“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.”

“Let’s get moving, then,” Remi said. “You climb up and pull these things out with the rope and I’ll tie the next load.”