The Great Zoo of China

35

CJ ran quickly but quietly down the wooden boardwalk. The floorboards creaked. The waters of the swamp sloshed with the movements of crocodiles.

Hamish and the others ran behind her, also trying to move with minimal noise.

By now, night had fallen over the zoo, but it was relatively easy to see thanks to the many floodlights mounted on the rim of the crater. The full moon was hidden behind a dense layer of storm clouds.

Then the first drops of rain began to fall, spattering the boardwalk.

As she ran, CJ kept an ear out for another sound: the sound of realisation. When the Chinese discovered that the American witnesses to the bloodshed had not been eliminated, there would be uproar. So far, she had heard no such sounds.

‘CJ Cameron,’ Go-Go whispered as he jogged, ‘can I just say that you are Xena the fucking Warrior Princess! Nice moves back there, honeypie.’

‘Thanks, Go-Go,’ CJ said.

‘It was pretty impressive,’ Greg Johnson said as he came up alongside her. ‘Where’d you learn to build a flamethrower?’

‘High school science class,’ CJ said. ‘Honestly, I was just trying to set them alight, create a distraction of some sort. The grenades were… well…’ She let the sentence trail off. She didn’t mention that her hands had been shaking ever since. She’d never killed anyone before.

‘They got what they deserved,’ Johnson said, looking her in the eye. ‘They were going to kill you and all of us. Right now, the question is: now what?’

CJ regathered herself. ‘Now, we get as far away from this swamp as possible. When the Chinese find out we’re not dead, they’ll send more troops, maybe choppers, too.’

‘Concur.’ Johnson turned to Go-Go. ‘Hey, you. How many helicopters have your army guys got here?’

‘Yo. Salt-and-Pepper. The name is Go-Go or Mr Go-Go, okay? To answer your question, they have seven choppers in total: four of the little Z-10 attack birds, two big Mi-17 gunships, and one of those really big double-rotored transport choppers—’

‘A Chinook,’ Johnson said.

‘Yeah, that’s it. It’s also loaded with fucking guns. The dragons hate the choppers. Hate ’em. I’ve seen a few civilian helicopters here as well, but they come and go and they don’t have any weapons on them that I know of.’

Johnson turned back to CJ as they jogged. ‘So we evade and avoid capture. What then?’

‘The first thing we need to do is find something that can put us in touch with the outside world: a working phone or a computer. We need to call for help and then find a place to hide till someone can come and get us,’ CJ said. ‘I figure the best place to hide is outside this crater, so after we find a telephone, we find a way out. Go-Go, where’s the nearest phone?’

‘The casino hotel.’ Go-Go pointed out over the reeds. ‘Lots of offices and rooms there with heaps of phones and computers.’

‘Where else?’ CJ asked. ‘Give me options.’

Go-Go nodded across the valley to the south, to where Dragon Mountain towered in the rain. ‘The mountain. There’s a maintenance office inside the cable car station. There’s also a manager’s office up in the restaurant.’

CJ looked up at the disc-shaped revolving restaurant at the summit of the peak.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Closer is better, so the casino it is. We stay out of sight, find a phone, call for help, then we get the hell out of Dodge. Everybody okay with that?’

There were no objections.

‘Getting out is going to be next to impossible in daylight,’ Johnson said. ‘We need to do it tonight, under cover of darkness.’

CJ turned as she jogged, appraised Johnson. With his salt-and-pepper hair and clean-cut features, he was kind of handsome, but there was something more to him, something in his sharp grey eyes.

‘Okay, you,’ she said. ‘Since we’re on the run from the Chinese Army in a valley filled with dragons, it’s time to come clean. You’re not just an aide to the US Ambassador, are you?’

Johnson nodded. ‘I’m the deputy station chief for the Central Intelligence Agency at the United States embassy in Beijing. I was a field agent for nine years before I was shot in the line of duty and got sent to Beijing to drive a desk. It was supposed to be a nice cushy office posting. Look at me now.’

‘Why send a CIA agent to a new zoo?’ CJ asked. ‘Did the Agency know about the dragons?’

‘No,’ Johnson said firmly. ‘We didn’t know a thing about the dragons. We knew about the zoo, we knew that it had been planned for years and that it was supersized. But the Chinese outflanked us on the dragons. They kept that very close to their chests. We were totally blindsided.’

‘Then why were you sent here with the ambassador?’ CJ glanced at Syme running along behind them.

‘I specialise in observing China’s strategic nuclear arsenal and other exotic weapon systems,’ Johnson said. ‘One of the ways the Chinese kept this place a secret is that it is built entirely on military land. I got intel a few weeks back that the Second Artillery Corps of the People’s Liberation Army—the division of the Chinese military that controls its nuclear weapons and high-yield conventional devices—had sent three 6,000-kilogram thermobaric bombs to the military airfield adjoining this zoo. My job was to find out why.’

‘There’s an airfield down here?’ Hamish said.

‘A few miles to the southwest of the main valley,’ Johnson said. ‘It’s a mirror image of the civilian airport that you arrived at on the eastern side.’

‘What’s a thermobaric bomb?’ CJ asked.

‘It’s the most powerful conventional weapon short of a nuke,’ Johnson said. ‘It has a blast yield of approximately forty kilotons. A thermobaric device is often called a vacuum bomb. The initial blast will vaporise everything within a 300-yard radius while the ensuing shock wave is far more devastating: it creates a vacuum that literally sucks the oxygen out of the air for a radius of ten miles. Any living thing in that ten-mile radius will be asphyxiated and quite gruesomely, too. Some reports say that the vacuum will suck your lungs right up out of your throat.’

‘What a charming image,’ Hamish said.

‘So it’s a big-ass bomb,’ CJ said.

‘The biggest you can get without going nuclear, yes,’ Johnson said.

‘And you say the Chinese have three of them here?’ CJ said.

‘Yes,’ Johnson said. ‘I’ve been tracking those three thermobaric bombs since the Chinese bought them off the Russians in a very shady deal. I know their serial numbers, their firing codes, even their override codes.’

CJ said, ‘So why would the Chinese bring three of them to a zoo, even if it is a dragon one?’

Johnson shrugged. ‘Now that I know what’s here at this zoo, my guess is that the thermobaric bombs are a failsafe, a last resort in case the Chinese lose control of the zoo and the dragons get out.

‘You blow one of them and you lose a small amount of real estate but you bring down every living animal for miles. It’d fix a dragon problem. Whatever the reason, three of those bombs are here… somewhere.’

They had been running for about ten minutes in the slow-falling rain when they rounded a bend in the boardwalk and the wall of reeds to their right fell away to reveal a striking view.

A long high waterfall stretched away from them to the south. The lake beneath it glistened in the glare of the zoo’s floodlights, the whole vista veiled by drizzling rain. At the other end of the waterfall, about half a kilometre away, rose Dragon Mountain.

In other circumstances, it would have been a beautiful sight, but not tonight.

CJ didn’t like it here. The waterfall was so loud, they couldn’t hear anything coming, a dragon or a chopper. The boardwalk looped away to the left, heading off in the direction of the casino hotel—

Blinding white light blazed to life all around her, coming from above. An enormous Chinese Mi-17 helicopter thundered by overhead, banking low. It pulled up into a hover, its searchlights casting twin beams through the air, beams that centred on CJ and her group on the boardwalk at the edge of the swamp.

Muzzle flashes erupted from the left side of the gunship and the boardwalk was strafed by bullets.

‘Into the water!’ CJ yelled as she dived off the walkway a second before it was shredded by heavy-calibre gunfire.

CJ splashed into the brackish swampwater, right at the point where the reeds met the lake. Her feet found the bottom and she stood once again in the water. She flung her wet hair out of her eyes—

—to find herself staring right into the jaws of a huge saltwater crocodile. The crocodile’s tail slunk back and forth behind it, cat-like. It was a monster of a croc, easily seventeen feet long.

There was nothing CJ could do. The croc had her. She knew it. It knew it.

With a powerful lash of its tail, the crocodile lunged.

36

CJ threw out her right arm in defence and the croc clamped down on it.

She screamed in pain as the croc’s foreteeth slammed down on her shoulder. It felt like being pinned in a giant vice. CJ had expected to feel the hot searing pain of the animal’s teeth piercing her skin, but her yellow-and-black leather jacket—taken from the dead trainer, Yim—had Kevlar plates sewn into its shoulders and the plates had thankfully spared her from that.

Still, the croc had her entire right arm in its mouth and a second later, the big reptile yanked her under.

Another flashing memory of the attack in the Everglades.

The bull alligator has dragged her under, her head in its jaws. Its teeth grate across her cheek. Bubbles and brown water fill her vision.

She has a pocket knife in a pouch on her belt. It is small but sharp.

As the gator swings her into a death roll, almost snapping her neck, she manages to extract the knife.

Everyone has heard that if you stab a gator or a croc in the eye, it might release you—but when your head is in its jaws, that’s all but impossible.

So CJ thrusts her knife into the only place within reach: the alligator’s soft underbelly.

The knife goes in. The alligator grunts in surprise but keeps hold of her, keeps rolling. So CJ just stabs away at its belly, shredding it, tearing the skin apart.

The opening in the beast’s underbelly widens. CJ keeps stabbing. Blood pours from the wound. She keeps stabbing. Guts start falling out.

Finally the rolling slows. The bull is weakening. CJ keeps stabbing. She is fighting for her fucking life and she will not relent. As the roll slows, she jams the knife deep into the animal’s heart.

It exhales loudly… and releases her head.

She falls away from it, staggers onto the muddy shore, her face unrecognisable, her clothes rags.

She collapses in the mud as some employees come running, firing rifles into the air to scatter the other alligators.

CJ blacks out.

She will wake up in hospital two weeks later. When Troy, her fiancé, sees her destroyed face, he leaves her.

This time it was different: this croc had her by the arm.

Her whole arm, from shoulder to hand, was within its mouth. While her jacket had saved her shoulder from being punctured by the crocodile’s teeth, the pressure of its bite was still incredible, the most powerful bite-pressure in the world—well, short of a dragon.

In the previous attack, CJ had been all panic and adrenalin.

That wasn’t the case now. Now she was calm, her mind sharp, and it was her mind that was going to get her out of this.

CJ braced herself for the death roll that was about to come. She had a plan, but she couldn’t afford to break her shoulder in the execution of it.

With a powerful spinning movement, the crocodile rolled and CJ was yanked into the roll.

That’s it, you bastard. Do what you do. But I’ve got a bigger brain than you.

It was trying to drown her, but as it did, CJ did a strange thing: she stretched out with her right hand—the hand that was inside the croc’s mouth—and grabbed hold of a fleshy flap of tissue at the back of the reptile’s tongue and yanked on it hard.

That flap of tissue was the palatal valve and it was incredibly important to a crocodile, since it covered the croc’s tracheal opening when it was underwater, preventing water from going into its lungs.

So when CJ lifted this crocodile’s palatal valve, water began gushing down its trachea.

Now she was drowning it.

The croc didn’t know what was going on. This had clearly never happened to it before: prey fighting back. It began to cough and gag, before…

…it released CJ and swam away, tail lashing.

Free of the croc’s grip, CJ surfaced and sucked in gulps of air. She checked her shoulder. Thanks to the Kevlar plates in her jacket, it was fine, just a little bruised.

She rose into a kaleidoscope of light and sound.

The roar of the waterfall and the thump-thump-thump of the Chinese helicopter filled her ears; the glare of its floodlights created spots in her eyes; and from somewhere she heard Hamish’s voice calling: ‘CJ! Behind you!’

CJ spun. The croc had returned. It had regathered itself for a second attack and was now five feet away.

CJ tensed for round two. She was standing at the edge of the swamp, where the high reeds met the glistening expanse of the lake, her back to the lake.

And then the crocodile stopped.

It didn’t attack. It just stayed where it was, staring at her from a distance of five feet.

Then it did something even more unusual.

It edged backwards.

CJ cocked her head. That just didn’t happen.

She frowned, her mind racing—

Uh-oh…

Slowly, very slowly, CJ turned to face the lake behind her.

There, five feet away from her in the other direction, staring up at her with only its eyes, ears and snout protruding above the waterline of the lake, was the only animal in the world that could scare off a seventeen-foot-long saltwater crocodile.

A two-hundred-foot-long olive-coloured emperor dragon.

The thing was simply immense and it stared at CJ with almost unnatural stillness.

More olive-coloured dragons rose up out of the lake beside it, princes. Three, then five, then seven. A whole pack of them.

Rain pattered down on the water around them. Their slit-like eyes, horned ears and spiky backs were all that could be seen.

‘Swamp dragons…’ she heard Go-Go gasp.

It was then that CJ bumped against something under the surface. She looked down to see a chest-high Perspex retaining wall separating the saltwater swamp from the freshwater lake: the borderline between crocodile and dragon territory.

The gigantic emperor watched her.

But it didn’t attack.

And in a moment of realisation, CJ deduced why.

It still had ears and she was still wearing her wristwatch with its protective sonic shield.

She saw Hamish, Johnson, Wolfe, Go-Go and Syme nearby, also at the edge of the lake.

‘Get closer to the dragons!’ she yelled.

‘Are you insane!’ Wolfe said.

‘CJ!’ Go-Go shouted back. ‘They’re swamp dragons! They’re very agg—’

‘They can’t attack us with our shields! But the crocs can!’

‘Halt! Stay where you are!’ a voice called from a loudspeaker on the chopper overhead. A line of bullet-impacts sprayed across the water’s surface around CJ.

The dragons growled and hissed at the chopper. They’d clearly had bad experiences with gunships before.

CJ saw Johnson raise his newly acquired 9mm pistol up at the helicopter and she wondered what he was doing. A pistol would be useless against a gunship.

Johnson fired three quick shots.

Sparks flared on the side of the chopper, near the top of its cockpit windows.

Johnson grimaced. He’d obviously missed what he was aiming for.

He fired again and this time CJ understood.

A small explosion flared out from the chopper’s fuselage, just above its cockpit windows, and CJ glimpsed something go flying off it.

The chopper’s sonic shield–generating antenna.

The big gunship wasn’t protected anymore.

The response from the swamp dragons was instantaneous.

The emperor swamp dragon rose out of the lake with a mighty roar that drowned out both the sound of the chopper and the gushing of the waterfall.

Rising to its full height, it was impossibly huge. Gargantuan.

The great animal dwarfed the Mi-17—one of the biggest helicopters in the world—its immense body making the chopper look like a toy. It spread its bat-like wings wide as it rose and torrents of water rolled off them. With its pointed ears, skeletal body and immense wings, it looked like an angry demon rising out of Hell itself. The wave of water it displaced as it came out of the lake threw CJ back into Johnson.

The emperor reached out and snatched the chopper with its foreclaws and then dropped back underwater with the ten-ton helicopter in its grip!

The massive chopper went under tail-first, its searchlights tilting upward, sending beams of light lancing into the sky before the whole helicopter simply vanished beneath the waves of the lake, its rotors slapping the surface on the way down. The beams from the spotlights became eerie green glows as the chopper disappeared into the murky depths of the lake. Soon they vanished, too, and the lake became dark again.

‘Holy fucking shit,’ Hamish said.

‘Come on,’ Johnson said, taking CJ by the arm. ‘This way.’

He pulled her through the chest-deep water toward the waterfall.

As she allowed herself to be hauled along, CJ glanced back at the boardwalk and saw what Johnson must have already seen: the bouncing lights of cars and other vehicles coming from the direction of the casino hotel.

‘The casino is no longer an option,’ Johnson said. ‘We go for the mountain. If we cross the lake behind that waterfall, maybe they won’t be able to see us.’

Pulling CJ with him, he plunged through the veil of falling water.

CJ emerged on the inside of the waterfall. It was somehow quieter here, the only noise the steady rush of water. A long rock wall stretched away to the south, hidden behind the cascade. The water here was shallower, only waist-deep.

‘Come on, everyone,’ Johnson called, moving purposefully, gun up. ‘We can’t stop moving.’

The group waded down the length of the waterfall, hidden behind its veil of falling water.

Hamish walked up front behind CJ and Johnson. Hamish had been in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he’d seen some seriously weird shit in those hellholes, but here, now, in this zoo, he was still trying to process everything that had happened.

The whole time the group sloshed along behind the waterfall, they were shadowed by the pack of swamp dragons. The dragons followed close behind them and occasionally—startlingly—poked their heads through the curtain of falling water.

But they didn’t attack. The sonic shields on the watches were still effective.

The swamp dragons, Hamish thought, were easily the ugliest of all the dragons he had seen so far. Perhaps it was simply a colour thing. The yellowjackets, purple royals and red-bellied blacks, with their vibrant colourations, had a kind of style. These olive-green dragons, with their flatter snouts and spotted skin, looked like hideous monsters. The way they lurked in the water didn’t help either, all hunched and craven.

Hamish recalled the ugly olive-coloured dragon that had appeared out of nowhere in the Birthing Centre and attacked the red-bellied black prince.

‘These dragons look different to the others,’ he said to Go-Go as they pushed through the water.

‘That’s because they are,’ Go-Go said. ‘The swamp dragons were the first dragons at the zoo to come out of the bioengineering program.’

‘The what?’ Wolfe asked. He hadn’t gone through the Birthing Centre earlier.

‘The crocodile breeding program,’ CJ said.

Go-Go said, ‘The bosses wanted more dragons, so they utilised female saltwater crocodiles as hosts for dragon insemination. The program eventually managed to produce a lot of “pure” dragons—mainly red-bellies, yellowjackets and eastern greys—but at the start, as the engineers tried to figure out the right gene matrix, it produced an unexpected type of dragon, this species that we call the brown swamp dragon.’

Hamish said, ‘So the swamp dragons didn’t come from any eggs inside the original nest?’

‘That’s right,’ Go-Go said. ‘They are a totally new, entirely man-made, bioengineered dragon—essentially nine parts dragon, one part crocodile—bred right here at the Great Dragon Zoo.’

‘Which is why they look so different to the others,’ Hamish said.

‘Precisely,’ Go-Go said.

‘We saw your Birthing Centre,’ CJ said flatly. ‘Not exactly the nicest place I’ve ever seen.’

‘It isn’t nice. As you would imagine, dragon eggs are a lot bigger than crocodile eggs. Giving birth to a dragon kills the host croc.’

‘What!’ Hamish said. ‘You kill the mother crocodile to get a new dragon egg?’

‘A female crocodile’s birth canal isn’t wide enough to expel a dragon egg, so a Caesarean section is made. This, unfortunately, is fatal for the host mother. I know, I know, it’s callous and cruel,’ Go-Go said, ‘but for my bosses this is an acceptable sacrifice in the pursuit of building an amazing zoo.’

‘Just like we are an acceptable sacrifice,’ Ambassador Syme said.

‘Yes,’ Go-Go said quietly. ‘Just like we are.’

After about fifteen minutes of wading, they reached the end of the waterfall, where they were confronted by a small rocky cliff.

‘I’ll go first,’ Hamish volunteered.

He began climbing. The gushing of the waterfall filled his ears. If there was another Chinese helicopter waiting for them outside, he wouldn’t know it until he poked his head above the top of the rock wall.

After a short climb, he tentatively raised his head above the little cliff… and was immediately assaulted by the harsh glare of a spotlight that came blazing to life.

There waiting for him and the others, its rotors stopped, its spotlight flaring, was a second Chinese Mi-17 helicopter gunship, with a dozen soldiers arrayed in a semicircle in front of it, their rifles pointed right at Hamish.

37

CJ’s ragtag group—Hamish, Wolfe, Johnson, Syme, Go-Go and CJ herself—stepped out from the waterfall with their hands raised.

It was raining more heavily now.

The chopper stood about twenty feet above them, on a stone viewing platform overlooking the waterfall.

Dragon Mountain rose behind it, a steep slope of uneven black rock. A set of stone stairs led up from the waterfall to the viewing platform and then from the platform up the mountain: a hiking path of some sort.

CJ frowned.

The first time the Chinese had found them in the swamp could have been predicted. But this was different. It was as if the Chinese knew where her group had been going. She wondered how—

And then, with her hands raised, she saw the Great Dragon Zoo watch on her wrist, with its little pilot light glowing.

It didn’t just create a sonic shield, she realised unhappily. It probably also had a GPS transmitter in it, so the Chinese could keep track of all their guests.

They’ve known where we were all along.

Looking at her raised hands, she also wondered why she bothered putting them up. These Chinese troops were probably going to execute her and the others right now—

The Chinese captain in charge of this unit—he held a battlefield display unit in one hand and a pistol in the other—barked an order and his men cocked their rifles.

They were going to shoot them, then and there.

‘Aw, heck…’ CJ scowled.

Then something very large flashed between her and the chopper and suddenly the twelve soldiers were only six. The large object was followed by a second one and the next moment, the six soldiers were only one: the captain was left standing there, alone and confused.

CJ snapped to look sideways and saw two earless red-bellied black kings flying away, gripping the Chinese soldiers in their claws, biting down on a couple of them.

The chopper’s pilots reacted instantly. They fired up the Mi-17’s engines and its rotors began to spin.

The captain on the ground ran for the chopper just as, with a hideous shriek, two red-bellied black princes—also earless—came roaring out of the rain-filled sky and knocked him to the ground.

One held him down while the other gripped the captain’s head in its claws and ripped it clean off.

Then the two princes sprang toward the helicopter. Its rotors were beginning to blur with speed and through its canopy, CJ could see its pilots looking out frantically at this new threat.

The two princes hurled themselves right through the Mi-17’s windshield and soon all CJ could see of them was their tails, lashing back and forth as they mauled the pilots, spraying blood all over the side windows of the cockpit.

CJ stared at the attack. The sheer ruthlessness of it was astonishing.

But then she cocked her head to the side. There was something odd about it, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on—

‘Run!’ Johnson yelled. ‘We’re not gonna get many chances like this!’

‘The stairs!’ Go-Go called, pointing at the hiking stairs carved into the mountainside above and behind the chopper. ‘They go past a fire exit in the side of the mountain!’

‘Roger that!’ CJ was already moving, bolting across the viewing platform and passing the chopper, when the two kings returned.

As she dashed past the decapitated body of the Chinese captain, she spied his battlefield display unit on the ground beside his outstretched hand.

She scooped it up and jammed it in the thigh pocket of her cargo pants just as one of the kings swooped over her, low and fast, the wind-gust almost bowling her over—before the big beast slammed hard into its real target, the chopper.

The Mi-17 rocked wildly and the king hit it again and this time, the chopper rolled onto its side, right behind CJ and her group.

CJ and the others dived forward as the huge Mi-17 slammed down onto the ground behind them. Its rotors, now tilted dramatically, fizzed like buzz saws, dangerously close. Weapons and crates went tumbling out of the helicopter’s open side doors, scattering to the ground.

‘Grab a gun!’ Johnson called and CJ snatched up a pistol that had landed near her. Johnson grabbed something bigger, a long rectangular case.

‘Up the stairs!’ CJ yelled, leading the way. Go-Go ran behind her, then Johnson, Hamish, Wolfe and Syme.

CJ bounded up the stairs two at a time, rising above the smashed helicopter just as one of the earless red-bellied black kings landed like a gigantic eagle right next to her and roared at her face! It was classic apex predator behaviour, designed to frighten its prey into a petrified, frozen stance.

But CJ Cameron was no ordinary prey.

She whipped up her pistol and pumped two rounds right into the beast’s left eye.

The dragon screamed and, losing its balance, fell from its perch, dropping away from the stairs and—squelch!—its long neck landed astride the spinning rotor blades of the chopper and the dragon was instantly beheaded, its head falling from its neck in a disgusting spray of blood.

Another shriek made CJ spin around.

The second earless king had seen the first one’s demise and now it was zooming in toward CJ and her group.

‘Oh, man…’ Go-Go gasped.

This time the sight of the flying king dragon coming straight for them with its talons raised, its jaws bared and squealing its hideous attack-scream made even CJ pause. It was coming in fast, way too fast to evade or avoid. Even her pistol would be useless. This was a sight no animal lived to remember.

Then CJ heard a deep whump from her left and suddenly a finger of smoke lanced out toward the incoming dragon, a finger of smoke that had come from the shoulder-mounted rocket launcher that Greg Johnson had extracted from his newly-acquired case.

The rocket hit the dragon and an explosion flared out in the rainy night. One of the dragon’s wings fell away from its body and the big creature’s head lolled lifelessly, but due to its considerable inertia, it continued travelling straight for them.

‘Move!’ Johnson shouted. ‘It’s going to hit!’

CJ took four bounding strides up the stone stairway, closely followed by Go-Go and Johnson.

Hamish, Syme and Wolfe all leapt down the stairs a bare second before the incoming dragon smashed against the stairway at phenomenal speed, turning a whole section of the steps to dust before it dropped to the platform below, broken and dead.

When the dust settled, CJ found they had a new problem.

A twenty-foot-wide void now existed in the middle of the stone stairway, separating her group.

She, Johnson and Go-Go were on its upper side while Hamish, Syme and Wolfe were cut off below.

CJ locked eyes with Hamish as the rain came tumbling down.

‘Get out of here, Cass!’ he called. ‘We’ll find another way up the mountain!’

She knew he was right—they had to go and they had to go now—but she didn’t want to leave her brother.

‘Hamish!’ she yelled. ‘If we can’t find each other, find a radio and do the call we did as kids: 20 at 20.’

‘20 at 20, got it!’ he shouted back. ‘Now go—’

‘Wait!’ She tore off her watch and held it up. ‘Take off your watches! They’re tracking us with them.’ She threw the watch down into the remains of the helicopter.

‘But won’t we lose our shields?’ Syme called. ‘Then the dragons will be able to get us!’

‘We trade one set of predators for another,’ CJ shouted. ‘And those dragons don’t have tracking devices or guns.’

Hamish unstrapped his watch and threw it away. ‘All right, now, go!’

‘Be careful,’ CJ called.

‘You, too,’ Hamish said seriously.

And so CJ ran up the stone stairs, followed by Johnson and Go-Go, drenched by the rain, separated from her brother and without the protective sonic shield of her watch. And without that, she was now exposed to attack from all the dragons in the Great Dragon Zoo of China.

38

A short way up the mountainside, CJ, Johnson and Go-Go came to a shallow cave. Inside it, artfully concealed from outside view, was a red-painted door embedded in a concrete wall. Emblazoned across the door was a sign in Mandarin and English: FIRE EXIT.

‘This is the emergency exit from the mountain,’ Go-Go said. ‘If there’s a fire in the restaurant or the cable car station, the fire stairs lead you here.’

CJ cracked open the door to see a long corridor lit by dim lights. It stretched away for at least eighty metres.

‘There are stairs at the other end of this tunnel?’ Johnson asked.

‘Yuh-huh.’

‘And they’ll take us up the mountain?’ Johnson said.

‘Hope you’re fit, Secret Agent Man.’

‘Let’s hustle,’ CJ said.

They hurried down the concrete tunnel.

Back outside, Hamish Cameron was running hard through the rain, with Wolfe and Ambassador Syme close behind him.

They ran around the base of Dragon Mountain, following a muddy bush-lined trail, their eyes scanning the sky, searching for dragons.

‘Hey,’ Syme said to Hamish as they ran. ‘What did your sister mean by 20 at 20?’

‘It was something we did as kids,’ Hamish said. ‘Our dad was always taking us camping in national parks. If we ever got separated, dad told us to find a ranger shack and get on the CB radio. We were to set the radio to channel 20 and send out a call at twenty minutes past the hour, every hour, until he answered. He would’ve set his own CB radio to channel 20 by then and be waiting for our call. Ergo, 20 at 20.’

‘Nice,’ Syme said. ‘Ever use it?’

‘A couple of times.’

‘Looks like it’s also handy when you’re in a zoo filled with dragons that’s gone to shit,’ Syme said.

‘Yeah.’ Hamish looked behind them as they ran.

As they’d dashed from the site of the side-turned helicopter, he’d seen one of the red-bellied black princes spot them and now he could hear the braying of the dragon somewhere on the path behind them—

Whump!

A second prince landed right in front of him, claws and jaws bared!

Hamish dived right, off the trail, and suddenly he found himself sliding down a steep muddy slope. Wolfe and Syme must have done the same, because he heard them yelling behind him.

They were lucky they did. They slid much faster than they could have run and it gave them a lead on the two dragons. Hamish must have slid for about a hundred metres before he dropped off a ledge and slammed to a halt in a shallow muddy pool. Wolfe and Syme landed with twin splashes and a similar lack of grace behind him.

Hamish leapt to his feet and saw a high curving waterfall to his right, a lake in front of him and the ruined castle on the other side of the lake, all veiled in rain and lit by floodlights.

He knew where they were: they were on the western side of the valley, near the waterfall that their cable car had gone over earlier.

‘Great, we’re back where we started,’ he muttered.

‘Not quite,’ Wolfe said, pointing to their right.

A small building stood on the near shore of the waterfall, with a dock extending out from it and a handful of riverboats tied to the dock.

A shriek from overhead made Hamish look up and he saw the two red-bellied princes fly across the rain-streaked sky.

‘Get to that building!’ he said, breaking into a run.

CJ panted as she bounded up the fire stairs inside Dragon Mountain. Johnson and Go-Go ascended the seemingly endless concrete stairwell behind her.

A hundred thoughts flashed through her mind: images of dragons and crocodiles, Chinese troops with guns and giant helicopters being pulled underwater.

But behind it all, there was something else.

Something about the earless dragons’ attack that nagged at her. It was so coordinated, so deliberate, and yet…

These dragons were intelligent. But as Ben Patrick had said, theirs was an ancient reptilian intelligence and in her experience, a reptilian intelligence always had a purpose. Crocodiles and alligators were utterly single-minded in their thinking. They didn’t do things by halves and the dragons’ attack seemed to CJ to be somehow unfinished.

Unless it isn’t over yet, she thought.

She replayed the various dragon attacks in her mind: first, assaulting the cable car, then using the cable car to storm the administration building and penetrate the waste management facility. Then, just recently, attacking the two helicopters, first in the swamp and then at the base of the mountain.

There had to be a purpose, but right now, she couldn’t see what that purpose was.

After about eight minutes of hurried climbing, the three of them came to a landing at the top of the stairwell.

CJ doubled over, catching her breath.

A fire door branched off the landing. There was also an electrical junction box mounted on the concrete wall. It was open and stuck to the inside of its small steel access panel was a map of the zoo:

As she gazed at it, CJ realised that she’d seen this map before.

It was the map of the zoo’s underground electrical cable network that she had seen inside the master control room earlier.

‘CJ?’ Johnson said, panting. ‘What’s the matter? We gotta keep moving.’

‘Just wait a second—’ CJ said, staring at the map.

Seeing it had made her think of two other maps of the zoo she’d seen since arriving here.

The first was the map she’d seen on the smartboard inside the Birthing Centre, the one with the Xs written on it.

The second was the black digital map she had seen both in the master control room and on Colonel Bao’s battlefield display unit in the hunting area, the one showing all the dragons as moving coloured dots.

In her mind’s eye, CJ recalled the first map, the one from the whiteboard in the Birthing Centre:

She remembered the series of Xs that had been splashed across the map, accompanied by the question: Why are they digging?

The Xs, she thought. They were the spots where the dragons had been caught digging, but the person who marked the Xs on the map—probably Ben Patrick—hadn’t been able to figure out why the dragons had been digging in those places. They seemed so random.

CJ now looked more closely at the map stuck to the inside of the electrical junction box in front of her.

Her eyes zeroed in on the power lines inside the crater:

And suddenly she saw a connection.

‘The power lines…’ she said aloud.

‘What?’ Johnson said, perplexed. ‘What about them?’

CJ said, ‘The Xs on that smartboard map in the Birthing Centre match the electrical power arteries of the zoo on this map. The dragons weren’t digging randomly. They had a plan, a purpose.’

Go-Go said, ‘What are you talking about?’

CJ said, ‘Your dragons have been planning for today for a while, Go-Go. Using their ampullae of Lorenzini, they can sense electrical energy. They’ve been sniffing out your power cables and digging along the power lines, tracing them back to the strongest power surge in the zoo, searching for the source of the zoo’s electrical power. That search led them to’—she jabbed her finger on the map—‘the administration building, the target of their first attack.’

Johnson and Go-Go just stared at the map, astonished.

‘But there has to be something more…’ CJ said. ‘I need to see…’

She tried to recall the black digital map from Bao’s display unit on which the admin building had also featured, but then she realised she didn’t need to remember it.

She had it with her.

Standing there on the landing, she pulled out the iPad-like battlefield display unit she had taken from the headless Chinese captain earlier. She looked at it now:

The cluster of red crosses—representing red-bellied black dragons—massing inside the administration building now screamed out at her.

CJ zoomed in on them.

Most of the red crosses in there were unmoving: she guessed they represented dead dragons.

Except for two crosses.

That were still moving.

And those two crosses appeared to be fractionally outside the crater, inside a passageway of some sort. CJ recalled that the inner electromagnetic dome actually extended a little outside the valley, so the two dragons were contained. That said, they must have been at the absolute extremity of the inner dome.

Johnson said, ‘So let me get this straight. You’re saying that the power cables led the dragons to the administration building. And then the dragons used the cable car and fuel trucks to smash open the admin building and get inside it.’

‘Yes,’ CJ said. ‘And judging from this image, two of them are still in there. Go-Go.’ She held up the BDU. ‘What’s the passageway that those two crosses are in?’

Go-Go scanned the screen and shrugged. ‘It’s a subducting tunnel for underground cabling.’

‘Could a dragon get out of the zoo through it? A prince, maybe?’

‘No. Not even a person could get out through there. After about a hundred metres or so that tunnel ends at a small hole in the wall through which the cables go. It’s a conduit pipe only about a foot wide, so no dragon could fit inside it. That conduit pipe encases the… Oh, no…’

Go-Go paused, his face going ashen white.

‘What?’ Johnson asked. ‘What does it encase?’

CJ already knew the answer. ‘Some kind of main power cable, I’d guess.’

Go-Go nodded. ‘The main power cable, the primary power cable that supplies the whole zoo with power. If you cut that cable, everything goes off, all the lights, all the antennas powering the sonic shields,’ he swallowed, ‘and the inner electromagnetic dome covering this valley.’

‘Surely this place has back-up generators,’ Johnson said.

‘It does,’ CJ said, ‘but they’re offline. The dragons tore them up in the attack. I overheard Ben Patrick and the colonel talking about it.’

Johnson and Go-Go exchanged worried glances.

CJ looked hard at them. ‘Gentlemen, the dragons at this zoo didn’t just launch their attack today on a whim. It was a coordinated plan executed on a day when the staff at this zoo were nervous and off balance. These dragons don’t want to kill us or just cause mayhem. They are executing a carefully prepared plan and the goal of that plan is to get out of this zoo. That’s what they’re doing. The inmates of the Great Dragon Zoo are busting out.’

‘Wait, wait,’ Go-Go said, ‘even if they do bring down the inner dome, there’s still the second dome outside that one. They can’t get out.’

‘Jesus, don’t you get it yet? That’s the whole problem with this place,’ CJ said. ‘You guys have underestimated these creatures from minute one. These dragons are unlike any other animal on this planet. They are smart and they are motivated and I’d be willing to bet they have a plan for bringing down the second dome, too.’

39

The silver Range Rover sped around the northeastern corner of the Great Dragon Zoo of China, its wipers working furiously, its wheels kicking up spray.

Inside it were the two remaining visiting Politburo members, one of their wives and the little girl named Minnie.

After a time, their Range Rover was caught by a second silver Range Rover plus a pair of troop trucks filled with Chinese soldiers.

The second Range Rover contained the three most senior men at the Great Dragon Zoo: Hu Tang, Colonel Bao and Director Chow.

The four-car convoy now sped around the ring road, heading back to the main entrance building via the eastern wall of the valley.

Inside the second Range Rover, Hu Tang’s mind was racing.

This was the worst mishap yet. First, there had been the incident in the river village, when a single adolescent dragon with a faulty pain chip had killed eight people before it had been taken down. Then the breakout last month, when the American expert, Bill Lynch, had needed to be liquidated: nineteen people had died in that one, plus Lynch. But this was bigger again. The clean-up alone, including rebuilding the administration building, would take at least a year.

This was an unmitigated disaster, for the zoo and for Hu Tang’s career. Hu Tang began drafting in his mind the presentation he would have to give to the Politburo, explaining the delay and allocating the blame. He decided he would blame the foreign security consultants.

Just then, beside him, Colonel Bao touched his ear as a report came in.

‘Well, they must be somewhere on Dragon Mountain then!’ Bao barked. ‘Send in Recon One. Tell them to find those Americans and kill them or I’ll put them in front of a firing squad.’

Bao turned to the others. ‘The Americans got away from our men in the swamp. We used the GPS chips in their watches to track them to the other side of the waterfall but then some dragons attacked; they destroyed another of our choppers and killed our men. The Americans got away and now we’ve lost their GPS signals. They must have taken off their watches.’

Hu Tang said, ‘They cannot be allowed to get out of this valley. Too much is riding on this.’

‘I understand,’ Bao said.

He touched his earpiece again as another report came through. ‘In the administration building? Underneath it?’ The colonel frowned. ‘If it’s a dead end, then send Recon Two into the tunnel to kill them.’

‘What was that?’ Hu Tang asked.

‘It seems there are still two red-bellied black dragons inside the administration building. They’re in an underground cable tunnel that branches off the waste management facility. The stupid animals must think it’s a way out. They’ll be dead soon. As will our American guests.’

A few minutes later, a squad of twelve Chinese ‘reconnaissance’ commandos arrived at the tunnel entrance to the waste management facility.

These men weren’t regular infantry troops. They were special forces, which meant they didn’t carry Chinese knock-offs of Russian-made assault rifles. They carried German-made Heckler & Koch MP-7 submachine guns with special compact M40 grenade launchers under the barrels.

The vast concrete hall looked like a war had been fought in it, which wasn’t far from the truth. Dead bodies and debris lay everywhere; garbage trucks were overturned; there were even a few dead dragons in places around the hall.

The huge external gates on the western wall still stood resolutely closed. Slanting rain blew in through their massive bars. The gates had withstood the dragons’ onslaught.

The commando team’s leader spotted a nondescript door over in the far corner of the hall, to the left of the external gates.

It was an access door to a subducting tunnel. The tunnel, he’d been informed, was basically a passageway that contained bundles of electrical and communications cables; it allowed engineers to access the cables in the event of an overload or shutdown. About a hundred metres in, the tunnel ended abruptly. It just stopped at a pipe into which the cable bundles disappeared. A dead end. The two dragons inside it would be sitting ducks.

‘Base, this is Recon Two, we have arrived at the waste management facility,’ he said into his throat mike. ‘Have spotted the subducting tunnel. Preparing to make entry.’

‘Copy that, Recon Two,’ came the reply in his earpiece.

‘Men. Ready your weapons.’

One after the other, the team of crack Chinese commandos raised their MP-7s and fanned out across the waste management facility, heading for the subducting tunnel.

40

CJ turned to face the fire door leading off the landing.

‘Okay, Go-Go,’ she said, ‘on the other side of this door is…?’

‘The cable car station. We’re halfway up the mountain.’

‘And there’s an office in there somewhere with a phone or a computer?’

‘Yes. The maintenance office. It’s in the corner of the station.’

‘Okay, let’s do this.’ CJ gripped the handle and cracked the door open an inch. The space beyond it was bathed in flickering darkness. She peered out through the gap—to look right into the jaws of a lunging king dragon!

CJ fell back with a shout, landing clumsily on her butt, only to hear Go-Go chuckling softly.

CJ looked up and saw that the dragon looming above her was in fact a life-sized stone carving of a king dragon cut from the rocky wall of the station.

She kicked herself. She’d forgotten about the giant carvings of dragons in dynamic poses that ringed the station. She saw the rest of them now, lunging from the walls in the strobing light.

She opened the door fully and beheld the wide, high space that was the cable car station. As she did so, Go-Go stopped chuckling.

There was carnage and wreckage everywhere.

What had until recently been a slick and modern area—with new concrete and shiny steel—was now the site of a grim bloodbath.

What little light there was flickered on and off. Only a few of the station’s fluorescent light bulbs were still working: the rest had all been smashed. Exposed wires sparked intermittently, giving off the strobing blue light that made the statues seem alive.

CJ recalled the team of electricians she’d seen here earlier, including the young one who had clumsily dropped his tools and clips.

Their dead bodies lay in pieces on the floor—heads, arms, torsos, legs. A huge double-decker cable car lay tilted at a crazy angle beside the platform, nose up, ass down. It looked like it had been savaged by dragons: all its windows were smashed and one of its walls was completely peeled away.

The station’s platform kinked at a ninety-degree angle. It was here that the cable cars made their turn. The overhead steel cable disappeared down two concrete tunnels: it came in from the south and exited to the east. A chill wind whistled eerily as it swept through the long tunnels.

There was no movement.

No dragons.

‘That’s the maintenance office.’ Go-Go pointed at a two-storey glass-walled structure in the corner of the station. Its upper storey had slanted windows and nearly all of them had been smashed.

CJ hurried toward it.

The three of them raced through the maintenance office’s lower door and hustled up some internal stairs before bursting through an open doorway.

The maintenance office had been ripped to shreds. Two dead Chinese technicians lay on the floor, their throats ripped out, their stomachs torn open. The main console had been wrenched apart. Naked wires sparked. Blood dripped off every surface.

And every computer screen was smashed.

Johnson tapped on some keys. ‘All these computers are useless.’

CJ found a phone on the console. It had been cracked in two, broken beyond repair.

‘We try the restaurant,’ she said.

A clunking noise from above made them all look up.

A ceiling panel came free and CJ tensed… only to see a fearful young face appear from behind the panel, the face of the young Chinese electrician from before, the man named Li.

‘Hello…?’ he said softly.

‘Li?’ CJ helped him down. ‘Are you okay?’

He nodded quickly.

‘The dragons attacked your team?’

He nodded again. ‘Some red-bellied black princes and a king,’ he said in Mandarin. ‘They had no ears. We were working under the cable car here, relying on its sonic shield, so none of us was wearing our watches. But the cable car’s shield was useless against them.’

CJ glanced around nervously. She didn’t like this place at all. There weren’t enough exits. It was too easy to get trapped.

‘We shouldn’t linger here.’ She began to move. ‘We make for the restaurant—’

She cut herself off, glimpsing movement in her peripheral vision: she could have sworn one of the dragon statues outside had moved. No. It was just a trick of the flickering light. It was only a statue.

Then the statue really did move.

It turned its head to face the maintenance office and looked CJ right in the eye.

It was a purple royal, king-sized, with high pointed ears.

With a roar it bounded forward, lunging at the maintenance office’s upper windows.

‘Look out!’ Johnson pushed CJ sideways as the big dragon’s foreclaws came rushing in through the shattered windows.

CJ fell one way, while Go-Go and Li dived the other way, but Johnson’s reaction had put him in the middle and two of the dragon’s razor-sharp talons slashed across the front of his body, drawing twin sprays of blood across his chest up near the left shoulder.

Johnson slumped instantly, dropped to the floor.

The dragon roared, its bellow shaking the little room.

CJ crab-crawled over to Johnson, ducking beneath the dragon’s slavering jaws, threw his good arm over her own shoulder and hauled him away.

‘Can you run?’ she asked.

‘Just,’ Johnson groaned.

With Johnson looped over her shoulder, CJ raced to the door leading downstairs, reaching it just in time to see two purple princes arrive at the base of the stairs below, spot her and roar.

‘Shit…’ she said.

‘What the fuck do we do!’ Go-Go yelled.

CJ slammed the door, locked it and turned just as the king’s entire head came smashing into the maintenance office in a rain of glass.

Ducking below it, CJ saw the upturned cable car just outside the windows: the roof of its raised nose-end was level with the windows. The cable car’s lower end lay over near the catwalk that led to the guest elevator.

‘Go-Go, Li, follow me. Johnson, I need you to give me everything you’ve got!’

Without any further pause, she ran across the maintenance office, staying out of the reach of the king dragon. She skipped up on a chair and with Johnson beside her, leapt up onto the control console and then out the shattered window, past the dragon and onto the roof of the upturned cable car, where she slid down its length, dragging Johnson with her.

They slid wildly, past the king dragon, its head still thrust inside the maintenance office.

After they’d slid for about ninety feet, CJ threw out her left leg and caught the edge of the grated catwalk leading to the double-decker guest elevator. She and Johnson came to an abrupt halt.

Li and Go-Go slid to matching halts beside her.

CJ looped Johnson’s arm over her shoulder again and made for the elevator. They got there with Go-Go and Li close behind them. CJ punched the call button.

A deafening roar answered her.

CJ turned.

The purple royal king was glaring right at her from the other side of the cable car platform. Its two princes were at its side, also staring at them, snarling.

Ping!

The elevator doors opened. CJ slipped inside it with the others.

The king growled, a deep resonating noise, and then it and the princes attacked.

As the elevator doors began to close with frustrating slowness, the king bounded across the void, kicking the double-decker cable car out of the way as if it weighed nothing, while the two princes took to the air and flew across the void at incredible speed. CJ willed the doors to close, because right now they were all that stood between her and certain death.

The doors joined, closed, just as—wham!—the whole elevator rocked as the king dragon rammed it from the outside.

But the elevator was away.

They were clear.

CJ breathed a sigh of relief.

Until a few moments later when the floor of the elevator began to get torn apart.

41

‘Oh, you have got to be kidding me!’ she said as she saw the claws of the two prince-sized purple royals appear through the floor of her double-decker elevator, tearing through the plush carpet, ripping it away with frenzied slashes.

They must have got into the lower level of the elevator before the doors had closed and now they were trying to claw their way through the floor separating the two decks.

‘How long till we reach the restaurant?’ CJ asked Go-Go quickly.

‘Maybe thirty seconds, I don’t know,’ Go-Go said, staring at the frenzied clawing of the two dragons.

The flooring of the elevator wasn’t exactly a complex feat of engineering. It was just carpet over aluminium sheeting and beams. The two dragons punched up through the sheeting, cracking it.

‘We’re not gonna make it…’ CJ said, looking upward, as if she could see the approaching restaurant.

The two holes in the floor were growing larger by the second. Then one of the dragons managed to shove its head through the gap and snarled at CJ. She slid forward and kicked it square in the nose. The dragon squealed in pain and dropped back down to the lower level.

Then the second dragon squeezed its shoulders and one arm up through its hole. It was ready for CJ’s kick: it batted her boot away with one of its foreclaws.

The dragon rose up out of the hole in the floor, first its head, then its chest. It bared its teeth—

Ping!

The elevator doors opened.

CJ lunged out of the elevator with Johnson on her shoulder and Li and Go-Go at her side. The dragon broke through the floor completely and bounded after them.

CJ flung Johnson across a table and dived over it after him as the beast spread its wings to cover the last few feet and—

Braaaaaack!

The dragon was pummelled with a spray of automatic gunfire and it dropped out of the air on the spot, collapsing in a tangle of spasming wings. It squealed until a final round slammed into its head and it flopped to the floor, dead.

CJ looked up to see a team of ten Chinese soldiers—dressed in black and brandishing better guns than any of the other Chinese soldiers she had seen—standing in a semicircle before her.

A Chinook helicopter—the biggest chopper she had seen so far—patrolled the air behind them, its spotlight blazing, illuminating the mountaintop restaurant with blinding white light.

The second dragon obviously didn’t know of its comrade’s fate, because it came screaming out of the elevator a second later, only to suffer a similar end. It was torn apart by a hail of gunfire from the waiting Chinese commandos.

Then all was silent, save for the rhythmic thumping of the helicopter outside.

CJ, Li and Go-Go stood and raised their hands. In CJ’s case, she threw down her pistol. Johnson remained on the floor.

CJ glanced to her right and saw, behind the maître d’s counter, an open doorway leading to an office: the restaurant manager’s office. On a desk inside it, she saw a computer and a phone: the computer was on and the phone’s lights blinked.

So near yet so far.

The ring of Chinese commandos closed in on them. They had saved their lives, sure, but only in the act of saving themselves from the two oncoming dragons.

That would be the last act of kindness they would show her, CJ thought, for as she looked at their hard faces, she realised that these commandos had been sent here to kill her.

At exactly the same time as this was happening, over in the waste management facility the other Chinese special forces team was in the process of entering the cable subducting tunnel.

They moved down it in single file, guns up. The concrete-walled tunnel was only a few feet wide, but it was well lit by overhead fluorescent bulbs.

As he moved along the tunnel looking down the barrel of his gun, Recon Two’s point man glanced up at the many cables running along the roof and walls of the passageway. One extra-thick black cable ran directly down the centre of the ceiling, dominating it: the primary main.

The point man rounded a bend and suddenly a monstrous apparition that was all claws and slashing teeth dropped from the ceiling above him and the man fell under the weight of a red-bellied black dragon.

His comrades opened fire and the tight concrete tunnel echoed with gunfire. The frenzied dragon managed to take down two more men before it was shot in the head and it dropped to the floor, dead.

The Chinese team stepped past its body, rounding the bend fully, their guns up, tensed for another attack. There was, after all, one more dragon down here.

They saw it.

The other earless red-bellied black prince was at the very end of the tunnel, but oddly, it had its back to them.

It was at the spot where all the overhead cables came together and disappeared into a small conduit pipe that led southwest.

The recon team’s leader frowned. The dragon was tearing away with all its might at all the cables. It used its claws and its teeth. Sparks flew. Wires fell every which way.

‘What the hell…?’ the leader breathed.

The dragon severed a final cable—the primary main—and immediately, one after the other, all the fluorescent lights in the ceiling went out and the tunnel was plunged into darkness.

Then the dragon rounded on the commando team and launched itself at them.

All across the Great Dragon Zoo of China, electrical power was extinguished.

Every single light went out.

All the lights inside the main entrance building, in the administration building, in the casino hotel.

All the streetlights flanking the ring road.

All the floodlights mounted on the rim of the crater and atop Dragon Mountain.

And all the pilot lights on every single sonic shield–generating antenna on every wristwatch, car and building in the zoo.

Inside the master control room in the main entrance building, all the monitors winked out and the room went dark.

The head technician yelled, ‘What just happened!’

‘Sir! Power’s out across the zoo!’

‘Switch to back-up power.’

‘Generators are offline, sir. We do not have back-up power. Repeat, we do not have back-up power.’

‘What about the electromagnetic domes?’

‘The inner dome is on the same grid as we are, sir. It’s off…’

The head technician snatched up his desk phone but he got no tone: all the phones were dead, too.

‘Sir,’ one of his techs said. ‘The sonic antennas are all just receivers, as are all the watches. They have no power themselves. If the main power supply is gone, they’re useless. Every building, vehicle and person in this zoo just lost their protection from the dragons.’

The entire zoo was plunged into darkness.

In an instant, the Great Dragon Zoo of China was taken back to the Stone Age.

And with the coming of the darkness came the sound of beasts that had thrived in a more ancient time.

Dragon calls rang out across the valley, and with the calls came movement and suddenly the sky above the crater was filled with the gigantic creatures, all moving with purpose.