“Ah, of course. We’re all told that as little children,” said Tibor. “Arpad Bako must be the only child who ever believed it. Besides, the Tisza is a thousand kilometers long, and it used to be even longer. Lots of it has been diverted, some parts cut off and left dry. All the swampy parts were drained.”
“That’s the beauty of it, Tibor. Remi and I are not going to find the tomb. We’re just going to make Bako watch us look for it.”
“I want to join you.”
“Welcome aboard. Speaking of boats, do you have any relatives with boats?”
“Not a relative, a friend. He would rent it for, say . . . nothing.”
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Well, you just risked your life to rescue a friend from a compound full of armed men and paid me a fortune for spending a day and a night helping you. It’s good business to be your friend.”
The next morning, a thirty-foot fishing boat, Margit, puttered up the Tisza River at five to ten knots. Sometimes it would idle, barely holding against the lazy current of the river, and then begin to make diagonal crossings. The Margit was towing something, but it was impossible to tell from the shore what it was because it never rose above the surface.
A sharp-eyed observer might have seen that there were five people aboard—a helmsman, two men who stood watch, a man who operated whatever was being towed, and a slender auburn-haired woman who watched the screen of a laptop computer on a shelf that was mounted just inside the cabin.
After less than an hour of this, a truck with an enclosed cargo space moved slowly along the road above the 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 Gábor Székely. 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.
Gábor 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 Gábor Székely. “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 Enikö Harsányi. “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 Polgár 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,” Enikö Harsányi 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. Polgár.
“I can see some right here,” Remi said. “Nobody looted the battlefield.”
“That’s one,” said Dr. Harsányi. “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.”