The Tombs

river.

In the cargo space were four men, sitting on a bench along one side. They used a camera with a telephoto lens, two marksman’s spotting scopes, and a video camera with a powerful zoom lens, all mounted through holes in the side of the truck. The leader of the group was a man named Gabor Szekely. He was in the first position behind the driver so he could direct the actions of any of the others.

His cell phone buzzed and he lifted it and said in Hungarian, “Yes?” He listened for a time and then said, “Thank you.” He put the phone away and announced to the others, “The man in the stern with the cable in his hands is Samuel Fargo. He had some equipment flown in overnight: a metal detector, some pairs of night vision goggles, and a Geometrics G-882 marine magnetometer, which detects small deviations in the earth’s magnetic field, especially those caused by pieces of iron.”

“The iron coffin,” said the man beside him.

Gabor didn’t see fit to acknowledge that. “The woman must be his wife, Remi Fargo. They have been staying at the City Center Hotel.”

The third man said, “We’ve got rifles here with scopes. We could easily kill anyone on deck from this truck.”

“We don’t want to do that just yet,” said Gabor Szekely. “The Fargos are experienced treasure hunters. They’ve found important treasures in Asia and the Swiss Alps and elsewhere. They have the boat and the equipment for the search.”

“We’re going to wait until after they find it?”

“Yes. That’s what we’re going to do. When they find the outer casket of iron, we’ll move in before they can raise it to the surface. They’ll have a terrible accident and we’ll find the tomb. Mr. Bako will be a hero for finding a national treasure.”

In the boat on the river, Remi Fargo studied the display from the magnetometer on her laptop computer screen. “This is insane.”

Sam said, “What’s wrong? Not getting anything?”

“The opposite. I’m getting everything. The riverbed is full of metal. I’ve got images that look like sunken boats, anchor chains, cannons, ballast, junk, bundles of rebar encased in cement. I think I’ve picked up a couple of bicycles, an anchor, and what looks like an old stove in the past five minutes.”

Sam laughed. “I guess there’s enough to keep it interesting. If you spot anything that’s buried ten feet down and looks like an iron coffin, it might be worth a closer look.”

“I assume we’re going to dive the river no matter what we see.”

“The more we do what Bako and his people think is getting us closer to the underwater tomb, the more they’ll ignore Albrecht and the others.”

Tibor said, “We may have Bako all confused and frustrated now, but don’t let it make you too comfortable. He has enough men to do many bad things at once.”

They spent several days on their magnetometer survey of the lower river. Each evening, they went to see Albrecht and his team at the building in the city center that they had rented as a lab.

“It’s definitely a battlefield,” said Albrecht.

“How could it be anything else?” said Eniko Harsanyi. “So far, we’ve found six hundred fifty-six adult male bodies, all armed, and all apparently killed together and then buried where they fell.”

Imre Polgar said, “Many of them—perhaps a majority—show signs of having serious wounds that had healed. We found impact fractures, stab and slash wounds that hit bone. These were career fighters. The term should probably be warriors rather than soldiers.”

“And who are they?” asked Remi.

“They’re Huns,” said Albrecht.

“Definitely Huns,” Eniko Harsanyi agreed. “All of them so far.”

“How can you tell?” Sam asked. “DNA?”

Albrecht took them to a long row of steel tables, where skeletons lay in a double row. “There isn’t a DNA profile of a Hun. The core group in the first and second centuries were from Central Asia. As they came west, they made alliances with or fought, defeated, and absorbed each tribe or kingdom they met. So by the time they were here on the plains of Hungary, they still had many individuals with genes in common with Mongolians, but others who appeared to be Scythian, Thracian, or Germanic. What they shared wasn’t common ethnicity but common purpose. It’s like asking for the DNA profile of a seventeenth-century pirate.”

“So how do you identify them?”

“They were horsemen. They traveled, fought, ate, and sometimes slept on horseback. We can tell by certain skeletal changes that all of these men spent their lives on horses. But there’s much more conclusive evidence.”

“What’s that?” Sam asked.

“The Huns weren’t regular cavalry, they were mounted archers. In Asia they developed this tactic with the help of an advance in the bow and arrow.”

He very carefully picked up a blackened piece of wood with irregular curves. “Here it is. It’s a compound bow, and the style is distinctive. See the ends where you nock the string? They’re called siyahs. They’re stiff, not flexible. The wood isn’t just a piece of wood. It’s layers of laths glued together. There are always seven siyahs, made of horn, and the grip is bone. It made for a very short bow that they could use on horseback and it gave much greater velocity to the arrow. This is probably as good a specimen of a Hun bow as exists today. So far, we’ve found over four hundred of them.”

“Huns against who?” asked Sam.

“That, I’m afraid, is a more difficult question. The victims were all over the field together. They were laid out with no separation for affiliation, simply covered with earth where they fell. They all had the sort of armament that a Hun would use, primarily the compound bow. They also carried a long, straight, double-edged sword in a scabbard that hung from the belt, and a short sword, or dagger, stuck horizontally in the belt. They wore goatskin trousers and a fabric or fur tunic. Some had leather vests.”

“There are still puzzles and mysteries,” said Dr. Polgar.

“I can see some right here,” Remi said. “Nobody looted the battlefield.”

“That’s one,” said Dr. Harsanyi. “A well-made sword was a prized possession. A compound bow made of wood, bone, and horn took a very skilled craftsman much preparation, a week of labor, and months of drying and curing. It’s not the sort of thing one leaves on the field.”

Remi pointed at the nearest skeleton. “And the wounds are peculiar, aren’t they? They’re not random the way they usually are in a blade fight.”

“No,” said Albrecht. “The Huns were archers, and yet we haven’t found any arrow wounds—no arrowheads that stuck in a bone or pierced a skull. And we haven’t seen the sorts of injuries usual to the battles of the period. No arms lopped off, no leg wounds that must have bled out. Every wound is a big, fatal trauma—there are nearly four hundred beheadings and a very large number of what I believe to be throats so deeply cut that the blade hit the anterior side of the vertebrae.”

Sam said, “What it looks like to me is a mass execution. We don’t see a second faction because the killers buried the victims and walked away.”

“It does look that way,” said Remi. “But if these men died so heavily armed, why would they let themselves be killed?”

“We don’t know,” said Albrecht. “We’ve just begun our work, but we’re asking ourselves these questions as we recover the rest of the remains.”

The next day, Sam and Remi arrived in the morning at the dock where the Margit was waiting to tow the magnetometer. Tibor sat, eagerly reading a newspaper. When he saw them, he said, “Sam. Remi. You have to see this article.”

“What is it?” asked Remi.

Tibor spread the paper out on the dock so they could all look at it at once. On the front page were pictures of six people. The photographs looked like mug shots, with the subjects staring straight into the camera. Remi knelt on the dock. “Sam! It’s them, the people from Consolidated Enterprises.” She turned to Tibor. “What does it say?”

“Six people, all carrying American passports, have been arrested by Szeged police on suspicion of having