halt outside it, bellowing—

Blam!

The dragon’s head burst apart and dropped from view and suddenly CJ saw soldiers in Chinese Army uniforms fanning out into the black-painted room, guns up and shouting.

‘Clear! Clear!’ they yelled in Mandarin before one of the soldiers came up to the door and peered in at CJ and the others.

‘Ni hao?’ He saw CJ and switched to English. ‘Hello? Please. Open the door. The area is secure. The zoo is secure. You are safe now.’

CJ slumped to the floor, relieved.