The Great Zoo of China (48 page)

It was a short drive to the middle emplacement, barely a kilometre, but the movement of the cable repair truck in the streets of the otherwise deserted city caught the attention of the eastern grey dragons.

They swooped from their perches atop some nearby apartment buildings, dive-bombing the truck.

A prince landed on top of the speeding truck, leaned over the front edge and smashed the windshield with a grey fist but, amid the hail of glass that washed over him, Li swerved, bringing the truck under a concrete overpass and the dragon hit the underside of the ramp and, with a screech of metal, was swept off the roof.

Emerging from the underpass, the truck turned onto the final stretch of road leading to the emplacement—just as a second grey prince came roaring in, only to be crash-tackled by Lucky, zooming in from above, and the grey prince thrashed in pain as it hit the road, its intestines spilling from its belly.

Only fifty metres to the emplacements.

Li risked a smile. ‘We’re gonna make it . . .’

As he said it, the repair truck was hit with
ferocious
force by a grey emperor that CJ hadn’t seen coming and which Lucky would never have been able to stop.

The immense dragon came roaring out of the sky and it lashed out at the truck, swiping it with one of its foreclaws.

The truck was lifted clear off the road and fell onto its side before it went sliding—on that side—at speed, down the road.

Both CJ and Li were wearing their seatbelts so they were held in their seats as their world turned sideways.

CJ lay against her window, with the road speeding by only inches from her face.

They slid for some time—as they did so, their truck actually spun laterally—so when at last it began to slow, they were facing
back
toward the worker city.

With a lurch, the side-turned truck came to a stop.

Still fastened in her seat, CJ found herself looking through her truck’s smashed windshield back down the road on which they had come.

Boom
.

Four huge claws landed right in front of her: the giant forelimbs of the grey emperor.

Then the impossibly huge head of the emperor appeared outside the windshield, two feet away from CJ’s face. It opened its massive jaws and growled. Saliva stretched between its fangs.

‘We almost made it,’ CJ said. ‘Almost . . .’

She closed her eyes in exhaustion and waited for the end.

B
ut for some reason the emperor didn’t attack. It bellowed with rage at CJ’s face.

CJ opened her eyes.

It was
right there
. It had them, but why wasn’t it—

CJ flipped down her visor and saw some dazzling red laser grid-lines separating her from the dragon. Her truck’s slide had ended just outside the electromagnetic dome,
inches
outside it.

CJ released the breath she’d been holding. ‘Now that’s what I call close.’

Beside her truck stood Lucky, also on the safe side of the dome. Since the yellowjacket no longer had the pain chip in her head, she had been able to pass through the dome unhurt.

CJ unbuckled her seatbelt. ‘Come on, Li, let’s get this truck upright again and do our thing.’

It took a little help from Lucky to right the truck, but soon CJ and Li were driving it up to the outer edge of the gigantic hole in the ground nearby, the hole into which the middle emplacement had fallen.

Frayed cables stuck out of the hole on three sides: first, the main power cable coming in from the north; and second, the two lesser cables branching off to each side, connecting that incoming cable to the other emplacements.

Thanks to the emplacements over at the airfield, the pulsing laser dome cut across the hole, separating CJ and Li from the pack of grey dragons now watching them from the other side.

Li backed the truck up to the edge of the void and got to work.

CJ helped as much as she could, unspooling replacement cable and holding insulation rubber while Li did the technical stuff.

As Li had said, reattaching the copper cabling wasn’t that hard. It was insulating the new joints that was time-consuming. If the new connections weren’t perfectly insulated, with no bubbles or imperfections, the new cabling wouldn’t transmit enough power.

That was the function of the high-tech silver box: it was the insulation-repair unit that sealed the thick rubber layer around the new joints. But it worked slowly and they had three reconnections to make.

As Li worked, CJ kept an eye on the pack of grey dragons on the inner side of the dome. They looked like a flock of giant vultures, peering at their prey.

There were perhaps twenty of them, of all sizes, and they just glared balefully at the two humans working at the cabling not ten feet away.

‘Okay,’ Li said. ‘The first reconnection is done.’

‘Only the first?’ CJ said. ‘Can’t you work any faster?’

‘I’m trying to . . .’ Li said, moving around the edge of the hole.

As she glanced worriedly at the grey dragons, CJ wondered what was happening over at the airfield. If the emplacements at the airfield fell before she and Li reconnected the cables here, not only would all the dragons at the Great Zoo be free, these grey dragons would pounce on Li and her in a heartbeat.

It was a race now, pure and simple.

Either she and Li succeeded or they died.

She keyed her radio earpiece. ‘Bear? You copy? How’s it going over there?’

The radio squawked. Hamish’s voice came in over the sounds of roars and explosions.

‘
Hey, Chipmunk! It’s a clusterfuck of monumental proportions over here! They’re trying to bring down the middle emplacement! We’re harassing them but we won’t be able to hold ’em out much longer. You?
’

‘Working as fast as we can. Out.’

CJ spooled more cable to Li as he commenced the second reconnection. This required him to stand even closer to the grey dragons and they growled at him ominously. But the young Chinese electrician kept his cool as he worked barely three feet away from their drooling jaws. He waited patiently for the insulation unit to join this connection. It beeped.

‘Second connection is done . . .’ he said.

Li moved over to the other side of the hole to begin the final reconnection.

‘Miss Cameron,’ he said, ‘stand by the truck, please. Once this last cable is connected, we will be ready to restart the power. To do that, you must first disconnect the truck from the main power cable: that is the switch marked
DISENGAGE EXT SOURCE
. Then you must throw the big blue switch labelled
OPEN LINE
.’

CJ saw both switches on a nearby panel. ‘Got it.’

Li kept working. He rejoined the cable. Then he stepped in with the insulation unit.

‘Almost done . . .’ he said.

CJ looked from Li to the dragons. ‘Come on . . . come on . . .’ she whispered.

Over at the airfield, surrounded by fire and chased by dragons, Hamish’s fire truck whooshed past an outlying hangar.

Consumed by their battle with the dragons, neither Hamish at the water cannon nor Syme in the driver’s seat saw a panel in the floor of the hangar slide aside and a platform rise up out of the ground.

On that platform was a 6,000-kilogram fine aluminium/ethylene oxide thermobaric bomb.

It was about twenty feet long with a pointed nose and tailfins.

Second in power only to a nuclear warhead, it was the most powerful conventional weapon in existence. Its blast would vaporise
all
things within a three-hundred-metre radius while the ensuing shock wave would suck the very oxygen from the air, asphyxiating any living thing within a ten-mile radius.

At the same time, two other thermobaric devices emerged from underground chambers around the Great Dragon Zoo, powered by independent emergency reserves: the first appeared inside the electrical substation in the worker city while the second rose up from a concrete chamber buried three hundred feet beneath the Halfway Hut, the watchtower-like cable car station situated halfway between Dragon Mountain and the main entrance building.

This device was lifted on a hydraulic elevator that rose within the struts of the hut until it came to a clunking halt just below the cable car station, the height from which it could do maximum damage.

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!’