The Great Zoo of China (55 page)

‘How would you get here?’ Syme asked.

CJ said, ‘Thought I might take a job in Darwin, down in Australia. Lot of crocodile jobs there and it’s only a few hours’ flight-time to here. Figured I could take up flying lessons and, well, if I could somehow get my hands on a plane . . .’

‘You know,’ Syme said, ‘the President told me very specifically that a reward of some kind was in order for your efforts, Dr Cameron. I think I might be able to find some spare funds in my budget to help you purchase a decent plane. After all, there’s got to be
some
reward for saving the life of the US Ambassador to China and preventing a global outbreak of dragons. In fact, if you ever need
any
money for
anything
, you just give me a call, okay?’

CJ smiled. ‘Thanks. I will.’

The four of them spent the rest of the day rebuilding one of the base’s shacks, flanked and followed by the family of yellowjacket dragons.

At one point in the course of the day, Greg Johnson said to CJ, ‘I was wondering if, you know, we ever found ourselves on the same side of the world, you’d like to grab a coffee sometime?’

CJ looped a stray strand of hair over her ear. ‘Are you asking me out on a date, Agent Johnson? I don’t get asked out on many dates.’

‘I might be.’

‘I’d like that,’ she said, smiling.

When the day was over, they all returned to the seaplane. It was time to go.

CJ stepped to one side with Lucky and gave the dragon a huge hug. Tears welled in her eyes.

‘White Head like Lucky,’ she said.

Lucky mewed. ‘
Lucky . . . like like . . . White Head . . . Lucky sad
. . .’

‘White Head sad, too.’ CJ gave the yellow dragon a kiss on the snout. ‘But White Head will return.’

And with those words, she walked off to the seaplane.

A
month later, CJ Cameron resigned from her position at the San Francisco Zoo and took up a senior role at Kakadu National Park in northern Australia, outside Darwin, observing and studying the large saltwater crocodile population there.

Many of her students commented on how fearlessly she treated the big crocs. CJ would just shrug and say, ‘I’ve seen bigger.’

And her colleagues gently ribbed her about the handsome American gentleman with the salt-and-pepper hair who would swing by every few months to meet with her.

She also took up flying lessons.

Soon she was flying solo in a compact Pilatus PC-12 that she’d bought second-hand from the Australian Flying Doctor Service. A small plane, the PC-12 was known for its considerable range. It became common for her to fly off alone in her plane, ‘Just to spend some time on my own for a few days,’ she would say.

None of her colleagues noticed that the plane always flew north from Darwin, out over East Timor and Indonesia, toward the remote southern islands of the Philippines.

They did notice, however, that she always returned from these trips with a faraway but very contented smile on her face.

THE END

AN INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW REILLY ABOUT
THE GREAT ZOO OF CHINA

SPOILER WARNING!

THIS INTERVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS FROM
THE GREAT ZOO OF CHINA

Well, Matthew. We always think your books can’t get any bigger or faster and then along comes
The Great Zoo of China!
How do you do it?

As my regular readers will know, I love big-scale action. As the years have gone by, I like to think that the action in my novels has got bigger and bigger. From the early stuff in
Ice Station
—hovercraft chases, blowing up submarines—to the wild car chase and the exploding aircraft carrier in
Scarecrow
, and then to the even bigger action scenes in the Jack West Jr novels, I have always seen it as something of a progression for me. But—and it’s a big but—I always felt that, at some stage, I would reach a point where the action might simply get
too
big.

And then I decided to write about dragons . . . and suddenly a whole new ballpark of action opened up for me.

When I conceived
The Great Zoo of China
, I was very excited about the potential the story had for absolutely huge action. Once you can realistically bring giant dragons to life, you can then dream up all the things they can throw, hurl and otherwise destroy! I came up with garbage trucks, buildings, revolving restaurants and fighter planes. I felt like a kid in a candy store when I wrote this one.

How did you come up with the idea of the survival/existence of dragons?

I actually had the idea for a zoo filled with dragons way back in 2003. I was travelling through Switzerland, of all places, when I stumbled upon a ‘dragon museum’. It was a little place, but it had all these fantastically realistic paintings and drawings of dragons: pictures of their skeletons and their musculature. In other words, all the things that would make them seem
real
.

In recent years, I have been a big fan of the Christopher Nolan–directed
Batman
movies. What I think those movies do very well is make something that is inherently unbelievable—a guy chasing criminals dressed as a bat—into something entirely believable. They do this, I think, by making it absolutely and utterly real. Batman’s armour is a military suit; his cape is an electrostatic membrane; his Batmobile is a prototype military vehicle. If I was going to write about dragons, then I had to make them real in a similar, believable way. I had to come up with a credible reason for their existence and also for the rarity of their appearances throughout history.

I decided to focus on the idea that myths are often based on reality or real events. So I asked: what if all those myths of giant dragons were based on actual creatures that had shown themselves only rarely.

This idea percolated in my mind for a long time (to give you an idea, back in 2003, I had only just finished writing
Scarecrow
). I remember doing a lot of research into dragons and dragon myths while holidaying in Queenstown, New Zealand, in 2010. It rained non-stop for the entire week I was there, so, with nothing else to do, I just curled up beside the fire for the week and researched dragons.

It was here that I realised that the myth of the dragon is indeed a global one . . . and yet there was no mass communication system in the ancient world. How could the features of dragons be so
consistent
all around the ancient world, from Australia to Meso-America to Greece and Norway, when there was no way to send information around that ancient world? My (fictional) answer was that every now and then a single dragon would rise from its nest and check to see if the atmosphere was suitable for the rest of its brethren to emerge.

What made you decide to set the zoo in China?

When I first had the idea of a zoo filled with dragons in 2003, I asked myself:
who would build such a thing?
More than that, I asked,
who could afford to build such a thing?
The zoo I had in mind would be simply enormous, a valley the size of Manhattan Island. Back in 2003 I had no answer to that. The idea was too fanciful, too fantastical. I couldn’t think of a company or a country that could build such a place, let alone have a good reason to do so.

And so I let the idea rest in the back of my mind.

However, as the first decade of the 21st century passed by, I noticed something: the rise of China. I watched the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing: the unforgettable Opening Ceremony and the huge stadiums that the Chinese built. I watched documentaries about how China constructed the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam and her ability to build entire cities within months. I read about the many kilometres of maglev tracks China has laid. I read about its multi-trillion-dollar national savings and the massive debt America owes it. (I also, it should be said, read up about China’s suppression of protests and dissent during the 2008 Olympics, and the way it arrests known agitators every year in early June, just before the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.)

And suddenly, in 2012, I realised that I now had a nation that could realistically build my dragon zoo:
modern China
. (The fact that China also had a long history of dragon myths helped, too.) My fanciful and fantastical notion of a dragon zoo was no longer fanciful and fantastical. I had just had to wait a decade until the world caught up with my idea!

Having China build my dragon zoo also solved another problem I had: comparisons with
Jurassic Park
.

As anyone who has attended one of my talks will tell you, my favourite novel of all time is
Jurassic Park
by Michael Crichton. In fact, it is one of the novels that made me want to be a novelist. I loved the originality of it, the pace of it, and the fact it was a gleeful monster movie on paper.

I was very aware that my story of a dragon zoo would inevitably draw comparisons with the dinosaur theme park of
Jurassic Park
. So I endeavoured from the outset to make
The Great Zoo of China
as different from
Jurassic Park
as I could.
Jurassic Park
sees several experts brought in by the park’s investors to assess the dinosaur park when it encounters difficulties. My novel would be about a press tour: any new world-class zoo needs to announce itself to the world, so I figured its owners would bring in some bigshot journalists to have an early look at it. Given the nature of the new zoo, they would have to be journalists with instant credibility, from trusted newspapers and journals like
The New York Times
and
National Geographic
.

But the main difference between my novel and
Jurassic Park
would be China. The theme park in
Jurassic Park
was an out-and-out capitalist venture. With their Great Dragon Zoo, China is attempting to do something else entirely: it is trying to usurp the United States as the pre-eminent country on Earth. To do that, it needs to top America’s cultural superiority: basically, it needs to come up with an attraction that trumps Disneyland. To me, this is actually a real issue today and it gave the story a geopolitical reality that I wanted.

Tell us about making the dragons real.

There is a quote early in the novel that I really like: the one that says fairytales sanitise things that were, in reality, not very pleasant at all. Knights have been immortalised as chivalrous heroes in shining armour, when in truth they were swarthy brutes and rapists. I simply adapted this idea to my dragons.

My dragons would not be towering, high-crested and proud-chested beasts. They would be lean and mean, low and calculating. They would be monsters of a bygone era. To make these inherently unreal animals real, I gave them capabilities that only exist in the real world.

In their tempers and capabilities, my dragons mostly resemble large crocodiles. This is because (a) crocodiles scare the crap out of me, and (b) I see modern crocodiles as a species of dinosaur that survived the meteor impact 65 million years ago and still live among us. If you have ever seen a big croc up close, you will agree that they are literally monsters of another time.

I gave my dragons the best predatory senses and skills of the most dangerous apex predators in the animal kingdom: crocs, alligators, snakes, hawks, big cats and sharks. All the capabilities you read about in the book come from real predators. Hawks really do see in the ultraviolet spectrum. Snakes can detect changes in air pressure. Sharks really can sense the increased beating of a wounded animal’s heart (seriously, whoa). Crocs really do have remarkable memories for hunting. Alligators really do communicate with subsonic grunts and vibrating their bodies. Chimps really do make specific vocalisations regarding leopards. By grounding my dragons’ abilities in reality, I felt I made them more believable.