The Great Zoo of China (24 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The dragon beside her never lost his balance.

‘Hamish! Hit the brakes!’ CJ called.

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

The garbage truck skidded.

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

Melted Face wasn’t so fortunate.

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

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

The garbage truck took off again, burning rubber.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Let us in!’ Zhang said in Mandarin.

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

‘I said, let us in!’ Zhang cried.

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

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

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

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

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

It stretched away, empty and bare.

The dragons hadn’t entered it yet.

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

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

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

CJ spun and saw what he was looking at.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The garbage truck raced toward it.

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

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

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

They now consider it their territory
, CJ thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CJ ran out in front.

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

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

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

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

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