The Doomsday Testament(132)
He heard a grunt of bitter laughter. It wasn’t surprising that Frederick had worked out what was coming. Frederick was German, and Germans knew all about the history of Dresden.
‘Walter Brohm believed Dresden was the ideal place to keep the Sun Stone safe. He was right . . . up to a point. That point came on the night of February the thirteenth nineteen forty-five, probably about a week after the stone was brought here, when a formation of 723 Lancaster bombers proved him wrong. The bull’s-eye for the raid was to be a sports stadium about three hundred metres from here in the Aldstadt, but the Pathfinder mosquitoes dropped their target markers over the cigarette factory about a mile to the east. If every plane had dropped its bombs on target, everything would have been fine, but there was a phenomenon during the war called bomb creep, where every subsequent crew tended to drop its bombs a little further back than those that had gone before. Bomb creep resulted in an arrowhead pattern one and a quarter miles long and one and three-quarter miles broad at its widest point. In the next twenty-four hours that arrowhead would become the most dangerous place on earth. The first RAF attack would be followed by a second, a few hours later, and a daylight raid by B17 bombers of the USAAF. Twenty-seven hundred tonnes of high explosive and incendiaries rained down from planes flying at eight thousand feet and the flames of Dresden could be seen by air crew from as far as five hundred miles away. In the middle of the arrowhead was the Old Town; in the middle of the Old Town was the Frauenkirche. At least twenty-five thousand people were killed, crushed beneath falling buildings or incinerated in the firestorms that followed.’ He paused. ‘Nothing was left but rubble.’
Mr Lim appeared to be praying. Frederick’s vengeful eyes never left the back of Vanderbilt’s head. Sarah and the industrialist stared at the church around them.
‘Oh, yes, this too,’ Jamie assured them. ‘The Frauenkirche may look like an eighteenth-century Renaissance masterpiece, but it was built – or rebuilt – as an exact replica of the original only after the Communists were kicked out and it was finally completed in two thousand and five. All that’s left of the old Frauenkirche are those little black stones you see decorating the exterior. The church that was here in nineteen forty-five was blown to bits by at least one four-thousand-pound blockbuster bomb. The RAF in their schoolboy fashion called them Cookies and they were designed to bury themselves deep in the earth before exploding. They were among the most destructive weapons of that uniquely destructive war. The bomb reduced everything, including the vaults of the Frauenkirche, to dust and bricks. Whatever was down there ended up with the millions of tonnes of rubble from the rest of Dresden.’
Vanderbilt’s face had turned ash grey. ‘What happened to it?’ he whispered. ‘What happened to the Sun Stone?’
Jamie took Sarah Grant’s hand and she didn’t resist as he walked her steadily towards the doorway. No one tried to stop them. Through the door he could see the flashing lights of half a dozen parked police cars. He didn’t envy Lotte Muller the job of cleaning up the diplomatic mess, but the pictures and phone transcripts from Mr Lim should help.
‘It’s out there, Howard,’ he continued. ‘The rubble from the old city was used to build the foundations for the new Dresden, and to pave the roads for a couple of hundred miles around. About half a million people are living on top of the Sun Stone.’
They emerged into the early evening sunshine.
‘It’s all yours.’