Matthew Reilly - The Great Zoo of China

Twenty other grey dragons—kings and princes—swarmed up the other buildings, clambering up their sides, and joined their emperor roaring into the night.

‘ Grey dragons smell Lucky… smell White Head… ’ Lucky’s electronic voice said in CJ’s ear. ‘ Grey dragons… mean dragons …’

‘They’re warning us off, but also…’ CJ cut herself off.

They were not all looking in CJ’s direction. Some of the greys were facing away from her, looking to the northeast.

CJ listened more closely, and with her trained ears, she detected something extra in their bellowing. There was a plaintive tone to it, a kind of keening. The keening of a dragon population that had laid claim to a territory… only to be pushed out by a bigger fish.

At that moment, two sudden flares of flame caught CJ’s eye off to the right, at the extreme northern edge of the ghost city: two billowing extensions of fire that lit up the night.

Her gaze fell on an industrial complex over that way: it looked like a power substation, with a transformer farm and high steel fences. On its outer side, it was ringed by a curving arc of fifteen evenly spaced black concrete emplacements that looked like a miniature Maginot Line.

The small army of red-bellied black dragons from the Nesting Centre—their red-and-black bodies were clearly discernible in the firelight—was gathered just beyond the power station. There were perhaps forty of them and they were led by their two masters, the superking and the superemperor.

The two bursts of fire that CJ had seen had been fire-blasts from the two master dragons.

They were blowing fire at the concrete emplacements, in particular, the very middle one.

‘No wonder the grey dragons are upset,’ CJ said. ‘The red-bellies barged into their city and took over.’

Soaring high above the scene, careful to avoid being spotted by the two packs of dragons, CJ peered at the emplacements: the laser-emitting base stations that supported the outer dome.

Illuminated by the fires and the ghostly streetlights, they did indeed look like wartime pillboxes, solid, low and sturdy.

CJ flipped down her helmet’s visor—stuck to which were her oversized UV glasses—and beheld the dazzling red grid of the outer electromagnetic dome. It slanted into the sky from the fifteen emplacements.

She flipped up the visor and looked more closely at the middle emplacement that was the object of the red-bellies’ assault.

Alone among the fifteen emplacements, it was accessed by a service road coming in from the north. That road ran alongside a ditch in which she could see a reinforced concrete pipe: the high-voltage main power cable.

The dragons were going directly for the source of the dome’s power.

‘Li!’ she called above the wind. ‘Where is the cable repair truck kept?’

Gripping CJ’s waist, Li replied, ‘In a loading shed inside that substation! What are you planning to do?’

‘Right now, nothing,’ CJ said.

‘Nothing? I don’t understand,’ Li said.

‘What I mean,’ CJ said, ‘is that in order for us to succeed in this battle, we first need to fail.’

CJ brought Lucky into a landing on a small hill overlooking the emplacements and from there, she, Lucky and Li watched the red-bellied black dragons assault the middle one.

The dragons worked together with almost frightening efficiency.

The masters blew acid-fire at the emplacement—or more precisely, at the soil under it, liquefying the soil. Then some king dragons stepped in and raked out the melted soil with their huge claws. Princes positioned behind them cleared that soil even further. Then the masters would return and blow more fire, creating more melted soil, which would then be cleared away again. It was a digging operation.

The dragons had got a good head-start. They had already created a substantial hole in front of the middle emplacement. It must have been four storeys, or forty feet, deep.

After a little more digging, the emplacement’s foundations were exposed: a thick wall of grey concrete. The master dragons turned their fire on the foundations.

The two masters blew matching tongues of fire at the concrete foundations, softening them, before four red-bellied emperors did their part by flying in and flinging some buses and trucks right at the exposed foundations.

The vehicles slammed into the concrete foundations, chipping away at them, cracking them.

Then the masters blew more fire and the circuit continued until, on the fourth go-around, with a screech of rending rebars and the crunch of cracking concrete, the foundations of the middle emplacement could resist no more.

They crumpled.

And like a slow-falling tree, the emplacement toppled into the huge hole the dragons had created in front of it, tearing itself free of its power source.

Sparks flew. Electricity flared.

And where the middle emplacement had been there was now a huge void with a thick high-voltage cable and some other minor wires sticking out from it.

The damage was done.

CJ flipped down her special glasses.

The dome was still there, only now it was not nearly as dazzling as it had been earlier. Now it was only half as bright as it had appeared before, since it was now only being emitted by the emplacements over at the airfield.

The two masters squealed in triumph and immediately took to the air.

They swept away to the southwest. Their army of red-bellied black dragons launched into the sky after them, heading in the direction of the airfield on the far side of the zoo: now the only thing standing between them and freedom.

From her vantage point on the hill, CJ watched them fly off.

She pulled out her radio. ‘Bear, this is Chipmunk. The dragons are coming to you. I need you to hold them out for as long as you can.’

‘ Copy that, Chipmunk ,’ Hamish’s voice replied. ‘ We’re almost at the airfield .’

‘Try to stay alive, little brother.’ CJ clicked off and turned to Li. ‘Okay. Time for us to go in.’

They leapt onto Lucky’s back and zoomed down toward the worker city.

Hamish Cameron was driving like a maniac down the road that connected the waste management facility to the military airfield, at the wheel of an absolute beast of a vehicle.

Amid all the wreckage and debris inside the waste management facility, one truck had remained largely unscathed by the mayhem that had occurred there.

A fire truck.

It was one of the two superlong ladder trucks that had been parked in the cavernous hall when Hamish had first arrived there.

Now, driven by Hamish with Kirk Syme beside him, the huge semitrailer-sized rig thundered across the plain between the zoo’s crater and the airfield. The extendable ladder on its roof bounced with every bump as the big truck boomed through the night.

The airfield loomed before it.

It was lit up like a Christmas tree: eighty floodlights blazed with white artificial light, illuminating cargo planes and fighter jets, storage hangars, an air traffic control tower, some support buildings and…

…about thirty Chinese Army jeeps and trucks arrayed in a defensive line in front of the airfield, with over a hundred Chinese soldiers manning them, their rifles and RPGs pointed at the very road Hamish was now racing along. There were even four Type-99 tanks in the defensive line.