The Great Zoo of China (13 page)

Voices in the master control room, speaking into radios:

‘
North waterfall team, stand by. Guests are en route.
’

‘
North waterfall team, ready
.’

‘
Prepare for fish release. In three, two, one
. . .’

The cable car passed across the face of the waterfall, level with its lip, within twenty feet of the olive-green river dragons on the ledges—when suddenly the dragons saw something in the water and they leapt into it with whip cracks of their tails.

‘Look how fast they go!’ Perry exclaimed.

CJ was thinking the same thing. They had moved with astonishing speed, far faster than any crocodilian she had seen.

The cable car moved past the waterfall, now rising higher again, and CJ glimpsed the freeway-like ring road that ran around the circumference of the valley. It was artfully concealed, disappearing every now and then into tunnels cut into the rock wall.

Shortly after passing the waterfall, the cable car arrived at an open-air station that serviced a hotel-like building at the northern end of the valley. Flashing lights blared
WELCOME TO THE DRAGON’S TAIL CASINO!

It reminded CJ of the Bellagio in Las Vegas: it had beige walls, immense columns and Italian-style windows.

The cable car, however, did not stop at the casino. It only slowed as it passed through the station before continuing on, gliding around the northern edge of the lake, moving past a second broad waterfall which also had river dragons perched on rock ledges jutting out from its lip and face.

As their cable car moved away from the second waterfall, CJ saw four silver Range Rovers emerge from a garage at the base of the casino building and speed along a gravel road that ran parallel to their cable car.

Hamish saw them, too. ‘Nice wheels. Range Rover Sport.’

They could just make out the occupants of the cars: the four Chinese Party men in their freshly bought outdoorsmen outfits.

‘The big kahunas,’ Hamish observed.

The four silver Range Rovers zoomed alongside the cable car for a short time, kicking up dust clouds behind them, before their road curved northward and they peeled away. Their gravel road, CJ saw, wrapped around some dramatic cliffs—covered with dragons—that formed a kind of natural screen in front of the northwestern corner of the crater.

CJ stopped herself.

It wasn’t a
natural
screen at all. This entire valley had been sculpted by thousands of Chinese workers for the specific purpose of building a tourist playground. Those cliffs—and the screen they formed—were there for a reason.

‘Looks like the big shots are on a very different tour from us,’ she said.

Hamish turned to Zhang. ‘Yo, Zhangman. Where are those dudes going?’

Zhang smiled. ‘Our esteemed Party officials are about to enjoy a very special section of our zoo, which you will see later. Forgive me if I don’t tell you what it is now. I don’t want to ruin the surprise.’

‘Oh, okay. Cool,’ Hamish said.

Everyone else in the cable car was focused on the dragons on the dramatic cliffs. The cliffs, CJ thought, had been well designed: the dragons lay on high ledges or sat perched on striking peaks. It seized the attention. It was a postcard shot and Hamish duly took many photos of it.

While all this was happening, the cable car travelled over a broad swamp filled with reeds and, it appeared, many large crocodiles.

‘Why the crocodiles?’ CJ asked Zhang.

Zhang said, ‘Crocodiles are the only surviving members of the archosaur line in the modern world. Large crocs lived back in the Triassic Period. We thought having some of them around would be good for the dragons: a reminder of the world they used to live in.’

‘Those are saltwater crocs,’ CJ said, ‘which means that’s a saltwater swamp. I thought you said your dragons don’t like salt water.’

‘They don’t.’

‘But that swamp adjoins the lake and there are dragons in the lake. How does that work?’

‘Well spotted, Dr Cameron,’ Zhang said. ‘We cheated a little. You can’t see it, but just below the waterline is a Perspex barrier that separates the saltwater swamp from the freshwater lake.’

‘Do the crocs ever venture out into the lake?’ Perry asked.

‘The larger ones do, but not the smaller ones,’ Zhang said. ‘The dragons, on the other hand,
always
avoid the swamp. They hate it. When it comes to salt water, they’re like cats: precious and fussy.’

When it was about halfway across the swamp, the cable car turned southward and soared grandly out over the lake, travelling twenty feet above the surface.

It was now heading back down the western side of the valley. CJ saw the enormous main building way off in the distance ahead of them, dominating the southern end of the valley, perhaps ten kilometres away.

On the nearby western wall of the crater, she saw about twenty dragons of various sizes—but all clustered in small groups of the same colour—alternately sitting on or moving around the crater’s rocky wall.

The voices from the master control room came through a tiny earpiece in Hu Tang’s ear:

‘
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.

T
he 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.