Matthew Reilly - The Great Zoo of China

Inside the Chinese bunker behind the airfield, a technician reported: ‘Colonel Bao, the three thermobaric devices are in place and ready for detonation.’

Bao stood. ‘All personnel are to retreat to the alternate command centre on the lowest level of this bunker.’

The colonel and his staff, along with Hu Tang, caught a secure elevator to the alternate command centre, ten levels below ground.

There, a series of display screens showed Bao real-time images of the airfield above: the dragons, the speeding fire truck, the flaming hangars. Those images were overlayed with an ultraviolet filter so that he could also see the red laser grid of the electromagnetic dome still in place.

He inserted a key into a console. Three red buttons shielded by clear-plastic safety latches illuminated.

Bao flicked open the three safety latches.

Then, as he watched the dome outside, he held his finger poised over the buttons that detonated the thermobaric bombs.

Kirk Syme brought the fire truck round for another pass at the dragons gathered around the middle emplacement. The big red fire engine came rushing in, sirens wailing, lights flashing.

The dragons had excavated a substantial hole by now, so large that the foundations of the emplacement were exposed.

Hamish had his water cannon ready to go, but then something unexpected happened.

The emplacement toppled into the hole.

Sparks sprayed outward as the emplacement tore away from its cabling and fell into the hole created by the dragons.

‘No!’ Hamish swore. ‘No…!’

He keyed his radio. ‘Chipmunk! We’re cactus! The dragons just wrecked the main emplacement here!’

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.

Thirty 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.’

Twenty 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: