Robin's and Nick's journalistic instincts were aroused. They both wanted to proceed.
Michael Sullivan was pensive but resolute. "We have to do something to help," he said simply.
Even the prima donna Leena Sims seemed to agree. She nodded every time someone pointed out another good reason to go.
Finally, Shelly threw up her arms in surrender.
"Okay," she relented. "Let's go to Antarctica!"
Tuesday, December 12, 2000, 12:36 P.M.
Pudong New Area
Shanghai, People's Republic of China
Despite the weird communications blackout that affected the whole world, it was business as usual in the Pudong New Area - a glittering, bustling capitalist zone in the middle of Communist China. Though the phones and fax machines were not working, electricity, self-contained computers, and the citizens of Pudong New Area certainly were.
But as the sun shone overhead, noon arrived - and that meant lunch. Many of the people who worked in the towering glass-and-steel skyscrapers began filing out into the busy streets and plazas to buy a meal at the many food stalls that serviced the brand-new city. Lines were long, and secretaries spent the time in gossip. Executives eyed the competition warily, or traded stock tips.
Towering over all were two unique structures. One of them, the Jin Mao Building, was the tallest structure in Asia. The other, called the Pearl TV Tower, looked like a huge oil rig covered with glass. It, too, was one of the tallest buildings in Shanghai, and a symbol of the new China.
In the 1980s, the land on which Pudong New Area now stood was muddy farmland, used for growing food to feed the people of Shanghai. But with the coming of the early 1990s, and new economic initiatives by the Chinese government, development began.
Now skyscrapers replaced rice paddies, and Pudong New Area featured a new transit system and a coal-burning electric-generating plant. The first stages of construction on a new international airport were already under way.
Two massive bridges and several commuter tunnels now connected Pudong New Area with Puxi, central Shanghai. Each day hundreds of thousands of people crossed those bridges to go to work in this shining capitalist powerhouse.
Deep beneath the ground, in the newest tunnel under construction - a wide, two-tier shaft for commuter trains - Chinese and Japanese engineers were searching for the source of a leak in the walls of the brand-new structure. When workers reported for duty in the deepest section of the tunnel that morning, they found the floor covered with water.
The leak was puzzling. There had been no sign of trouble when the men quit work the day before, and night crews, who worked on the entrance of the tunnel in the heart of Pudong New Area, had heard nothing unusual.
But now tons of brown, muddy river water were pouring into the tunnel. As the men walked through the wide shaft, the electricity suddenly died, leaving the engineers in pitch-darkness.
One of the Chinese foremen leading the consultants pulled a flashlight from his belt. But before he could turn it on, the entire shaft echoed with a strange, supernatural noise that sounded like the hissing bellow of a huge beast.
The electric lights flickered once, then came on again. One of the engineers pointed into the distance and screamed at the nightmare vision that the lights revealed.
The gigantic face of a traditional Asian dragon was emerging from the deepest part of the underground pit. Its huge eyes seemed to gleam in the darkness. Its snout had strange antenna-like tendrils, which flared back from its wide nostrils. The creature hissed again, and a pointed tongue flicked out of its massive, tooth-lined maw.
As one, the men in the tunnel bolted. As they raced for the entrance to the shaft, they passed lines of scaffolds with dozens of workers toiling away.
"Run! Run!" an engineer cried.
The workers exchanged uneasy glances. Then the creature burst out of the tunnel and was on them. Laborers screamed and died as the creature slithered past them, tearing down the scaffolds. Men spilled to the floor of the cavern, where they were crushed beneath the creature's heavy scaled body.
As workers spilled out of the mouth of the tunnel and ran through the muddy construction site, the mammoth dragon thrust its head out of the mouth of the tunnel.
From dozens of nearby buildings, scores of office workers saw the monster emerge from the pit. Many were struck with supernatural dread as a figure from Asian mythology uncoiled to its full length outside the tunnel.
At one of the food stalls near the construction pit, an ancient Chinese woman, who had lived in Pudong New Area when it was just a muddy bog full of vegetable plants, saw the creature. Instantly the old woman recalled the legends of the region, and one story in particular - the story about an ancient dragon that lived in the bog.
"Manda! It's Manda!" the woman cried, pointing at the monster that slithered through the ultramodern streets of the New Area.
As the old woman gathered up her wares and pushed her food cart out of harm's way, she began talking to herself. "Aiiiee, I always knew this place had bad feng shui," she muttered, waving her hand to ward off the evil spirits. "The stupid fools built the Pearl TV Tower on the dragon's eye, and now it's coming to tear down the building."
As she ran away, food and cooking utensils dropped off her cart, but she did not slow.
With short, stubby forearms, the dragon called Manda pulled itself over the low construction buildings surrounding the tunnel site. As it passed, a tall crane plunged to the ground and a bulldozer was reduced to scrap metal. The mammoth creature was a silvery gray color. Its large head was framed by tufts of woolly hair and punctuated with two elongated eyes that scanned the area with an evil intelligence.
Manda's long, snakelike body had four short legs that ended in grasping, curved claws, similar to a bird of prey's.
The creature had a length of 150 meters and probably weighed 30,000 tons. Its body was entirely covered with overlapping scales. As Manda uncoiled to its full length and began moving in the steel-and-glass canyon of Pudong New Area, it smashed aside buses, cars, and the tiny food stalls that clustered around the large buildings. The citizens fled before the dragon, while civil defense sirens began to wail in the distance.
But there was no one coming to save Pudong New Area - all communications were out, and no one outside the city knew that the district was in any danger ...
Tuesday, December 12, 2000, 4:39 P.M.
Aboard the Yuushio-class submarine Takashio
Under the East China Sea
After failing to make contact with Japan - or anyone - in the past few days, Captain Sendai continued with the primary mission of Japanese submarines on patrol in the world's oceans: locate and track Godzilla's movements.
The Takashio had followed the monster since stumbling across it in the Sea of Japan, near the coast of Hokkaido. Godzilla had moved parallel to the Japanese coast since then, with the Takashio in pursuit.
Captain Sendai was glad that he'd refueled and resupplied the submarine at a naval base before embarking on this mission. They had many days of sailing ahead of them before they would have to return to Japan for resupply. And if they were to lose Godzilla, the elusive creature would be difficult to locate again.
To the captain's surprise, Godzilla suddenly changed direction after passing through the Korea Strait. Now he was moving away from the Japanese mainland. Though that brought relief to all aboard the Takashio, the officers were curious as to why Godzilla had moved into the East China Sea, toward the southeast coast of mainland China. Captain Sendai realized that the creature might soon lead them into Chinese territorial waters, which could cause an international incident.
With the submarine following, Godzilla soon increased speed - as if rushing to a rendezvous of some kind. And as they neared the Chinese mainland, the submarine's powerful sonar began to pick up loud sounds, which were carried to them through kilometers of ocean.
When the sonarman and the sound technician put the noise over the intercom, Captain Sendai and th
e others on the crowded bridge listened intently. Finally, the captain said what the other submariners were thinking.
"It sounds like a battle," Sendai announced. He scanned the illuminated map table. "The sound is coming from the area around Shanghai."
Then the captain looked at the sonar screen at his command station.
"And Godzilla is heading right for it," he whispered fearfully.
13
MONSTERS FROM THE SEA
Tuesday, December 12, 2000, 9:03 A.M.
Somewhere along the shores of the Caspian Sea
Craig Weedie, INN's famed Backpack Adventurer and spokesperson for Fellow Traveler Publishing Company - the publishers of the popular series of international travel guides - found himself stranded.
It wasn't the first time, and it wouldn't be the last. Sometimes things got intense on the road, but the life of a Backpack Adventurer was always intense.
It was also one of the greatest jobs in the world.
Craig Weedie got to travel all over the world, he was on television every week, and he made a lot of money. He had no bosses, no one to report to - up to a point, that is. As long as he taped his weekly appearances for Teen Beat and wrote a few introductions for the Fellow Traveler Travel Guides, everything was fine.
Craig Weedie was totally free. He didn't even bother to drag a film crew around with him. He merely traveled to the nearest large city with an INN affiliate and taped his weekly report. Then he moved on to the next destination. He was free to go where he wanted, when he wanted - and the Fellow Traveler Publishing Company paid for everything!
It was the best life possible for a nineteen-year-old from Athens, Ohio, and he was lucky to have it.
In the last two years, Craig had done it all. He ran with the bulls in Spain, hiked through Tibet with Richard Gere, and explored the wreckage of the Titanic with science reporter Nick Gordon. It had been fun and rewarding.
But it all came to an end on Sunday, when civilization collapsed. Suddenly Craig Weedie, international citizen-at-large, became a foreigner in a strange land where he didn't speak the language.
Worse still, he was nearly penniless.
And all because of a stupid monster that probably doesn't exist in the first place.
Craig bitterly regretted his futile search for the monster called Anguirus - named after some local legend or something - in the beginning of the cruel Russian winter.
It started out innocently enough. He'd done a tongue-in-cheek story about monster sightings on the Caspian Sea a couple of weeks before, and a lot of viewers liked the segment. Craig was having a good-enough time in the towns around the Caspian Sea, so he stayed for a few weeks. The whole region was in the middle of an economic boom because of the vast, previously untapped oil reserves that were only now being exploited.
During his time on the shores of the Caspian Sea, he even went out on a fishing boat to film a report at the last place the creature had been spotted. Weedie also interviewed people who claimed to have seen the sea monster.
Someone at INN's art department in New York had drawn a sketch of the monster, based on eyewitness reports that described the creature as a huge reptile with a head like a crocodile's and a spiked, turtlelike shell.
Craig, of course, had never seen the creature - and doubted that it ever existed. He wondered cynically how much the people near Loch Ness made cashing in on their monster - in tourist dollars alone!
Just as Craig was getting bored with the story and with Russia, a real monster arrived - the thing called Gigan. Before the communications meltdown, Craig had seen the reports about the creature's rampage through the Baikonur and Kapustin Yar cosmodromes on Russian television.
Craig sensed it was time to go. He filed his last story of the Caspian monster - a clever piece in which he contrasted the charming local folklore about Anguirus with the horror that was Gigan - and then scheduled a chartered airplane to leave the region. The dreary village in which he'd been staying had finally gotten to him.
Then things fell apart. The blackout began, and Craig's chartered seaplane never arrived. Now he was down to his last traveler's check.
Before the blackout, all he had to do was call INN's financial department in New York, and they would wire him funds - usually within minutes. And if that didn't work, Craig had a wallet full of credit cards, along with his U.S. passport.
But without communications, credit cards were just useless plastic. And he hadn't been able to contact the next town - let alone New York City - in days. Money became a big problem. Since he'd gotten a visa to enter the Russian Republic, Craig was used to bribing people to get what he wanted. Now he didn't have enough money to buy a meal, and he was stuck in a town filled with people as hostile toward the Russian government as they were toward strangers - especially strangers who couldn't speak the language.
So Craig Weedie finally left the village he'd been stranded in yesterday morning, without checking out of the hotel. He couldn't afford to pay the bill, anyway. When and if civilization returned, he'd get INN to pay the bill. If not, it didn't matter anyway.
Wearing his down parka and a backpack crammed full of gear for the harsh winter, Craig set off on foot. He took the road that led to the Russian military base at Peliograd, about fifteen kilometers away. He was lucky enough to get a ride with a local laborer for part of the way, and that saved him some time. But he didn't cover the full distance on the first day of the trek, as he had hoped.
After spending a cold night in a remote area on the shores of the Caspian Sea, Craig rose, folded up his insulated thermal tent, rolled up his sleeping bag, oriented himself, and proceeded to walk the remaining five kilometers or so to the entrance of the base at Peliograd.
The day was bright, sunny, and crisp - a little mild for this time of the year, but he didn't mind. Temperatures could easily have fallen to minus fifty. As he walked, Craig recalled the first time he'd made this trip along the shore of the Caspian Sea. He had gone to Peliograd a few weeks before to interview General Kolgan, the commander of the base, as part of his sea monster story. Some of Kolgan's soldiers had been loading a patrol boat when they spotted the creature - they claimed.
Craig and the general had gotten along well, and Craig presented the man with his own Sony video-cassette recorder - Craig knew he could always wheedle another one out of the folks at Fellow Traveler. Craig liked and trusted the general, and hoped that the Russian would have a cot for him to sleep on until the blackout passed or until he could arrange transportation to Moscow.
But as the American trudged up a steep, rocky hill that overlooked the sea and the shore ahead of him, he noticed plumes of smoke rising in the distance. Craig hurried up to the top of the hill. Breathing heavily from the exertion, he dropped his backpack and drew out his binoculars.
Squinting through the lenses, he focused on the Russian military base in the distance. Then the American gasped.
An unbelievable sight greeted him ... two of them, in fact!
Pudong New Area
Shanghai, People's Republic of China
The first civil authority to respond to Manda's invasion of Pudong New Area was the Chinese Navy, which dispatched ships and helicopters. Despite a total lack of radio communications, the navy managed to mount a well-organized and effective counterattack.
A Chinese naval officer who was enjoying leave brought the Chinese Navy its first warning. The sailor had been on his way to meet his girlfriend, who worked in Pudong New Area, when he saw Manda emerge from the construction site. The officer immediately appropriated a motorcycle from a messenger and sped to the Chinese naval yard at Jiangnan, on the coast of the old town of Shanghai.
Admiral Lu'un, an experienced blue-water naval officer, immediately took control of the defense of the city.
The admiral quickly formulated a clever plan using the resources he had at his fingertips. He scrambled a flight of six brand-new Mil Mi-28 Havoc attack helicopters belonging to the Chinese marines. The attack helicopters we
re recently purchased from the Russians, and the pilots were still in training.
Armed with a thirty-millimeter 2A42 high-velocity chin machine gun and over 5,000 pounds of wing-mounted rockets in four pods, the Havocs deployed to drive Manda out of the city and back into the East China Sea. There, two Jianghu-class missile frigates and an ES5G missile submarine would launch an attack on the dragon.
When the Havocs arrived over Pudong New Area, they found Manda many stories above the streets, coiled around the center section of the Pearl TV Tower. Inside the building, hundreds of office workers were trapped. The power had been lost, and the elevators were not working. Already stairwells were clogged with frightened people.
As Manda climbed the glass-and-steel structure, the Havocs approached. The vibrations from their blades beat against the windows of the skyscrapers of Pudong New Area. Circling the tower with the dragon coiled around it, the Havocs soon unleashed their fury.
Hundreds of bullets and dozens of rockets were launched in seconds. The munitions struck Manda repeatedly, but they also tore through the tower, killing many workers who were trying to flee. Cover was impossible - the shells fired from the chin gun ripped through the glass windows and the thin partitions between the offices.
Shards of glass were blasted inside dozens of offices, even as the glass rained down on people below, who were trying to get out of the building's lobby.
The rockets struck the center of the skyscraper, too. Multiple explosions weakened the structural integrity of the building. Fires broke out on a half-dozen floors. Soon smoke began pouring out of the shattered windows.
The dragon Manda was unaffected. Bullets bounced off its armorlike scales, and the rockets detonated on its thick skin but did not penetrate to damage anything vital.
The noise and confusion disoriented the creature. In its frenzied throes of rage and bewilderment, Manda tightened its grip, crushing the center of the Pearl TV Tower. The tip of the pointed skyscraper began to sway. Then it plunged into the streets below, spilling hapless workers through broken plate-glass windows and into the concrete canyons.
Godzilla at World's End Page 18
