“Pay no attention to him. There was an incident which was embarrassing to his country’s navy. Our two governments had an agreement not to speak about this, but from what I am hearing now, I believe this should be known to all of you.”

“Your government? You are private or government?” the big Pole asked, suspicious. MHI really did a have a lot in common with our competitors.

“I am privy to some things. You could call me a consultant,” she answered innocently.

“Consultant? More like secret agent ninja,” one of the Australians whispered to me. Apparently he was familiar with the woman.

“An anomaly appeared on the ocean floor, in over two thousand meters of water. It rose from the mud overnight.”

“Anomaly?” I asked.

“A city.” When she said that it stunned the whole group. “It is two kilometers across, and sonar indicates that there are approximately twenty structures, the tallest of which was over a hundred meters.”

“Deep Ones, maybe?” the Pole asked.

“Far too advanced for such creatures. We do not know what inhabited it, but we were warned to be on the lookout, since it appeared that the inhabitants abandoned the city as soon as it rose from the mud. We do not know where they went. The beggar’s navy, pardon me, North Korea lost a spy ship over the disturbance, and then the Chinese navy lost a submarine to an unknown force while investigating. They then destroyed the city to keep it from falling into the hands of the Americans.”

“When did this happen?”

“Two weeks ago.”

Her comments caused quite a bit of commotion. “Holy shit!” I exclaimed, and that was one of the most coherent comments of the bunch.

Earl’s hunch had been right. There was a pattern emerging, and it was scary as hell.

I wasn’t the only one with crazy news to report. The South Africans had confirmed to Priest that there had been reports of isolated villages being found totally emptied of people, cooking fires still burning, vehicles still running, all with signs of tunneling nearby. Lee had managed to get a similar story to that of the Korean woman out of one of the Chinese Hunters about the underwater city. National security was one thing, but most Hunters realized that there were some threats out there a lot bigger than any one country. The PLA interpreter was going to have a cow, but none of us gave a crap about their lost submarine, when we were more worried about what had destroyed it. Julie had gotten rumors of strange new activity in the Paris underground from the French, and Earl had heard that one of the Russian companies had lost an entire team to an unknown entity that had begun terrorizing a mine in Siberia.