The Great Zoo of China (14 page)

She shrugged and took off the glasses and was turning back to look at the administration building when she spied a group of vehicles speeding out from the ring road tunnel at its base.

It was a convoy of five petrol-tanker trucks: eighteen-wheelers with long silver tanks on their backs. The tankers rumbled north along the ring road before disappearing into another tunnel.

‘Deputy Director, what is that?’ CJ heard Hu whisper harshly to Zhang in Mandarin.

‘It’s the two o’clock fuel run,’ Zhang said. ‘They’re taking diesel to the cable car stations and the generators.’

Hu hissed, ‘The drivers should have been informed that we had visitors today. Remember what the Disney consultants said: visitors should never see the backroom machinery at work.
Never
. Make sure those drivers and their supervisors are disciplined.’

CJ didn’t outwardly acknowledge their words. They must have forgotten she spoke Mandarin.

A deafening roar made her and everyone else in the cable car spin.

CJ’s eyes went wide.

An emperor dragon was hovering
right alongside
the cable car!

It kept itself aloft with the occasional flap of its vast wings and it peered curiously into the cable car.

CJ hadn’t even heard it approach. She couldn’t believe the sheer size of it. It defied the senses to see something so big hovering in the air. And it thrilled her to be able to see it so close.

The great beast roared again, an ear-piercing shriek that seemed to shake the whole valley.

It was a red-bellied black dragon. Its underbelly blazed scarlet. Its black plated armour looked strong beyond belief. When it roared, its teeth flashed.

CJ noticed that it was looking closely at her and her companions, as if evaluating them.

CJ found herself admiring it. Curiosity in an animal was a sign of intelligence and it was rare. You found it only in a few members of the animal kingdom: chimpanzees, gorillas, dolphins.

Her eyes swept up the curve of the great beast’s neck and she gazed at its fearsome head. Its eyes were a pitiless black. The sinews of its jaws were stretched taut. Its crest was sleek and sinister, while the rest of its massive head was covered in ugly scars and gashes, presumably from fights with other dragons—

CJ frowned.

Wait a second . . .

Something about this dragon’s head didn’t look right, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

Suddenly, with a final hideous screech, the massive creature beat its wings and banked away, flying off to the north, and everyone in the cable car started murmuring with wonder.

Shortly after, the cable car came to the great ruined castle. When she’d seen it before from the main building, CJ thought it hadn’t looked so big, but now she realised that that had been a trick of the distance.

Seen from up close, it was absolutely enormous: dark, grim and imposing.

‘We got the production designer from the Lord of the Rings movies to design this castle,’ Hu said to Wolfe. Hu seemed a little standoffish toward CJ now.

‘It’s awesome,’ Hamish said.

CJ had to admit that it did look pretty impressive. Indeed, it looked as if the fictitious inhabitants of the castle had done battle with invading dragons and lost badly. The brick battlements had crumbled. Whole towers lay askew on the ground. Some staircases ran nowhere, ending abruptly at ragged ends.

The whole thing was covered in black char-marks, causing CJ to remark, ‘I thought you said there were no fire-breathing dragons here.’

Zhang offered a bashful smile. ‘We took some liberties with the design of this castle, for the sake of theatricality.’

‘I like it,’ Hamish said.

About a dozen dragons moved in and around the ruins, all yellowjackets.

At the base of the castle, at the point where it sat at the same height as the waterfall, an elongated wooden platform stretched out from the front gate.

It resembled a drawbridge, only it led nowhere. It just extended out over the curving waterfall directly in front of the castle, looking like a bridge that had been stopped halfway through its construction. It took CJ a moment to realise what it was.

‘It’s a landing platform for the dragons,’ she said.

‘And a cable car stop for us,’ Zhang said, smiling. It was only a hundred metres ahead of them.

‘I have another question,’ CJ said suddenly.

‘Yes?’ Deputy Director Zhang cast a worried glance at Hu, no doubt fearful of another awkward question from the
National Geographic
woman.

‘You said you found 88 eggs in that cavern,’ CJ said. ‘But then you said that you have 232 dragons in this zoo. How does that work? I would have thought one egg means one dragon, so 88 eggs means 88 dragons, unless they’ve laid more eggs.’

Zhang visibly relaxed. This was apparently a question he could answer easily.

He smiled. ‘You are correct, Dr Cameron. One egg equals one dragon. And no, they have not laid any more eggs since they emerged from their nest. But we have been working and studying these animals at this facility for nearly forty years now. In that time, we have introduced some
augmented
breeding methods to bolster our stock of—what is that?’

He was looking out over CJ’s shoulder, peering northward, his smile fading.

CJ turned, following his gaze.

What she saw made the blood in her veins freeze.

She saw a gang of five red-bellied black dragons of various sizes coming right for the cable car, led by the emperor that had checked them out only a few minutes earlier.

And as she beheld the gang of dragons coming toward her, CJ realised what had been wrong with the emperor’s head.

It had no ears
.

The scars and gashes on this dragon’s head weren’t injuries from battles with other dragons.

This emperor dragon
had scratched off its own ears
—deeply, too, tearing out the entire auditory canal, leaving two foul bloody sockets—which meant that the sonic dome protecting the cable car
would not have any effect on it at all
.

‘Deputy Director, what is going on?’ Hu asked ominously.

‘Sir, I’ve never seen them do anything like this before,’ Zhang said.

‘Hang on to something,’ CJ said to Hamish. ‘
Right now
.’

The dragons rushed at the cable car and when they reached it, they did not stop.

The lead earless emperor smashed into the cable car with all its might, leading with its upraised claws. Glass exploded everywhere and the cable car rocked violently and in the space of a few terrible seconds CJ Cameron’s tour of the Great Dragon Zoo of China went to hell.

At a zoo or conservation park, you do not confront a photograph or a video. You confront the living, breathing animal.

—BILL CONWAY, PRESIDENT OF THE NEW YORK ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, JULY 1993

T
he cable car swayed wildly, swinging through almost ninety degrees, such was the force of the emperor’s blow.

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

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

The others were less lucky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CJ’s eyes went wide.

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

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

The dragon bit down on her stomach.

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

Hamish was speechless.

CJ wasn’t.

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

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

Silence.

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

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

Nothing happened.

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

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

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