Текст книги "Lost City"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Austin was the leader of NUMA's Special Assignments Team, created by former NUMA director Admiral James Sandecker, now vice president of the United States, for undersea missions that often took

place secretly outside the realm of government oversight. A marine engineer by education and experience, Austin had come to NUMA from the CIA, where he had worked for a little-known branch that specialized in underwater intelligence gathering.

After coming over to NUMA, Austin had assembled a team of experts that included Joe Zavala, a brilliant engineer specializing in underwater vehicles; Paul Trout, a deep-ocean geologist; and Trout's wife, Gamay Morgan-Trout, a highly skilled diver who had specialized in nautical archaeology before attaining her doctorate in marine biology. Working together, they had conducted many successful probes into strange and sinister enigmas on and under the world's oceans.

Not every job that Austin undertook was filled with danger. Some, like his latest assignment, were quite pleasant and more than made up for the bumps, bruises and scars he had collected on various NUMA assignments. Although he had known his female companion only a few days, he had become thoroughly entranced by her. Skye Labelle was in her late thirties. She had olive skin and mischievous violet-blue eyes that peered out from under the brim of her woolen hat. Her hair was dark brown, bordering on black. Her mouth was too wide to be called classical, but her lips were lush and sensual. She had a good body, but it would never make the cover of Sports Illustrated. Her voice was low and cool, and when she spoke it was obvious she had a quick intelligence.

Although she was striking rather than pretty, Austin thought she was one of the most attractive women he had ever met. She reminded him of a portrait of a young raven-haired countess he had seen hanging on the wall of the Louvre. Austin had admired how the artist had cleverly caught the passion and unabashed frankness in the subject's gaze. The woman in the painting had a deviltry in her eyes, as if she wanted to throw off her regal finery and run barefoot through a meadow. He remembered wishing he could have met her in person. And now, it seemed, he had.

"Do you believe in reincarnation?" Austin said, thinking about the museum portrait.

Skye blinked in surprise. They had been talking about glacial geology.

"I don't know. Why do you ask?" She spoke American English with a slight French accent.

"No reason." Austin paused. "I have another, more personal question."

She gave him a wary look. "I think I know. You want to know about my name."

"I've never met anyone named Skye Labelle before."

"Some people believe I must be named after a Las Vegas stripper."

Austin chuckled. "It's more likely that someone in your family had a poetic turn of mind."

"My crazy parents," she said, with a roll of her eyes. "My father was sent to the U.S. as a diplomat. One day he went to the Albuquerque hot air balloon festival and from that day on, he became a fanatical aeronaut. My older brother was named Thaddeus after the early balloonist Thaddeus Lowe. My American mother is an artist, and something of a free spirit, so she thought the idea of my name was wonderful. Father insists he named me after the color of my eyes, but everyone knows babies' eyes are neutral when they are first born. I don't mind. I think it's a nice name."

"They don't get any nicer than Beautiful Sky."

"Merci. And thank you for all this!" She gazed through the bubble and clapped her hands in childlike joy. "This is absolutely wonderful^. I never dreamed that my studies in archaeology would take me under the water inside a big bubble."

"It must beat polishing medieval armor in a musty museum," Austin said.

Skye had a warm, uninhibited laugh. "I spend very little time in

museums except when I'm organizing an exhibition. I do a lot of corporate jobs these days to support my research work."

Austin raised an eyebrow. "The thought of Microsoft and General Motors hiring an expert in arms and armor makes me wonder about their motives."

"Think about it. To survive, a corporation must try to kill or wound its competition while defending itself. Figuratively speaking."

"The original 'cutthroat competition," " Austin said.

"Not bad. I'll use that phrase in my next presentation."

"How do you teach a bunch of executives to draw blood? Figuratively speaking, of course."

"They already have the blood lust. I get them to think 'out of the box," as they like to say. I ask them to pretend that they are supplying arms for competing forces. The old arms makers had to be metallurgists and engineers. Many were artists, like Leonardo, who designed war engines. Weapons and strategy were constantly changing and the people who supplied the armies had to adjust quickly to new conditions."

"The lives of their customers depended on it."

"Right. I might have one group devise a siege machine while another comes up with ways to defend against it. Or I can give one side metal-piercing arrows while the other comes up with armor that works without being unwieldy. Then we switch sides and try again. They learn to use their native intelligence rather than to rely on computers and such."

"Maybe you should offer your services to NUMA. Learning how to blast holes in ten-foot-thick walls with a trebuchet sounds like a lot more fun than staring at budget pie charts."

A sly smile crossed Skye's face. "Well, you know, most executives are men."

"Boys and their toys. A surefire formula for success."

"I'll admit I pander to the childish side of my clients, but my sessions are immensely popular and very lucrative. And they allow me the flexibility to work on projects that might not be possible on my salary from the Sorbonne."

"Projects like the ancient trade routes?"

She nodded. "It would be a major coup if I could prove that tin and other goods traveled overland along the old Amber Route, through the Alpine passes and valleys to the Adriatic, where Phoenician and Minoan ships transported it to the eastern reaches of the Mediterranean. And that the trade went both ways."

"The logistics of your theoretical trade route would have been complex."

"You're a genius! Exactly my point!"

"Thanks for the compliment, but I'm just relating it to my own experiences moving people and material."

"Then you know how complicated it would be. People along the land route, like the Celts and the Etruscans, had to cooperate on trade agreements in order to move the materials along. I think trade was a lot more extensive than my colleagues would admit. All this has fascinating implications about how we view ancient civilizations. They weren't all about war; they knew the value of peaceful alliances a long time before the EU or NAFTA. And I mean to prove it."

"Ancient globalization? An ambitious goal. I wish you luck."

"I'll need it. But if I do succeed I'll have you and NUMA to thank. Your agency has been wonderfully generous in the use of its research vessel and equipment."

"It goes both ways. Your project gives NUMA a chance to test our new vessel in inland waters and to see how this submersible operates under field conditions."

She made a sweeping gesture with her hand. "The scenery is perfectly lovely. All we need is a bottle of champagne and foie gras." Austin leaned over and handed a small plastic cooler to his companion "Can't help you there, but how about ajambon et frontage sandwich?"

"Ham and cheese would be my second choice." She unzipped the cooler, extracted a sandwich, handed it to Austin and took one for herself.

Austin brought the submersible to a hovering stop. As he chewed on his lunch, savoring the crusty baguette and the creamy slab of Camembert cheese, he studied a chart of the lake.

"We're here, alongside a natural shelf that roughly parallels the shoreline," he said, running his finger along a wavy line. "This could have been exposed land centuries ago."

"It goes along with my findings. A section of the Amber Route skirted the shore of Lac du Dormeur. When the waters rose, the traders found another route. Anything we find here would be very old." , "What exactly are we looking for?"

"I'll know it when I see it."

"Good enough for me."

"You're far too trusting. I'll elaborate. The caravans that plied the Amber Route needed places to stop for the night. I'm looking for the ruins of hospices, or settlements that may have grown up around a stopping place. Then I hope to find weapons that would flesh out the full trade story."

They washed their lunch down with Evian water, and Austin's fingers played over the controls. The battery-powered electrical motors hummed, activating the twin lateral thrusters that the sphere rested on, and the submersible continued its exploration.

The SEAmagine SEA mobile was fifteen feet long, about the length of a mid sized Boston whaler, and only seven feet wide, but it was capable of carrying two people in one-atmosphere comfort to a depth of fifteen hundred feet for hours at a time. The vehicle had a range of twelve nautical miles and a maximum speed of 2.5 knots. Unlike most submersibles, which bobbed like a cork when they surfaced, the SEA mobile could be operated like a boat. It sat high in the water when it wasn't submerged, giving the pilot clear visibility, and could cruise to a dive site or edge up to a dive platform.

The SEA mobile looked as if it had been assembled from spare parts cast off from a deep submergence lab. The crystal ball cockpit was fifty-four inches in diameter and it was perched on two flotation cylinders the size of water mains. Two protective metal frames shaped like the letter D flanked the sphere.

The vehicle was built to maintain positive buoyancy at all times and the tendency to float to the surface was countered by a midship-mounted vertical thruster. Because the SEA mobile was balanced to remain level constantly, at the surface or under it, the pilot didn't have to fiddle around with pitch controls to keep it at a horizontal attitude.

Using a navigational acoustic Doppler instrument to keep track of their position, Austin guided the vehicle along the underwater escarpment, a broad shelf that gradually sloped down into the deeper water. Following a basic search pattern, Austin ran a series of parallel lines like someone mowing a lawn. The sub's four halogen lights illuminated the bottom, whose contours had been shaped by the advance and retreat of glaciers.

The sub tracked back and forth for two hours and Austin's eyes were starting to glaze from staring at the monotonous gray seascape. Skye was still entranced by the uniqueness of her surroundings. She leaned forward, chin on her hands, studying every square foot of lake bottom. In time, her persistence paid off.

"There!" She jabbed the air with her forefinger.

Austin slowed the vehicle to a crawl and squinted at a vague shape just beyond the range of the lights, then moved the submersible in for a closer look. The object lying on its side was a massive stone slab about twelve feet long and half as wide. The chisel marks visible along its edges suggested that it was not a natural rock formation.

Other monoliths could be seen nearby, some standing upright; others topped with similar slabs like the Greek letter.

"Seems we took a wrong turn and ended up at Stonehenge," Austin said.

"They're burial monuments," Skye said. "The arches mark the way to a tomb for funeral processions."

Austin increased the power to the thrusters and the vehicle glided over six identical archways spaced thirty feet or so apart. Then the ground on either side of the archways began to rise, creating a shallow valley. The natural hillsides morphed into high cyclopean walls constructed with massive hand-hewn blocks.

The narrow canyon ended abruptly in a sheer vertical wall. Cut into the wall was a rectangular opening that looked like the door on an elephant house. A lintel about thirty feet wide topped the door opening and above the huge slab was a smaller, triangular hole.

"Incredible," Skye said in hushed tones. "It's a tho los

"You've seen this before?" ~~

"It's a beehive tomb. There's one in Mycenae called the "Treasury of Atreus

"Mycenae. That's Greek."

"Yes, but the design is even older. The tombs go back to 2200 B.C. They were used for communal burials in Crete and other parts of the Aegean. Kurt, do you know what this means?" Her voice quivered with excitement. "We could establish trade links between the Aegean and Europe far earlier than anyone has dared to suggest. I'd give anything to get a close look at the tomb."

"My standard price for an underwater tomb tour is an invitation to dinner."

"You can get us inside?"

"Why not? We've got plenty of clearance on either side and above. If we go slowly "

"The hell with slow! Depeche-toi. Vite, vitel" Austin laughed, and moved the submersible forward toward the dark opening. He was as eager as Skye, but he advanced with caution. The lights were beginning to probe the interior when a voice came over the vehicle's radio receiver.

"Kurt, this is support. Come in, please."

The words being transmitted through the water had a metallic vibrato, but Austin recognized the voice of the NUMA boat's captain.

He brought the submersible to a hovering stop and picked up the microphone. "This is the SEA mobile Do you read me?"

"Your voice is a little faint and scratchy, but I can hear you. Please tell Ms. Labelle that Francois wants to talk to her."

Francois Balduc was the French observer NUMA had invited aboard as a courtesy to the French government. He was a pleasant, middle-aged bureaucrat who stayed out of the way except at dinner, when he assisted the cook in turning out some memorable feasts. Austin handed the mike to Skye.

There was a heated discussion in French, which ended when Skye passed the microphone back.

"Merde!" she said with a frown. "We've got to go up."

"Why? We still have plenty of air and power."

"Francois got a call from a big shot in the French government. I'm needed immediately to identify some sort of artifact."

"That doesn't sound very urgent. Can it wait?"

"As far as I'm concerned it can until Napoleon returns from exile," she said with a sigh, "but the government is subsidizing part of my research here, so I'm on call, so to speak. I'm sorry."

Austin stared with narrowed eyes at the opening. "This tomb has been hidden from human view possibly for thousands of years. It's not going anywhere."

Skye nodded in agreement, although her heart clearly wasn't in it.

They looked longingly at the mysterious doorway, and then

Austin put the submersible in a U-turn. Once they were clear of the canyon, he reached for the vertical thruster control, and the submersible began its ascent.

Moments later, the bubble cockpit popped out at the surface near the NUMA catamaran. He maneuvered the craft around behind the boat and drove it over a submerged platform between the twin hulls. The gate was raised and a winch hoisted the platform carrying the submersible up onto the deck.

Francois was awaiting their arrival, an anxious expression on his usually bland face. "I'm so sorry to interrupt your work, Mademoiselle Skye. The co chon who called me was most insistent."

She pecked him lightly on the cheek. "Don't worry, Francois; it's not your fault. Tell me what they want."

He gestured toward the mountains. "They want you over there." "The glacier. Are you sure?"

He nodded his head vigorously. "Yes, yes, I asked the same thing. They were very clear that they needed your expertise. They found something in the ice. That's all I know. The boat is waiting."

Skye turned to Austin, an anxious look on her face. He anticipated her words. "Don't worry. I'll wait until you get back before I dive on the tomb."

She embraced Austin in a warm hug and kissed him on both cheeks.

"Merci, Kurt. I really appreciate this." She shot him a smile that was only a few Btus short of seduction. "There's a nice little bistro on the Left Bank. Good value for the money." She laughed at his blank look. "Don't tell me you've forgotten your dinner invitation? I accept."

Before Austin could reply, Skye climbed down the ladder into the waiting powerboat, the outboard motor buzzed, and the shuttle headed toward shore. Austin was an attractive and charming man, and he had met many fascinating and beautiful women in his career. But as leader of NUMA's Special Assignments Team, he was on call day or night. He was seldom home and his globe-hopping lifestyle was not conducive to a long-term relationship. Most encounters were all too brief.

Austin had been attracted to Skye from the start, and if he read the signals in her glance and smile and voice correctly, the feeling was mutual. He chuckled ruefully at the turnabout. Usually he was the one who went charging off when duty called, while his romantic interest of the moment cooled her heels. He gazed off at the boat making its way toward shore and wondered what sort of artifact could have created so much excitement. He almost wished that he had accompanied Skye.

Within a few hours, he would be thanking the gods that he didn't go along for the ride.

LEBLANC MET SKYE on the beach and correctly sized up her sour mood. But the Frenchman's unkempt appearance masked his considerable Gallic charm and wit. Minutes after Skye got into the car, the troll-like man had her laughing with his stories about the temperamental Fifi.

Skye saw that the Citroen was heading to one side of the ice field and said, "I thought we were going to the glacier."

"Not to the glacier, mademoiselle. We will be going under it. My colleagues and I are studying the movement of the ice at an observatory eight hundred feet beneath Le Dormeur."

"I had no idea," Skye said. "Tell me more."

LeBlanc nodded and launched into an explanation of his work at the observatory. As Skye listened intently, her scientific curiosity took the edge off her irritation at being drawn away from the ship.

"And what is the nature of your work on the lake?" LeBlanc said when he was through. "We emerged from our cave one day and voilal The submersible had appeared like magic."

"I'm an archaeologist with the Sorbonne. The National Under

water and Marine Agency was kind enough to provide a vessel for my research. We traveled up the river that runs into Lac du Dormeur. I hope to find evidence of old Amber Route trading posts under the waters of the lake."

"Fascinating! Have you come across anything of interest?" "Yes. That's why I'm anxious to get back to the project as soon as possible. Could you tell me why my services are so urgently required?"

"We found a body frozen in the ice." "A body?"

"We think it is the corpse of a man."

"Like the Ice Man?" she said, recalling the mummified body of a Neolithic huntsman found in the Alps some years earlier.

LeBlanc shook his head. "We believe this poor fellow is of more recent origin. At first we thought he was a climber who had fallen into a crevasse."

"What made you change your mind?" "You'll have to see."

"Please don't play games with me, Monsieur LeBlanc," Skye snapped. "My specialty is ancient arms and armor, not old bodies. Why am I being called into this?"

"My apologies, mademoiselle. Monsieur Renaud has asked us not to say anything."

Skye's mouth dropped open. "Renaud? From the state archaeological board?"

"One and the same, mademoiselle. He arrived hours after we notified the authorities of the discovery and has put himself in charge. You know him?"

"Oh yes, I know him." She apologized to LeBlanc for jumping down his throat and sat back in her seat, arms folded across her chest. I know him very well, she thought.

Auguste Renaud was a professor of anthropology at the Sorbonne.

He spent little time in teaching, which was a godsend for the students, who despised him, and instead devoted his energy to playing politics. He had built up a cadre of cronies, and with his connections he had risen to a place in the state's archaeological establishment, where he used his influence to reward and punish. He had stymied several of Skye's projects, hinting that they could be put on a fast track if she would sleep with him. Skye had told him she would rather sleep with a roach.

LeBlanc parked the Citroen and led Skye to the tunnel entrance. He scrambled into the entry culvert and, after a moment's hesitation, she followed him to the main tunnel. LeBlanc fitted Skye out with a hard hat and headlamp and they began walking. Five minutes later, they were at the living quarters. LeBlanc used a telephone to call ahead to let the lab know that they were on their way. Then they started off on their half-hour trek.

As they hiked through the tunnel, their footsteps echoed off the dripping walls. Skye glanced around at their damp surroundings and said, "This is like the inside of a wet boot."

"Not exactly the Champs-Elysees, I agree. But the traffic is not as bad as in Paris."

Skye was awestruck at the engineering accomplishment the tunnel represented and kept up a barrage of questions about the details as they trudged deeper into the tunnel. At one point, they came upon a square section of concrete surrounding a steel door in the tunnel wall.

"Where does that door go?" she inquired.

"It leads to another tunnel that connects to the hydroelectric system. When the flow through the tunnels is slow earlier in the year, we can open the door, ford a little stream, and go places farther into the system. But this time of year, the water rises, so we keep the door shut."

"You can get to the power plant from here?"

"There are tunnels all through the mountain and under the ice cap, but only the dry ones are accessible. The others carry the water

to the plant. A regular river flows under the glacier and the current can become quite brisk. We don't normally work this late in the season. Melting water flows in the natural cavities between the ice and the rock, creates pockets and slows down our research. But our work took longer this spring than we thought it would."

"How do you get air down here?" Skye said, sniffing at the dampness.

"If we were to keep going past the lab and under the glacier for another kilometer more or less, eventually we would come to a large opening on the far side of the ice. It was used to bring in the trailers for the lab and staff. It's been left open like a mine entrance. Air flows in from there."

Skye shivered in the dank cold. "I admire your determination. This is not the most pleasant place to work."

LeBlanc's deep laugh echoed off the dripping walls. "It's most un-pleasant, very boring, and we're always soaked to the bone. We take a few trips into the sunlight during our three-week stays here, but it's depressing to have to return to the caves, so we tend to stay in the lab, which is dry and well lit. It's equipped with computers, vacuum pumps for filtering sediments, even a walk-in freezer so we can work on ice samples without having them melt. After working an eighteen-hour day, you shower and crawl into bed, so the time goes by fast. Ah, I see that we're almost there."

Like the living quarters, the lab trailers were nestled in a carved-out section of wall. As LeBlanc stepped up to the nearest lab, the door opened and a tall thin figure stepped out. The sight of Renaud rekindled Skye's simmering wrath. He actually resembled a praying mantis more than a roach. He had a triangular face, wide at the top, with a pointed chin. His nose was long and his eyes small and close together. His thinning hair was a pallid red.

Renaud greeted Skye with the limp, moist handshake that had triggered her revulsion the first time she met him.

"Good morning, my dear Mademoiselle Labelle. Thank you for coming to this damp, dark cave."

"You're welcome, Professor Renaud." She glanced around at the inhospitable surroundings. "This environment must suit you well."

Renaud ignored the veiled suggestion that he had crawled out from under a rock and ran his eyes up and down Skye's well-put-together body as if he could see through her heavy clothing. "Anyplace where you and I are together suits me well."

Skye stifled her gag reflex. "Perhaps you can tell me what was so important that you had to pull me away from my work."

"With pleasure." He reached over to take her by the arm. Skye stepped out of reach and linked her arm through LeBlanc's.

"Lead on," she said.

The glaciologist had been watching the verbal fencing with mirthful-eyes. His mouth widened in a toothy grin and he and Skye walked arm in arm to a steep flight of rough wooden stairs. The stairs led up to a tunnel about twelve feet high and ten feet wide.

Approximately twenty paces from the stairs, the tunnel branched out into a Y. LeBlanc escorted Skye down the right-hand passageway. Water was streaming along a shallow channel that had been cut in the tunnel floor for drainage. A black rubber hose about four inches in diameter ran alongside one wall.

"Water jet," LeBlanc explained. "We collect the drainage water, heat it up and spray it on the ice to melt it. The ice is like putty at the bottom of the glacier. We're constantly melting it, otherwise it would re-form at the rate of two to three feet a day."

"That's very fast," Skye said.

"Very. Sometimes we go as far as fifty meters into the glacier and we have to be alert so the ice doesn't close behind us."

The tunnel ended in an icy slope about ten feet high. They clambered up the slippery rock surface on a ladder and entered an ice cave with space enough to hold more than a dozen people. The walls and

ceiling were bluish white except for areas that were covered with dirt scraped up by the movement of the glacier.

"We're at the bottom of the glacier," LeBlanc said. "There is nothing but ice above our heads for eight hundred feet. This is the dirtiest part of the ice floe. It gets cleaner the more you drill into it. I must leave now to do an errand for Monsieur Renaud."

Skye thanked him and then her attention was drawn to the far wall where a man in a raincoat was spraying the ice with a hot water hose. The melting ice generated clouds of steam, which made the damp air in the room even harder to breathe. The man turned off the jet when he saw he had visitors and came over to shake hands.

"Welcome to our little observatory, Mademoiselle Labelle. Hope the trip from the outside wasn't too arduous. My name is Hank Thurston. I'm Bernie's colleague. This is Craig Rossi, our assistant from Uppsala University," he said, gesturing at a young man in his early twenties, "and that's Derek Rawlins, who's writing about our work for Outside magazine."

As Skye shook hands, Renaud brushed by the others and went over to the wall to examine a vaguely human figure that was locked in the ice.

"As you can see, this gentleman has been frozen for some time," Renaud said. Glancing at Skye, he said, "Not unlike some of the women I have encountered."

No one laughed at the joke. Skye stepped past Renaud and ran her fingers around the perimeter of the dark shape. The limbs were twisted in grotesque positions.

"We found him when we were enlarging the cave," Thurston explained.

"He looks more like a bug on a windshield than a man," Skye said.

"We're lucky he's not just a big greasy smear," Thurston said. "He's in pretty good shape, considering. The ice at the bottom of a glacier, and anything in it, is squeezed like putty by hundreds of tons of pressure."

Skye peered at the vague form. "Are you assuming that he was on top of the glacier at one point?"

"Sure," Thurston said. "With a valley glacier like Le Dormeur or some of the others you'll find in the Alps, a reasonable amount of snowfall moves pretty fast through the ice."

"How long would it take?"

"My guess is that it would take a hundred years, more or less, to get from the top to the bottom of Le Dormeur." It would only work for an object near the head of the glacier high in the mountains, where ice flows vertically as well as horizontally."

"Then it's possible that he was a climber who fell into a crevasse?"

"That's what we thought at first. Then we took a closer look."

Skye put her face closer to the ice. The body was dressed almost entirely in dark leather, from his boots to the snug Snoopy-type cap.

Tufts of fur lining poked out here and there. A gun holster, pistol still in it, hung from a belt.

Her gaze moved up to the face. The features were unclear through the ice, but the skin was burnished to a dark copper color, as if he had lain out in the sun too long. The eyes were covered with a pair of goggles.

"Incredible," she whispered, then stepped back and turned to Renaud. "But what does this have to do with me?"

Renaud smiled and went over to a plastic storage container and reached inside. He grunted as he lifted out a steel helmet. "This was found near the man's head."

Skye took the helmet and studied the intricate design engraved on the metal, pursing her lips in thought. The visor was formed into the face of a man with a large nose and a bushy mustache. The crown was engraved with ornate, interlocking flowers and stems, and mythical creatures revolved like planets around a stylized three-headed eagle. The eagle's mouths were open in a defiant scream and bundles of spears and arrows were clutched in its sharp claws.

"We actually discovered the helmet first," Thurston said. "We shut down the pump immediately and luckily we didn't damage the body."

"A wise decision," Renaud said. "An archaeological site is vulnerable to contamination, very much like a crime scene."

Skye poked her fingers through a rough opening in the right side of the helmet. "This looks like a bullet hole."

Renaud snorted. "Bullet hole! A spear or an arrow would be more appropriate."

"It's not unusual to see proof marks, dents in armor where it was tested against firearms," Skye said. "The hole is unusually clean. This steel is of exceptionally high quality. Look, except for a few scratches and dings it's hardly damaged after being squeezed by the ice. You've called in a forensics expert?" she said.

"He should be here tomorrow," Renaud said. "We don't need a specialist to tell us this fellow is dead. What can you tell us about this helmet?"