Clive Cussler: The Tombs

He stopped at a dark laboratory, took out a key, and opened the door. They stepped in, and he turned on the fluorescent lights. “This is it.” The room had black counters along the side walls, a whiteboard in front, and a half dozen large stainless steel tables. On one of them was a polished wooden coffin.

“Who died?” Remi asked.

“I call him Friedrich.” He walked to the coffin. “Specifically, I’ve certified that he’s my great-great-uncle Friedrich von Schlechter. When I found him, I didn’t want to arouse curiosity, so I bought a coffin and hired an undertaker in the nearest city to put him in it, get the proper export papers, and ship him to Berlin for burial.” He opened the lid. Inside was an age-browned skeleton with a few scraps of material that seemed to be rotted leather and a length of rusty metal like the blade of a sword.

Sam and Remi looked inside. Sam said, “He seems to have gotten his head disconnected during the trip.”

Remi looked closer. “It didn’t happen in transit. See the mark on the vertebra, right here?” She pointed at the back top surface of the last vertebra, where a deep chip was missing. “That’s from an ax or a sword.”

“Very good,” said Fischer. “If you spend some time with him, you begin to learn more about who he is. Judging from the wear on the molars, and the good condition of the bones, I’d estimate he was at least thirty, but not yet forty. If you’ll look at his left radius and ulna, you’ll see some more marks. Those are clearly wounds that healed long before he died. The decapitation, of course, was his last injury. But these marks tell much more about him. He was a warrior. He was probably using some kind of two-handed weapon when an opponent swung a blade at his forearm. Or if he was using a shield, the blow got behind it. He lived and the wound healed.”

“The swords and shields remind me,” said Remi. “Have you run the carbon 14 yet?”

“Yes. We did one on a chip of his femur, one on a strip of leather that was with the body—a fragment of his shoe, a wrapping for a weapon perhaps. The reading was 82.813 percent of the carbon 14 remaining. I had also taken samples from another individual near him and tested them here. The result was the same, giving us a date of around 450 C.E.”

“Four fifty,” said Sam. “And where is the site?”

“It’s a couple of miles to the east of Szeged, Hungary.”

“Wow,” said Remi. “And you think Friedrich here is just one of many?”

“Yes. How many, I don’t know yet. A battlefield is essentially a very large mass grave. The place where the bodies come to rest is lower than the surrounding area, whether they’re buried in the usual way or covered over time. I’ve detected remains as far apart as a hundred yards. Here. Look at this.” Fischer went to another table and unrolled a large hand-drawn map with a grid on it. “This is the Tisza River, and here’s the place where the joins it. This grid is where I found Friedrich, and this one, way over here, is where I found another individual at the same depth.”

“Who could they be?”

“I’m tempted to assume they were Huns. The area of Szeged was the stronghold of the Huns at around that time. But when they fought a war, they would decamp as a group and go off to the enemy’s country to fight. They fought the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, Romans—both from Rome and from Constantinople—the Avars, Gauls, Alans, Scythians, Thracians, Armenians, and many smaller peoples whom they swallowed up in their conquests. They were also at some point allied with each of these groups against one or more of the others. Sorting out who was in this battle will take some time and examination.”

“Of course,” said Sam. “It’s hard to say much about a battle after looking at two skeletons.”

“Exactly,” said Albrecht. “I’m eager to get back to begin an excavation. But there are problems.”

“What sort of problems?” Remi asked.

“It’s a big site—a large open field that at one time was a pasture, part of a collective farm under the Communist government, but has been lying fallow for more than ten years. It’s out in the open near a road. Szeged is a thriving modern city, only a few miles away. If the word got out, there would be no way to stop people from coming out on their own and digging for souvenirs. And there have been enough stories of treasure being found in classical-era sites to attract thousands. In a day, everything could be lost.”

“But, so far, everything is still secret,” Sam said. “Right?”

“I’m just hoping that I’m imagining things. But I got the impression several times while I was exploring the district around Szeged that I was being spied on.”

“There’s a lot of that going around,” said Remi.

“What do you mean?”

Sam said, “While we were in Louisiana, we were followed wherever we went to dive. It turned out to be an exploration team from a company called Consolidated Enterprises.”

“That doesn’t sound like archaeologists. It sounds like a business conglomerate.”

“I’d say that’s pretty accurate,” said Sam. “Their business plan seems to be to wait for someone else to find a promising site and then push them off it and dive it themselves.”

“Sam got them to follow us into a swamp on foot and then borrowed their boat.”

Albrecht chuckled. “Well, you’ve become known for finding gold and jewels. I’m just a poor professor who studies people who lived a long time ago and whose idea of treasure was a good barley harvest. This battlefield is the most dramatic thing I’ve found. I’d been studying the contours of the land, looking for signs of a Roman settlement. At one point, the area was part of a Roman province. The main reason I took interest in the field was that it wasn’t covered with buildings.”

“Do you have any idea who was spying on you in Szeged?” asked Sam.

“One day someone broke into my hotel room. I had my notes and my laptop computer with me. My luggage was searched, but nothing was taken. But on several days I saw a large black car with four big Eastern European men in dark suits. I would see them three or four times in a day watching me, and sometimes they would have binoculars or a camera.”

“They sound like police,” said Sam. “Maybe they suspected you were doing something illegal—like shipping Friedrich out of the country. If they knew you were an archaeologist, they’d want to know about any artifacts you’d found.”

Albrecht looked at his feet. “I’m guilty of smuggling Friedrich out. But if I had stayed in Hungary to do the lab work, the word of my discovery would have been out in a day. Keeping a find secret is standard procedure. Everyone who has gone public prematurely has come back to a site that’s been looted and trampled and all scientific and historical value destroyed. And this site is more vulnerable than most. The bodies I’ve found still had whatever weapons and armor they’d died with. There are textile fragments, bits of leather and fur. All that would be lost.”

“Of course we’ll respect your secrecy,” Sam said. “And we’re here to help you any way we can.”

“We’re good at secrets,” Remi said. “But wouldn’t it be a good idea to get Selma thinking about this? We may be able to use her help, and she has a way of anticipating what we might like to know.”

“Do we have your permission?” asked Sam. “It would mean alerting the rest of our staff, but that’s all.”

“Of course,” said Fischer. “The more good minds working on our side, the better. For now, I’m going to put Friedrich away.”

“After we’ve had a chance to unpack and recover a bit, we hope you’ll come to the hotel and have dinner with us,” Remi said.