The Great Zoo of China (49 page)

Inside the underground bunker, Hu Tang saw the red grid of the dome wink out . . .

. . . and then, to his absolute horror, he saw the superking and two emperor dragons swoop out over the line of emplacements.

The dome was down.

The dragons were out.

‘God help us all,’ Hu Tang breathed.

Beside him, Colonel Bao reached for the first red button.

A zoo is a place for animals to study the behaviour of human beings.

–UNKNOWN

The Larger Nest

T
hirty seconds earlier, as Li performed the final reconnection, CJ flipped down her visor.

She saw the thin red grid of the dome separating the Chinese electrician from the pack of grey dragons on the other side.

And then the grid vanished.

Just blinked out.

Gone.

The dragons rose, their wings spreading, their jaws opening.

Li’s head was bent over his work. He was oblivious to what had just happened.

‘Last reconnection is . . .
done
!’ he shouted. ‘Hit the switches!’

CJ flicked the first switch, disconnecting their truck from the main power line. Then she slammed down on the big blue switch labelled
OPEN LINE
.

A grey king roared at Li from a distance of three feet and readied itself to pounce at him when—
whack
—the dazzling red grid sprang back into place between them, and the dragon lunged into it only to fall instantly, like a boxer punched square in the face.

‘Whoa,’ CJ gasped.

Over at the airfield, Colonel Bao’s finger was mere millimetres away from pressing the first detonation button when a technician shouted, ‘Look! The dome! It’s back up!’

Hu Tang snapped up to see, on a screen, a fleeing dragon hit the dome and drop out of the air. The dome was indeed back in place.

‘It’s been restarted from over in the worker city!’ another tech called.

‘How many dragons got out?’ Bao demanded.

‘I counted three,’ someone said.

‘I did, too,’ Hu Tang agreed. ‘One of the fire-breathers and two emperors. All red-bellied blacks.’

‘Only three,’ Bao said. ‘We can handle that.’

Then he was up and moving: ‘Initiate the tracking chips for the three escaped dragons and send some gunships from Guilin to kill them! Get the internal power reconnected! I want somebody to tell me how the hell that dome got back online! And I want some fucking training units found so we can stun all the remaining dragons into fucking submission and drag them back into the valley! It’s time to reclaim our zoo.’

CJ keyed her radio. ‘Bear, this is Chipmunk. We got the dome back up.’

‘
We could tell. But some of the dragons got out in the few seconds that the dome was down. A fire-breather and a couple of emperors.
’

‘One of the fire-breathers . . . shit,’ CJ said.

‘
And who knows where they’ll go.
’

‘I know where they’ll go,’ CJ said flatly. ‘They’ll go to the larger nest and open it.’

‘
Where is that?
’

‘I have an idea. And I have to get there fast to stop them, or else the whole world is going to have an unstoppable dragon problem.’

T
wenty minutes later, CJ found herself flying alone with Lucky over the spectacular moss-covered landforms of southern China.

She still wore her heat suit with the hood thrown back plus her lightweight helmet. She also still had her flamethrower slung over her shoulder, its liquid propane canister on her back underneath the heat suit, and her MP-7 with the grenade launcher duct-taped to it.

Dawn was coming.

The eastern horizon glowed pink. The beautiful landscape—lush, green and wet—glistened in the early morning light. A low-lying mist ran between the sheer-sided buttes and the steep mountains like a river. The near impenetrable rainforests of these parts meant there were few villages here.

CJ had left Li back at the worker city with instructions to get to the airfield. She suggested he drive there the long way, in a wide circle staying outside the dome—and, if he could, repair the main emplacement there. She even said he should inform his Chinese superiors that it was he who had fixed the emplacements at the worker city; but he needn’t tell them he did it at CJ’s urging or with her help.

After a few minutes’ flying over this lush terrain, CJ beheld a singular landform: a wide meteor crater. It was perfectly round, like Meteor Crater in Arizona, only smaller. Over thousands of millennia, its vertical walls had crumbled in places and a lake had formed in its middle. A small forest had grown at its fringes, around the base of its inner wall.

The low-lying mist surrounded the crater, a soup of thick grey cloud.

CJ heard Na’s voice in her head, from when she’d been talking to Seymour Wolfe about this very land formation yesterday:

‘
Crater Lake was created by a nickel meteorite that hit here about 300 million years ago.
’

And Zhang’s voice from the tour:

‘
Our dragons—our archosaurs—survived the Alvarez Meteor 65 million years ago by hibernating deep beneath the surface of the Earth underneath dense nickel and zinc deposits.
’

And Hu Tang’s comment about the nickel deposit underneath the Nesting Centre:

‘
Our zoo is built on top of the second-largest nickel deposit in these parts; the largest is over at Crater Lake about fifteen kilometres to the northwest.
’

The largest nickel deposit . . .

CJ figured that the bigger the nickel deposit, the bigger the dragon nest—

A blaze of orange light flared up from the inner wall of the crater and CJ saw a round hole at the base of the crater there. It looked like a tunnel.

Two red-bellied emperor dragons peered down into the tunnel, their backs to CJ.

Then another blaze of light flared out from within the tunnel and the black superking emerged from it. The two emperors immediately slithered into the tunnel and large chunks of melted soil—soil that had accumulated in the dragons’ tunnel over the years—began to be flung out from within it.

‘Shit,’ CJ said aloud. ‘They’ve already started digging for the nest.’

She hoped she wasn’t too late.

Abruptly, the two emperors reappeared, barked something to their superking and the superking dashed inside the tunnel. The emperors then took up positions by the entrance, facing outward, standing guard.

‘What are they doing?’ she said aloud.

‘
Master . . . warm eggs
. . .’ Lucky’s voice said. ‘
Wake nest
. . .’

‘We have to get in there and stop it—’

A mighty roar cut CJ off.

The two emperor dragons were staring directly up at her and Lucky. They had spotted them.

One of the emperors took to the air with a great beating of its wings and charged right at them, roaring with rage.

CJ looked left and right for options, and saw something. She pulled Lucky into a steep dive and the chase began.

With its larger wings, the red-bellied black emperor was much faster than Lucky, but the yellowjacket prince was more manoeuvrable and as she and CJ shot down toward the fog layer, Lucky made a sharp turn that took the emperor by surprise and it overshot them by three hundred yards.

But then it banked around like an aeroplane and kept on chasing.

‘Lucky! Down!’ CJ called and with the emperor closing in behind them, they dropped into the mist.

From CJ’s point of view, it was like being on a superfast rollercoaster without any tracks and with only ten metres of visibility.

The walls of buttes and cliffs emerged from the soupy haze with frightening suddenness and Lucky banked and bent superbly.

Crouched low over Lucky’s neck like a jockey, CJ risked a glance over her shoulder—

—and found herself looking right into the jaws of the pursuing emperor! It was only a foot behind the tip of Lucky’s tail!

CJ snapped to look forward and saw it.

‘Lucky! Up! Now!’ she yelled, pulling on the reins, and Lucky went vertical, avoiding a cliff-face shrouded in mist right in front of them.

The red-bellied black emperor, bigger and less agile, didn’t.