At midnight they got into their rental truck. Sam drove and Remi sat beside him, trying to navigate. They drove along the curving rustic highway to the hamlet of Cuperly and then headed north. It was only a short time before they reached the field they had found in the late afternoon. Sam pulled the truck to the side of the road.
“Well, let’s go see what they were digging out there,” said Remi as she put on her backpack.
Sam replied, “Let’s hope they just have big gophers in France.”
They climbed a stone fence and walked into the field. Remi consulted the photos she’d taken that afternoon to guide them to the first hole they’d seen from the road. As they approached the hole, they put on their night vision goggles and knelt beside it. The sight was confusing, so they used their shovels to clear away some of the dirt.
“What is that?” Remi said. She reached down and touched it. “Steel. It looks like a cannon.”
“You’re right.” Sam dug around it a bit with his hand, then stopped at the muzzle. “I think it’s a French 75.”
“That’s a cocktail,” she said. “Gin, champagne, lemon juice, and sugar, I think.”
“Well, this is the cannon they named it after,” he said. “Something about the hangover, I imagine. This is also why we have to be careful when we dig in France. The Marne is just to the south and east beyond that field. In the summer of 1918, General Ludendorff planned a big offensive to take the Champagne region. The allies got a copy of his plan, moved a lot of artillery around, and, an hour before the German attack, opened fire with over three thousand cannons. I’m guessing from the position and condition of this cannon that it probably got damaged in the return fire—or just got too hot.”
“Whoever got here before us probably picked up a big spike on their magnetometer, dug down, and found it,” said Remi.
“Let’s go look at the next hole.”
They moved toward the next one in the field, stopped, and looked in. At the bottom of the hole was what seemed to be the remains of a couple of wooden crates, both age-darkened and rotted-away. There was also the metal rim of a wagon wheel and the hub. Sam cautiously poked at the crates, which were as soft as wet cardboard. He saw the row of five cannon rounds, shaped like giant bullets, the brass casings green with patina from being buried for so long and the projectiles a uniform gray. “There’s a find,” he said. “Unexploded ordnance. It looks like a buried caisson. Let’s move on.”
“We should call somebody,” Remi said.
“We will. There are so many bombs and mines and artillery shells from both world wars that France still keeps teams on the payroll to dispose of them when they turn up.”
“This must have been quite a surprise to Bako’s French friends when they dug their test holes,” Remi said.
“Well, there’s just one more hole dug in the field and it looks bigger than the first two,” Sam said. “Whatever they found must be something that doesn’t blow up.” They walked toward the third hole.
They stepped up to the mound of earth that had been thrown aside in the digging.
“Look at the entrance,” Remi said. “It’s like the other—made of mortared stones.”
“Let’s see what’s left in there,” Sam said. Sam took a nylon climbing rope out of his backpack, tied a loop, put it over the shaft of his spade, then propped the spade in the corner of the hole’s entrance to hold it. They adjusted their night vision goggles, and he lowered Remi into the chamber. After a few seconds, the rope went slack. There were a few seconds of silence.
“What do you see?”
“It’s not empty, but I think it’s been looted. There aren’t any piles of gold down here. Come look.”
Sam rappelled down the inner wall of the chamber. His feet touched a surface and he knelt. “It’s cement,” he said.
“The Romans had cement. Why not Attila?” Remi said.
“I know. If he wanted a mason, I’m sure he could have captured a thousand of them. It looks as though they made this chamber of timbers and then plastered the whole thing with cement, probably on both sides.”
“Look,” said Remi. She was standing a dozen feet away, beside a pile of metal that still had a dull gleam in the amplified green light of the night vision goggles.
Sam joined her. “I don’t see any gold, but this is amazing—Roman shields, helmets and breastplates, swords, javelins. This must have been part of the spoils of the campaign.”
“They’re historically valuable,” Remi said. “But still, it doesn’t make me happy to know that Bako’s French friends beat us here.”
“Let’s find the inscription, unless they took that too.”
They searched the walls, looking for any faint scratches. Then, at the bottom of the pile of Roman equipment, they found a shield that was not like the four-foot-high rectangular Roman scuta that curves back at the sides. This was a round one with a steel boss at the center that stuck out like a spike. On the inner side, engraved around the rim, was an inscription in Latin.
Remi took a picture of it with her cell phone’s camera, then had Sam hold the shield and took several pictures from different angles to bring out the carved letters in sharp relief. “There,” she said. “That should do it. Wait a second. It shouldn’t be here. Bako’s friends should know that this shield was important—maybe more important than anything else in the chamber. Why would they leave it?”
Sam shrugged. “They must have dropped in, seen lots of gold and silver and stones, taken them, and left. It’s incredible luck for us.”