The Great Zoo of China (33 page)

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.

C
J turned to face the fire door 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.

The station’s platform kinked at a ninety-degree angle. It was here that the cable cars made their turn. The overhead steel cable disappeared down two concrete tunnels: it came in from the south and exited to the east. A chill wind whistled eerily as it swept through the long tunnels.

There was no movement.

No dragons.

‘That’s the maintenance office.’ Go-Go pointed at a two-storey glass-walled structure in the corner of the station. Its upper storey had slanted windows and nearly all of them had been smashed.

CJ hurried toward it.

The three of them raced through the maintenance office’s lower door and hustled up some internal stairs before bursting through an open doorway.

The maintenance office had been ripped to shreds. Two dead Chinese technicians lay on the floor, their throats ripped out, their stomachs torn open. The main console had been wrenched apart. Naked wires sparked. Blood dripped off every surface.

And every computer screen was smashed.

Johnson tapped on some keys. ‘All these computers are useless.’

CJ found a phone on the console. It had been cracked in two, broken beyond repair.

‘We try the restaurant,’ she said.

A clunking noise from above made them all look up.

A ceiling panel came free and CJ tensed . . . only to see a fearful young face appear from behind the panel, the face of the young Chinese electrician from before, the man named Li.

‘Hello . . . ?’ he said softly.

‘Li?’ CJ helped him down. ‘Are you okay?’

He nodded quickly.

‘The dragons attacked your team?’

He nodded again. ‘Some red-bellied black princes and a king,’ he said in Mandarin. ‘They had no ears. We were working under the cable car here, relying on its sonic shield, so none of us was wearing our watches. But the cable car’s shield was useless against them.’

CJ glanced around nervously. She didn’t like this place at all. There weren’t enough exits. It was too easy to get trapped.

‘We shouldn’t linger here.’ She began to move. ‘We make for the restaurant—’

She cut herself off, glimpsing movement in her peripheral vision: she could have sworn one of the dragon statues outside had moved. No. It was just a trick of the flickering light. It was only a statue.

Then the statue really did move
.

It turned its head to face the maintenance office and looked CJ right in the eye.

It was a purple royal, king-sized, with high pointed ears.

With a roar it bounded forward, lunging at the maintenance office’s upper windows.

‘Look out!’ Johnson pushed CJ sideways as the big dragon’s foreclaws came rushing in through the shattered windows.

CJ fell one way, while Go-Go and Li dived the other way, but Johnson’s reaction had put him in the middle and two of the dragon’s razor-sharp talons slashed across the front of his body, drawing twin sprays of blood across his chest up near the left shoulder.

Johnson slumped instantly, dropped to the floor.

The dragon roared, its bellow shaking the little room.

CJ crab-crawled over to Johnson, ducking beneath the dragon’s slavering jaws, threw his good arm over her own shoulder and hauled him away.

‘Can you run?’ she asked.

‘Just,’ Johnson groaned.

With Johnson looped over her shoulder, CJ raced to the door leading downstairs, reaching it just in time to see two purple princes arrive at the base of the stairs below, spot her and roar.

‘Shit . . .’ she said.

‘What the fuck do we do!’ Go-Go yelled.

CJ slammed the door, locked it and turned just as the king’s entire
head
came smashing into the maintenance office in a rain of glass.

Ducking below it, CJ saw the upturned cable car just outside the windows: the roof of its raised nose-end was level with the windows. The cable car’s lower end lay over near the catwalk that led to the guest elevator.

‘Go-Go, Li, follow me. Johnson, I need you to give me everything you’ve got!’

Without any further pause, she ran across the maintenance office, staying out of the reach of the king dragon. She skipped up on a chair and with Johnson beside her, leapt up onto the control console and then
out the shattered window
, past the dragon and onto the roof of the upturned cable car, where she slid down its length, dragging Johnson with her.