Matthew Reilly - The Great Zoo of China

‘ Western wall team, stand by . Guests are en route. ’

‘ Western wall team, ready .’

‘ Prepare for horse release, in five, four, three …’

Hu Tang knew that his zoo was a wonder beyond compare. But these were influential American journalists and he didn’t want them reporting that his dragons just lazed around, doing nothing.

Sometimes you had to make the animals perform.

Gliding along in the cable car, CJ again saw the ring road, disappearing into and reappearing from tunnels in the mountainside.

Then she saw something that made her start.

It was so well camouflaged, she almost missed it.

On the sheer black cliff above the ring road, CJ saw a lone dragon, a large red-bellied black king, crouched in a very unusual position. The dragon clung to the cliff on its belly, perfectly vertical but upside-down: its head pointed downward while its barbed tail was pointed upward.

The animal was the size of a subway carriage and it did not move. It just lay there, eerily still.

CJ frowned. She was about to ask Zhang about it when sudden movement caught her eye.

Four yellowjacket princes burst out of some trees below the ring road, chasing a group of six wild horses across the hillside. The horses galloped hard, blasting between the trees, fleeing for their lives. The dragons ran swiftly and easily, with the cool agility of big cats. With their tails raised, their heads bent low and their muscular limbs bouncing over the uneven landscape with ease, they looked like oversized leopards.

Then suddenly two of the dragons took flight, flanking the horses, herding them to the right where—

—two more princes sprang from a cave and crash-tackled the first two horses with crunching, side-on hits.

‘Ow!’ Hamish yelled.

The two horses—who themselves must have weighed 800 kilograms each—shrieked as they went down, hoofs flailing, heads turning from side to side, eyes bulging with fear.

The two ambushing dragons were on them in seconds, wrapping their oversized jaws around the horses’ necks, crushing their windpipes. The horses stopped struggling, went still.

At this point, the other four yellowjackets arrived. But they did not engage in a feeding frenzy on the carcasses of the horses. Instead, the four chasers waited a short distance away as the two ambushers took the first bites out of the fallen victims.

CJ watched, entranced.

‘They’re like wolves,’ she said. ‘Wolves observe a strict hierarchy, both in the hunt and in the feeding that follows. The junior pack members drive the prey into the ambush, where the senior members wait. The senior members—an alpha male and an alpha female—carry out the kill. They always eat first. Then the juniors take their turn.’

CJ saw one of the senior dragons bite down on the carcass of one of the horses. It tore off the dead animal’s head with one mighty rip.

Ambassador Syme stepped up beside CJ, staring in awe at the bloody scene.

‘You don’t see that on the National Geographic channel,’ he said in a whisper.

The cable car continued on its journey over the western lake.

Up ahead of it was the ruined castle. The castle stood beside a third and final waterfall which curved in a wide U-shape. From where she stood, CJ could only see the lip of the waterfall dropping away like the rim of an infinity pool.

Above and behind the castle, however, was a far more modern structure: a fifteen-storey glass-faced building that sat half-embedded in the sloping wall of the crater.

Just below the point where the building’s lowest floor met the hill, CJ saw a tunnel that allowed the ring road to burrow into the slope. She guessed that there was some kind of internal entry to the building inside the tunnel.

At the top of the glass building was a sleek white tower that looked like an air traffic control tower. It had many large radio antennas sticking up from it.

‘What’s that building?’ CJ asked Zhang.

‘That is our administration building,’ Zhang said. ‘Running a zoo of this size is like running a small city. The administration building houses all of our admin and support staff. Its lower floors contain loading docks that receive all the building materials that come into the zoo as well as coordinating waste management and disposal.’

‘And the tower at the top?’

‘Dragon monitoring and observation,’ Zhang replied, a little too quickly and casually.

CJ noticed.

‘Does it have anything to do with the electromagnetic domes?’ she asked. ‘I mean, you wouldn’t want one of the bigger dragons to accidentally crash into it and knock out your dome.’

‘Oh, no,’ Zhang said. ‘The inner dome emanates from twenty-four concrete emplacements built into the rim of the crater. You can see them up there, beside the tower. Each is heavily reinforced; the concrete is nine feet thick. The dragons couldn’t damage them if they tried.’

CJ put on her oversized sunglasses and looked up at the rim.

Through the glasses, she saw the curving luminescent green rays of the inner dome lancing skyward from a series of emplacements on the crater’s upper rim. They looked like World War II pillboxes: supersolid concrete blockhouses with slit-like apertures from which the dome’s beams sprang upward.

She shrugged and took off the glasses and was turning back to look at the administration building when she spied a group of vehicles speeding out from the ring road tunnel at its base.

It was a convoy of five petrol-tanker trucks: eighteen-wheelers with long silver tanks on their backs. The tankers rumbled north along the ring road before disappearing into another tunnel.

‘Deputy Director, what is that?’ CJ heard Hu whisper harshly to Zhang in Mandarin.

‘It’s the two o’clock fuel run,’ Zhang said. ‘They’re taking diesel to the cable car stations and the generators.’

Hu hissed, ‘The drivers should have been informed that we had visitors today. Remember what the Disney consultants said: visitors should never see the backroom machinery at work. Never . Make sure those drivers and their supervisors are disciplined.’

CJ didn’t outwardly acknowledge their words. They must have forgotten she spoke Mandarin.

A deafening roar made her and everyone else in the cable car spin.

CJ’s eyes went wide.

An emperor dragon was hovering right alongside the cable car!

It kept itself aloft with the occasional flap of its vast wings and it peered curiously into the cable car.

CJ hadn’t even heard it approach. She couldn’t believe the sheer size of it. It defied the senses to see something so big hovering in the air. And it thrilled her to be able to see it so close.

The great beast roared again, an ear-piercing shriek that seemed to shake the whole valley.

It was a red-bellied black dragon. Its underbelly blazed scarlet. Its black plated armour looked strong beyond belief. When it roared, its teeth flashed.

CJ noticed that it was looking closely at her and her companions, as if evaluating them.

CJ found herself admiring it. Curiosity in an animal was a sign of intelligence and it was rare. You found it only in a few members of the animal kingdom: chimpanzees, gorillas, dolphins.

Her eyes swept up the curve of the great beast’s neck and she gazed at its fearsome head. Its eyes were a pitiless black. The sinews of its jaws were stretched taut. Its crest was sleek and sinister, while the rest of its massive head was covered in ugly scars and gashes, presumably from fights with other dragons—