The Great Zoo of China

by Matthew Reilly

  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.

  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.’

  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.

  CJ turned to face the fire d
oor 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.