The Great Zoo of China Read online

  It was her complimentary can of hairspray.

  But when fired through the flame of Hamish’s lighter it became a miniature flamethrower.

  A horizontal column of fire lanced out from the hairspray can, lighting up the area as it engulfed the two Chinese soldiers. Their faces and chests were enveloped in flames . . .

  . . . as were the grenades clipped to their weapons belts.

  The two flaming infantrymen exploded in identical grenade blasts. They simply disappeared. One second they were there, the next they were gone.

  By this time, CJ had hit the deck, pulling Hamish down with her. Blood and body parts went flying over their heads.

  But then something that CJ had not intended occurred.

  Damaged by the force of the blast, the section of the wooden boardwalk beneath them collapsed, and everyone on it dropped as one into the swampwater below, where the crocodiles were waiting.

  CJ plunged into the foul-smelling swamp and for a brief moment her world went silent.

  Then a line of fearsome teeth rushed past her, followed by a long pebbled body, webbed claws and a powerful tail. A flashing memory of a similar scene sent a wave of adrenalin coursing through her and she kicked out with her feet and they made contact with the bottom.

  CJ stood, her head breaking the surface. The water was only chest deep.

  As she resurfaced, she saw that the boardwalk was shattered in the middle, with spot fires burning at its edges. The burning flesh of the two exploded Chinese infantrymen had splattered the surrounding reeds.

  Her companions—Hamish, Johnson, Syme, Go-Go and Wolfe—all surfaced nearby, equally horrified. Also in the water were the four remaining Chinese troops: Captain Wong, the two soldiers who had been about to kill Wolfe, and the private who had brought Go-Go.

  CJ saw a look of panic on Wolfe’s face and she knew that he was about to bolt.

  ‘Wolfe! Don’t! Stay where you are! They go for the ones that flee!’ she barked.

  Despite his obvious terror, Wolfe somehow obeyed. He stayed still while the two Chinese soldiers near him sloshed desperately through the water, trying to get back to the boardwalk.

  Two crocs zeroed in on them immediately.

  They were much faster in the water than any person could hope to be and they overwhelmed the hapless infantrymen, dragging them under with screams of horror.

  CJ gasped at the speed of it.

  Usually solitary animals, crocs sometimes hunted in a manner known as ‘mobbing’: at the sign of a lot of food—like, for instance, a herd of zebras crossing a river—they banded together. But they almost always went for the outliers of the herd, usually the slower or younger ones, or the ones that panicked and bolted.

  Gunfire made CJ spin and she saw the private who had been guarding Go-Go firing his pistol at an oncoming croc. That croc veered away as the bullets hit the reeds around it but then the Chinese soldier was abruptly yanked under the surface. He disappeared in a spray of water, emitting a surprised shriek that was cut off when his mouth went under.

  CJ snapped around—in time to see Captain Wong wading through the water right beside her, his face twisted in fury, his 9mm pistol coming level with her face. At the exact same time, she felt a surge of water and in an instant CJ knew that the captain’s sudden movement had captured a croc’s attention.

  She grabbed Wong’s gun hand in her own and hip-tossed him, jujitsu-style, right into the path of an inrushing crocodile.

  The big croc—and it was indeed a big one—clamped its mighty jaws around Wong’s head. Then, with incredible ferocity, it yanked the captain away from CJ and she fell back into the water, to find his 9mm pistol now held dumbly in her own hand.

  CJ spun to see the croc rolling over and over in the water, still gripping Wong by the head, flinging his body like a rag doll: this was the death roll. A crocodile didn’t suffocate you with a bite to the jugular like a lion did. No, it rolled you until you drowned. Then it ate you at its leisure.

  CJ stepped slowly away from the death roll taking place right in front of her. She saw the others over by the semi-destroyed boardwalk.

  ‘Everybody, move slowly and together back to the boardwalk. We must stay together. No running and no breaking away from the group.’

  And so that was how they moved—slowly and tightly together—back toward the boardwalk.

  By now at least five crocs were feasting on the four Chinese soldiers with perhaps six more watching from the reeds.

  Gliding through the chest-deep water, CJ whispered, ‘Head for that side.’ She indicated the end of the exploded boardwalk farthest from the van that had brought them here. ‘There could be more Chinese troops on the way to make sure we’re dead.’

  The group reached the end of the damaged boardwalk.

  ‘One at a time,’ CJ said. ‘Keep it slow. No sudden movements. No splashing.’

  Syme went first, followed by Wolfe, Johnson, Go-Go and Hamish. Hamish and Johnson then scooped CJ out of the water together with a single powerful lift.

  They all now stood on the boardwalk, gasping and soaked. The spot fires were beginning to peter out.

  ‘What now?’ Hamish asked.

  CJ said, ‘I can’t say I’ve been in a situation like this before but I don’t think it’ll be long before someone comes to see why these assholes haven’t come back. We gotta move and we gotta move now.’

  She glanced at Greg Johnson, seeking the opinion of the only person there who she thought might actually have been in such a situation before.

  Johnson nodded. ‘They’ll come checking soon.’

  ‘But where do we go?’ Wolfe asked.

  CJ bit her lip, looked out into the darkness.

  Across the lake Dragon Mountain loomed large, a black shadow against the cloud-filled sky. Around it was the megavalley, dotted with hills, forests and waterfalls, and infested with dragons.

  She tossed the dead captain’s 9mm pistol to Johnson. ‘Here, you can use this better than I can.’ Then, to the others: ‘We go into the zoo. And if we can stay alive long enough, we figure out a way to get out of it.’

  The most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.

  —YANN MARTEL, LIFE OF PI

  (KNOPF, CANADA, 2001)

  CJ ran quickly but quietly down the wooden boardwalk. The floorboards creaked. The waters of the swamp sloshed with the movements of crocodiles.

  Hamish and the others ran behind her, also trying to move with minimal noise.

  By now, night had fallen over the zoo, but it was relatively easy to see thanks to the many floodlights mounted on the rim of the crater. The full moon was hidden behind a dense layer of storm clouds.

  Then the first drops of rain began to fall, spattering the boardwalk.

  As she ran, CJ kept an ear out for another sound: the sound of realisation. When the Chinese discovered that the American witnesses to the bloodshed had not been eliminated, there would be uproar. So far, she had heard no such sounds.

  ‘CJ Cameron,’ Go-Go whispered as he jogged, ‘can I just say that you are Xena the fucking Warrior Princess! Nice moves back there, honeypie.’

  ‘Thanks, Go-Go,’ CJ said.

  ‘It was pretty impressive,’ Greg Johnson said as he came up alongside her. ‘Where’d you learn to build a flamethrower?’

  ‘High school science class,’ CJ said. ‘Honestly, I was just trying to set them alight, create a distraction of some sort. The grenades were . . . well . . .’ She let the sentence trail off. She didn’t mention that her hands had been shaking ever since. She’d never killed anyone before.

  ‘They got what they deserved,’ Johnson said, looking her in the eye. ‘They were going to kill you and all of us. Right now, the question is: now what?’

  CJ regathered herself. ‘Now, we get as far away from this swamp as possible. When the Chinese find out we’re not dead, they’ll send more troops, maybe choppers, too.’

  ‘Concur.’ Johnson turned to Go-Go. ‘Hey, you. How many helicopters have y
our army guys got here?’

  ‘Yo. Salt-and-Pepper. The name is Go-Go or Mr Go-Go, okay? To answer your question, they have seven choppers in total: four of the little Z-10 attack birds, two big Mi-17 gunships, and one of those really big double-rotored transport choppers—’

  ‘A Chinook,’ Johnson said.

  ‘Yeah, that’s it. It’s also loaded with fucking guns. The dragons hate the choppers. Hate ’em. I’ve seen a few civilian helicopters here as well, but they come and go and they don’t have any weapons on them that I know of.’

  Johnson turned back to CJ as they jogged. ‘So we evade and avoid capture. What then?’

  ‘The first thing we need to do is find something that can put us in touch with the outside world: a working phone or a computer. We need to call for help and then find a place to hide till someone can come and get us,’ CJ said. ‘I figure the best place to hide is outside this crater, so after we find a telephone, we find a way out. Go-Go, where’s the nearest phone?’

  ‘The casino hotel.’ Go-Go pointed out over the reeds. ‘Lots of offices and rooms there with heaps of phones and computers.’

  ‘Where else?’ CJ asked. ‘Give me options.’

  Go-Go nodded across the valley to the south, to where Dragon Mountain towered in the rain. ‘The mountain. There’s a maintenance office inside the cable car station. There’s also a manager’s office up in the restaurant.’

  CJ looked up at the disc-shaped revolving restaurant at the summit of the peak.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Closer is better, so the casino it is. We stay out of sight, find a phone, call for help, then we get the hell out of Dodge. Everybody okay with that?’

  There were no objections.

  ‘Getting out is going to be next to impossible in daylight,’ Johnson said. ‘We need to do it tonight, under cover of darkness.’

  CJ turned as she jogged, appraised Johnson. With his salt-and-pepper hair and clean-cut features, he was kind of handsome, but there was something more to him, something in his sharp grey eyes.

  ‘Okay, you,’ she said. ‘Since we’re on the run from the Chinese Army in a valley filled with dragons, it’s time to come clean. You’re not just an aide to the US Ambassador, are you?’

  Johnson nodded. ‘I’m the deputy station chief for the Central Intelligence Agency at the United States embassy in Beijing. I was a field agent for nine years before I was shot in the line of duty and got sent to Beijing to drive a desk. It was supposed to be a nice cushy office posting. Look at me now.’

  ‘Why send a CIA agent to a new zoo?’ CJ asked. ‘Did the Agency know about the dragons?’

  ‘No,’ Johnson said firmly. ‘We didn’t know a thing about the dragons. We knew about the zoo, we knew that it had been planned for years and that it was supersized. But the Chinese outflanked us on the dragons. They kept that very close to their chests. We were totally blindsided.’

  ‘Then why were you sent here with the ambassador?’ CJ glanced at Syme running along behind them.

  ‘I specialise in observing China’s strategic nuclear arsenal and other exotic weapon systems,’ Johnson said. ‘One of the ways the Chinese kept this place a secret is that it is built entirely on military land. I got intel a few weeks back that the Second Artillery Corps of the People’s Liberation Army—the division of the Chinese military that controls its nuclear weapons and high-yield conventional devices—had sent three 6,000-kilogram thermobaric bombs to the military airfield adjoining this zoo. My job was to find out why.’

  ‘There’s an airfield down here?’ Hamish said.

  ‘A few miles to the southwest of the main valley,’ Johnson said. ‘It’s a mirror image of the civilian airport that you arrived at on the eastern side.’

  ‘What’s a thermobaric bomb?’ CJ asked.

  ‘It’s the most powerful conventional weapon short of a nuke,’ Johnson said. ‘It has a blast yield of approximately forty kilotons. A thermobaric device is often called a vacuum bomb. The initial blast will vaporise everything within a 300-yard radius while the ensuing shock wave is far more devastating: it creates a vacuum that literally sucks the oxygen out of the air for a radius of ten miles. Any living thing in that ten-mile radius will be asphyxiated and quite gruesomely, too. Some reports say that the vacuum will suck your lungs right up out of your throat.’

  ‘What a charming image,’ Hamish said.

  ‘So it’s a big-ass bomb,’ CJ said.

  ‘The biggest you can get without going nuclear, yes,’ Johnson said.

  ‘And you say the Chinese have three of them here?’ CJ said.

  ‘Yes,’ Johnson said. ‘I’ve been tracking those three thermobaric bombs since the Chinese bought them off the Russians in a very shady deal. I know their serial numbers, their firing codes, even their override codes.’

  CJ said, ‘So why would the Chinese bring three of them to a zoo, even if it is a dragon one?’

  Johnson shrugged. ‘Now that I know what’s here at this zoo, my guess is that the thermobaric bombs are a failsafe, a last resort in case the Chinese lose control of the zoo and the dragons get out.

  ‘You blow one of them and you lose a small amount of real estate but you bring down every living animal for miles. It’d fix a dragon problem. Whatever the reason, three of those bombs are here . . . somewhere.’

  They had been running for about ten minutes in the slow-falling rain when they rounded a bend in the boardwalk and the wall of reeds to their right fell away to reveal a striking view.

  A long high waterfall stretched away from them to the south. The lake beneath it glistened in the glare of the zoo’s floodlights, the whole vista veiled by drizzling rain. At the other end of the waterfall, about half a kilometre away, rose Dragon Mountain.

  In other circumstances, it would have been a beautiful sight, but not tonight.

  CJ didn’t like it here. The waterfall was so loud, they couldn’t hear anything coming, a dragon or a chopper. The boardwalk looped away to the left, heading off in the direction of the casino hotel—

  Blinding white light blazed to life all around her, coming from above. An enormous Chinese Mi-17 helicopter thundered by overhead, banking low. It pulled up into a hover, its searchlights casting twin beams through the air, beams that centred on CJ and her group on the boardwalk at the edge of the swamp.

  Muzzle flashes erupted from the left side of the gunship and the boardwalk was strafed by bullets.

  ‘Into the water!’ CJ yelled as she dived off the walkway a second before it was shredded by heavy-calibre gunfire.

  CJ splashed into the brackish swampwater, right at the point where the reeds met the lake. Her feet found the bottom and she stood once again in the water. She flung her wet hair out of her eyes—

  —to find herself staring right into the jaws of a huge saltwater crocodile. The crocodile’s tail slunk back and forth behind it, cat-like. It was a monster of a croc, easily seventeen feet long.

  There was nothing CJ could do. The croc had her. She knew it. It knew it.

  With a powerful lash of its tail, the crocodile lunged.

  CJ threw out her right arm in defence and the croc clamped down on it.

  She screamed in pain as the croc’s foreteeth slammed down on her shoulder. It felt like being pinned in a giant vice. CJ had expected to feel the hot searing pain of the animal’s teeth piercing her skin, but her yellow-and-black leather jacket—taken from the dead trainer, Yim—had Kevlar plates sewn into its shoulders and the plates had thankfully spared her from that.

  Still, the croc had her entire right arm in its mouth and a second later, the big reptile yanked her under.

  Another flashing memory of the attack in the Everglades.

  The bull alligator has dragged her under, her head in its jaws. Its teeth grate across her cheek. Bubbles and brown water fill her vision.

  She has a pocket knife in a pouch on her belt. It is small but sharp.

  As the gator swings her into a death roll, almost snapping her neck,
she manages to extract the knife.

  Everyone has heard that if you stab a gator or a croc in the eye, it might release you—but when your head is in its jaws, that’s all but impossible.

  So CJ thrusts her knife into the only place within reach: the alligator’s soft underbelly.

  The knife goes in. The alligator grunts in surprise but keeps hold of her, keeps rolling. So CJ just stabs away at its belly, shredding it, tearing the skin apart.

  The opening in the beast’s underbelly widens. CJ keeps stabbing. Blood pours from the wound. She keeps stabbing. Guts start falling out.

  Finally the rolling slows. The bull is weakening. CJ keeps stabbing. She is fighting for her fucking life and she will not relent. As the roll slows, she jams the knife deep into the animal’s heart.

  It exhales loudly . . . and releases her head.

  She falls away from it, staggers onto the muddy shore, her face unrecognisable, her clothes rags.

  She collapses in the mud as some employees come running, firing rifles into the air to scatter the other alligators.

  CJ blacks out.

  She will wake up in hospital two weeks later. When Troy, her fiancé, sees her destroyed face, he leaves her.

  This time it was different: this croc had her by the arm.

  Her whole arm, from shoulder to hand, was within its mouth. While her jacket had saved her shoulder from being punctured by the crocodile’s teeth, the pressure of its bite was still incredible, the most powerful bite-pressure in the world—well, short of a dragon.

  In the previous attack, CJ had been all panic and adrenalin.

  That wasn’t the case now. Now she was calm, her mind sharp, and it was her mind that was going to get her out of this.

  CJ braced herself for the death roll that was about to come. She had a plan, but she couldn’t afford to break her shoulder in the execution of it.

  With a powerful spinning movement, the crocodile rolled and CJ was yanked into the roll.