The Great Zoo of China (30 page)

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.