In theory, it sounded straightforward. The planning had been methodical, the staging of equipment and men meticulous. The mission was high risk, but it could work. But no one could anticipate, or plan for, how the boys would handle the situation. All the preparation and medication in the world would count for nought if one of the boys woke up mid-dive and panicked. If that happened, Thai authorities would be counting the number of casualties, not lives saved.
All of this and more—perhaps even what it would feel like if they succeeded—ran through the thirteen divers’ minds as they took up their positions in the Tham Luang cave.
Meanwhile, at Nern Nom Sao, the boys were nervous; they knew what, and who, was coming. Although six of the Boars had fasted the night before, it was decided at some point that the divers would attempt to bring out only four boys that Sunday. After talking it through with coach Ek and the Thai Navy SEALs, who had stayed with them since they were found, they’d decided among themselves who would go out first.
Volanthen, Stanton, Jewell, Mallinson and Harris had arrived at Nern Nom Sao after swimming and diving for close to two hours. Now it was time to get started.
Richard ‘Harry’ Harris was ready to prime the needle; it was time to sedate the first Wild Boar. In consultation with Dr Pak as well as a team of Thai doctors outside the cave, Harris had calculated approximately what dose each boy would need. He would give each of the boys Alprazolam—more commonly known as Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug—by mouth, then inject him in each leg with Ketamine, a sedative.3
Harris had devised a plan for handling the injections. Although he had visited them the day before, and someone had read the boys instructions in Thai, telling them what would happen at the start of the rescue, he didn’t want the Boars watching while one of their mates was injected and then submerged. So he asked the Navy SEALs to take the other Boars up to the top of the slope in Nern Nom Sao.
The instructions were to the point. First, each of the boys to be taken out that day would swallow a tablet, which would make him feel a bit strange, and then he would join Harris at the bottom of the bank, near the water. There, he would be injected in the legs and go to sleep. When he woke up again, he would be in a hospital bed, out of the cave. The boys had listened intently to this plan and nodded along, questioning nothing. As the rescuers went about prepping the four boys one by one in their deliberate, careful fashion, they made the most of the boys’ relative ignorance of what lay ahead, using it to their advantage.
While Harris prepared his sedatives, Dr Pak briefed the kids again about the rescue plan. As he spoke to the boys in Thai, the brave doctor, who had already spent seven nights in the cave with the three SEALs, paid careful attention to whether or not the first four boys were ready for the mission.
They were; they were eager to get started. Down by the water line, under unsteady torchlights, Richard Harris was ready. He plunged the needle into Note’s leg; he would be the first boy out.
‘They seemed to be very confident and having Dr Harris helped a great deal. He was in charge of giving the kids “medicine” and he was great,’ Pak says. ‘He had techniques to talk to the kids, he hugged them and he was so great with them. Dr Harris was like a father or grandfather figure to them.’
Harris’s calm, reassuring bedside manner was vital in getting the kids to the point where they were ready to dive, and he left nothing to chance. Once the first boy was sedated, and his full-face mask fitted, Harris took the boy down to the water and pushed his head under water. It may have seemed like the wrong thing to do, but it was absolutely critical to test each full-face mask to make sure it fitted properly. After all, better to discover a problem immediately rather than half a kilometre into the rescue mission.
After about 30 seconds, which passed with agonising slowness, the first Boar started breathing again; the mask worked, and the sedative had been administered in the right dose. Over the next three days, Harris would repeat this breathing test twelve times. The plan was to keep the boys completely ‘under’ at least as far as chamber 3. By the end, Harris had taken to horrifying the Brits with the procedure: ‘Watch this, he will stop breathing for a second …’
Narongsak would later confirm that the sedation of the boys was supposed to be kept quiet, but Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha let it slip.
After so long in the cave, a couple of the boys showed signs of the early stages of pneumonia; it was remarkable that more of them weren’t ill. But the last boy to leave on that first day gave Harris a scare. After the doctor administered the injections in each leg, the boy ‘behaved like a bad kid with a chest infection under anaesthetic—breath holding, he was over-sedated’, he later recalled at a medical conference in Sydney, Australia. He laid down on the sand with the boy for half an hour, spooning him and listening to his breathing to ensure that his airways remained open. It was one of many tense moments over the next three days. He later said he was ‘thinking this is what I predicted would happen, this is going to go really badly. Then he sort of fired up. He ended up needing another dose to put him back [under] in the water about 200 metres down the track.’
To minimise the risk to the rescuers on the way out, it had been decided to err on the side of caution and administer two to four top-ups to each boy as he was brought out of the cave.
Harris had consulted Thai medics and Australian ones about how to handle the situation, but he was the doctor on site, so he ultimately had to make the call.
For the Brits, the sedatives had been non-negotiable. They simply wouldn’t have undertaken the mission without Harris, in the cave, administering the doses that put the boys under.
Although the divers knew what to expect, and the water temperature was holding up well, still hovering around 20°C, those first few moments in the water were still a shock. It was simply the enormity of what they were about to do. Each man had the life of a young boy in his hands; each of the boys was, at best, semiconscious and, even if he had been fully conscious, he would have been unable to fend for himself in this incredibly dangerous place.
It is unclear whether all the boys were completely unconscious. Some of the rescuers, such as Rick Stanton, have insisted they were, and would remember nothing. Ivan Karadzic, however, recalls that at least one of the boys had his eyes open, and was speaking Thai—‘though my Thai isn’t good enough to know what he was saying’—as they came out of the cave. Though he agrees with Stanton that it’s unlikely the boys remember much, if anything, about the rescue mission.
Once Mallinson was in the water with Note, the pair submerged for the first 350-metre dive, which took them past Pattaya Beach to chamber 8. As well as the wetsuit and full-face mask, Note was wearing both a buoyancy device and a harness that would keep him attached to Mallinson and also give the diver a handle to grab onto. Note also had an oxygen cylinder strapped to his front, and was positioned beneath Mallinson to ensure he didn’t hit his head on the roof of the cave. Mallinson wasn’t concerned about his own safety, but he was nervous about the fate of the 15-year-old he held in his hands. He, and the divers who would come after him, were in completely uncharted territory.
‘I was very nervous when we took them from the end point and you got into that first flooded section,’ Mallinson says. ‘Until you got a feel for the way their breathing rhythm was going, it was very nervous for the first five or ten minutes, you just wanted to see those air bubbles coming out of that mask all the time.’
It was dark in the water, but the lights each diver wore helped him to see. The next step was to locate the path-finding line, which would help him to pull them through. Sometimes, the boy would be positioned to the left or the right of the diver, depending on where the guideline had been laid. At other times, as they made their way out of Tham Luang cave, the diver was so close to the boy that he could feel and see the air bubbles that would slowly escape from the face mask his young charge wore.
To get through the narrowest choke points, the diver would push the boy through first with t
he help of the other divers stationed throughout the cave. It was a painfully slow process, and took much longer than the couple of hours it had taken for them to reach Nern Nom Sao.
While the divers did their best, it was sometimes impossible to avoid bumping the boys into rocks and other obstacles. The key thing was to keep the boys’ full-face masks on—a task that, as the hours passed, became mentally exhausting. One wrong manoeuvre, one wrong turn could dislodge them. If that happened in a section of deep water and there were still 100 or 150 metres left to dive, the diver would have only a matter of minutes to get the boy’s head out of the water and into the open air before he drowned. The oxygen saturating the boys’ systems would buy them a little extra time, but not much. The reality was that if a face mask came off—depending on where it happened in the cave—it could be impossible to save the boy, and the diver would have to carry a corpse out of the cave. The extra concentration required to protect these young lives would take a heavy toll on the divers.
Volanthen, in his matter of fact way, would later liken bringing out the Boars to carrying a shopping bag. Where a section was narrow and deep, he would hold the boy close to his chest; at other times, when they were swimming through wider, shallow waters he would hold his Boar out to one side and manoeuvre him around any obstacles. Doing so also allowed him to see what lay ahead.
In chamber 8, Craig Challen, Claus Rasmussen and Mikko Paasi were enduring an agonising wait as they waited for Mallinson and Note to arrive. But as soon as they reached chamber 8, the trio swung into action. First, Challen checked the child’s breathing; he was alive and breathing normally. The three men were flooded with relief.
Now it was time to start removing Note’s diving gear. A muddy, rocky section that was about 200 metres long lay ahead and the team would have to carry the boy on a stretcher then drag it through a section that included a narrow sump that was difficult to negotiate. The pumping that had been going on for more than a week had helped drain this section of the cave of most of its water. All of this would have to happen in near darkness, too, with only a few lights to assist the divers as they worked away.
Once they had cleared this section, Challen checked the boy again and the team began to put the kid’s diving gear and full-face mask back in place. It was time to go back in the water—another dive, past chamber 7 and through the T-junction and onto chamber 6.
Sometimes the rescuers had to drag the boy after them. Sometimes, at the narrowest points, they would have to try different techniques to get him through sumps and openings that could be as narrow as 40 centimetres. At other times, a steep vertical climb or dip would present itself.
Although each of the boys had lost an average of a little over 2 kilos, it was still difficult to wrangle them through the cave. Every obstacle would eat up precious minutes that raced by. Again and again on that first day it was a case of trial and error as the four British divers grappled with how exactly to get the boys through those first six chambers to chamber 3, where a huge rescue team waited for them. At this point the divers had been working their way into and then back out of the cave for at least four hours.
In chamber 6, about 100 metres past the T-junction, more help was waiting. Like the trio in chamber 8, Ivan Karadzic and Erik Brown had been sitting in the near darkness for about two and a half hours, although to them it seemed much longer. Chamber 6 is about 4 metres high from floor to ceiling, and perhaps 3 metres wide, and at the time the water was about waist deep for an adult. Its muddy banks offered prime real estate for stowing spare air and oxygen tanks for the divers and the boys, and somewhere for the two men to perch while they waited for them to come through. It was hard for Karadzic and Brown to hear each other clearly against the continuous echo of dripping water. They were primed and ready for the moment the first boy and his diver would appear and they could check the Boar’s breathing. But as Mallinson surfaced and started swimming with Note towards them, the two men were consumed by one fundamental question—was the boy still alive?
They had to face this moment over and over again, as each boy was brought into chamber 6. Had some terrible mishap occurred? Was the diver bringing a dead child towards them? They simply couldn’t know what was coming.
Miraculously, one by one, the boys came through safely and they were all fine.
Brown says he will never forget the moment when the first boy came through: ‘You’re not sure what’s about to happen, but you’re optimistic. You’re on edge, in the dark, and you finally see that little light appear. Your heart is going a million miles a minute. When they came through the darkness, that first time, it was in slow motion.’
So difficult were the conditions in the dark chamber, and so great was the pressure of those hurried minutes to check each boy, that Brown and Karadzic never knew which boys were coming through, or in what order. And it wouldn’t be until they themselves had reached the entrance at the end of the day before they learnt if the boy they had just helped through their section of the cave had managed to survive all the way.
Karadzic describes the job he and Brown did like this: ‘The divers could change their own tanks, but the kids couldn’t obviously. So we would take charge of the kids, to give the diver a short break. At this point, they had been diving for two hours with the kid. So every minute where they didn’t have to worry about someone else’s life was probably beneficial. They got a five-minute break.’
Then the pair would spend perhaps five more minutes making sure the boy’s mask was properly fitted, and that there were no leaks in the equipment. If another injection of a sedative was required, they would deal with that, too. And, finally, with the British diver leading the way, Karadzic and Brown would help swim the boys, one by one, about 300 metres from chamber 6 to chamber 5.
Then the Brit would take charge again—with perhaps a couple more hours of diving ahead of him—and Brown and Karadzic would return to their station and prepare for the next arrival. ‘I don’t know if I was scared, but having to deal with the situation, it’s obviously not something I’ve trained for or ever tried,’ Karadzic recalls. ‘It was fairly stressful, you don’t want to do anything wrong. But we were told by the medical team what to do, what to look for, so that’s what we did.’
One by one, Mallinson, Volanthen, Jewell and Stanton kept going calmly and methodically—diving through the canals, struggling through the mud and guiding each boy around rocks, through narrow openings, S-bends and sumps, and up rocky slopes.
By the time they reached chamber 3, where they were greeted by about 150 people, the divers were naturally exhausted. But each man would hug his boy before handing him over to the huge support team.
The atmosphere in the chamber was electric, and there was a murmur of excited voices as the rescuers carried out their tasks as quickly and efficiently as they could. Doctors and nurses checked the health of each boy while the Skeds and the pulley system were made ready. Thai, American, Chinese and Australian personnel and more swung into action, helping the divers to get the boys through the final chambers and out to the waiting ambulances.
One by one, the four divers came through, and each time the boy they were escorting arrived alive. Jason Mallinson was the first man out with 15-year-old Prajak ‘Note’ Sutham. He was followed by, in order, John Volanthen, Chris Jewell and Rick Stanton. The other three boys who came out on that first rescue day were 14-year-old Nattawut ‘Tle’ Takamrong, 15-year-old Pipat ‘Nick’ Pho and 17-year-old Peerapat ‘Night’ Sompiangjai.
The four divers had brought the first four boys to the brink of freedom, defying everyone’s expectations as well as the harsh conditions, perhaps Mother Nature herself—or the Princess of the cave. Just four of them, with nine men in support positions along the way, had swum, dived and dragged the boys for hours, through the hardest sections of the cave.
The next day, Monday, they would have to do it all again.
9–10 JULY: INSIDE
Escape to freedom
Narongsak Osatanakorn
had predicted that the first news of the rescue operation would not filter out until about 9 pm that evening. He was wrong, by several hours.
That Sunday, as the rescue was underway, all of Thailand seemed to stop; everyone was praying for good news from Tham Luang cave. At the District Administration office, where journalists were working the phones, desperate for the smallest skerrick of information on the Boars’ fate, the hours dragged by. Thai volunteers, who for two weeks had worked tirelessly, supporting the rescue effort, kept handing out hundreds of free meals. Coconut ice creams with little flags planted in them were a welcome addition as the hot tropical sun bore down that afternoon. The message on the flag? ‘We give moral support to our heroes. Keep fighting!’
At about 4 pm, a relatively short downpour swept through, saturating laptops and cameras that weren’t carefully positioned under the tents and reminding everyone that the rescuers were racing against time and the weather.
Then, just after 6 pm, the incredible news began to break on Khao Sod, a local website. The first Boar was out of the cave—and he was alive! The news took off like a rocket, racing through the Administration office and all over Thailand. Could this really be true?
Journalists rushed to confirm the news, and Twitter—as always, a mish-mash of rumours, facts and speculation—went into meltdown.
Soon after, a second boy was said to be out, too. The global news agency Reuters confirmed it.
‘Two kids are out. They are currently at the field hospital near the cave,’ Tossathep Boonthong, chief of Chiang Rai’s health department, told them. ‘We are giving them a physical examination. They have not been moved to Chiang Rai Hospital yet.’
The Great Cave Rescue Page 12
