After eight days of digging, the tunnel extended beyond the factory wall, crossed underneath a fifteen-foot expanse of lawn and then the border wall, before continuing into East Berlin for almost twenty feet.
Sometime around noon, a digger named Klaus climbed the ladder from the tunnel and hauled a bucket of soil up with the wench. “You had better come look at this,” he said.
Kramer was sitting at a table near the work site, compiling a list of refugees and what couriers would be used to contact them. He looked at Klaus strangely, rose from the chair, and walked to the excavation site. “What’s wrong,” he asked.
“Look how moist this soil is,” Klaus said.
Kramer put his hand in the bucket, finding the excavated material more like mud than dirt. “Is this the first bucket like that?” he as
