Mission Accomplished
Singapore International School, Nathaniel Yeoh, Fiction: Group 2
A
s I stepped out of the plane, hot air blew relentlessly onto my face. It was as though I
was stepping into a hot steam room. I could feel the blazing sun scorch my skin, and
this was only an early summer’s day in July. This is the Gobi Desert, in Mongolia, a
place that is etched forever in my mind.
Suddenly, all my long forgotten memories flashed back like a movie playing vividly in
my mind. I remembered it had been exactly twenty years ago. I was ten years old and I was
on an expedition with my father in the same Gobi Desert. My father was an archeologist: his
passion was examining dinosaur fossils and he had collected about a dozen dinosaur eggs for
his archeology research. He was always willing to share with me his knowledge and the new
information he had just learned. There had been a recent find, the Therizinosaur, which was
supposed to roam the Gobi Desert during the Cretaceous period, some one hundred million years
ago. The Therizinosaur was a different species from earlier discovery and was unique because
it had very long hair from neck to tail. A fossil egg of the Therizinosaur would have advanced
scientific research by leaps and bounds.
That same early summer heat had followed us as we searched for that elusive Therizinosaurus
egg. The sand was yolk yellow and perspiration from the surrounding heat had soaked my shirt.
My father told me that it was typical weather of the plain old wasteland separating China and
Mongolia. Camels, scorpions and lizards are its usual inhabitants. Despite the harsh conditions,
my father and his colleagues were all upbeat about the prospect of a find. “Dino Egg, here we
come,” they exclaimed as they dug.
Now, I was back to complete my father’s mission. With new technology, finding dinosaur eggs
was a considerably easier task but the Therizinosaurus egg remained notoriously hard to find. The
sweltering heat was causing the motor of the detector to break down repeatedly, compounding our
challenge. Ten days after our arrival, nothing…
We had faced the same uphill struggle twenty years ago. A month into the search in the midst
of the harsh, dry conditions, we were starting to be depleted of our supplies. Food and water
had to be rationed. Many of my father’s colleagues were beginning to suffer from hunger and
dehydration. Confidence also sapped. As we headed into midsummer, the heat became intolerable.
We had decided to call it quits for the season. But before we packed up, my father and I decided on
one last day of searching. We had walked five kilometres from base camp when the glitter of the
ground some fifty metres away caught our attention! Could this be our lucky day? We ran towards
the glittering spot but the shine that we had noticed appeared now to have retreated deeper into
the sand dunes. In our excitement, we began to dig with our bare hands. Out of the blue, a giant
red worm with large and sharp teeth leaped out of the sand!
I had remembered researching on a creature that lived in the Gobi Desert. It had a red
exoskeleton that killed anyone that touched it instantly. It also had the same sharp teeth that I was
now seeing. No! It was the Mongolian death worm! As the worm moved towards me, spitting its
turquoise venom, my father came to my rescue. As he pushed me away, he was hit by the venom.
A drop of venom could dissolve a human’s skin, eating into the nervous system that caused
spasms and ultimately, death. Dad!!! But my cries were in vain as I witnessed my father take his
