The Boys in the Cave

by Matt Gutman

  Dedication

  For Saman Gunan, who sacrificed everything

  and

  Paul Gutman, for whom rescue was impossible

  Tham Luang Cave Complex Map

  Figures Mentioned in The Boys in the Cave

  The Wild Boar Soccer team

  “Note” Prachak Sutham: Fourteen, tall for his age, and perhaps the most mechanically inclined of the boys. His father works at a local garage.

  “Tern” Natthawut Thakhamsong: Fourteen, defender. Very close to his parents and grandparents.

  “Nick” Phiphat Phothi: Fifteen, cousin and neighbor to Night. Had only joined the team a couple of weeks before they went missing.

  “Night” Peeraphat Somphiangchai: Sixteen, celebrated his birthday the day the boys became trapped in the cave, June 23. Cousin and neighbor to Nick. Joined the Wild Boars only two months earlier.

  “Mick” Phanumas Saengdee: Twelve, goes to the Mae Sai Prasitsart School. Despite being chubby-cheeked, considered one of the better young players.

  “Adul” Adul Samon: Fourteen, originally from Myanmar. He was stateless and lives at the Grace Baptist Church.

  “Biw” Ekkarat Wongsukchan: Fourteen, team goalie. Notorious doodler and snacker in class. He drove the moped from which Coach Ek filmed as the boys rode up to the cave.

  “Dom” Duangphet Phromthep: Thirteen, family owns an amulet shop in Mae Sai, also a 13-and-under captain.

  “Coach Ek” Coach Ek Eakapol Jantawong: Twenty-four, coach of the 13-and-under “Wild Boar” squad. A former Buddhist monk and part of a stateless minority in Thailand.

  “Tee” Phonchai Khamluang: Sixteen (fifteen at the time the boys were trapped). An outgoing team captain.

  “Titan” Titan Chanin Viboonrungruang: Eleven, youngest member of team, had played soccer for four years. Very close to Coach Ek.

  “Pong” Somphong Jaiwong: Thirteen, a natural athlete, had always dreamed of playing for the Thai national team.

  “Mark” Mongkhon Boonpiam: Thirteen, one of the smaller boys on the squad. Was worried about missing exams during the rescue.

  British Cave Rescue Council Team

  Rick Stanton: British cave diver who arrived in Thailand with John Vollanthen on June 27. The former firefighter and Vollanthen were the two-man team who located the boys in Chamber Nine. Was ultimately part of the thirteen-diver team that rescued the boys. His girlfriend is a Thai woman from Chiang Rai.

  John Vollanthen: British cave diver who arrived in Thailand on June 27. He’s a member of the two-man team, along with Stanton, that located the boys in Chamber Nine. Father of a tween boy and a Boy Scout troop leader, he owns a small IT consultancy. Was ultimately part of the thirteen-diver team that rescued the boys.

  Chris Jewell: World-class British cave diver, works in IT in Sommerset. Was part of the thirteen-diver team that rescued the boys.

  Jason Mallison: British cave diver who brought out five boys. Works as a rope-access technician. Was part of the thirteen-diver team that rescued the boys. Mallinson hauled four of the boys and Coach Ek to safety.

  Jim Warny: Belgian/Irish support diver, positioned in Chamber Six after Karadzic became ill.

  Josh Bratchley: British support diver positioned in Chamber Five alongside Connor Roe.

  Connor Roe: British support diver. Positioned in Chamber Five alongside Bratchley.

  Bill Whitehouse: vice chair of the British Cave Rescue Council.

  Gary Mitchell: Team controller for British divers in Thailand. Also liaised with Thais.

  Martin Ellis: Published surveys and descriptions of Thai caves, including Tham Luang.

  Rob Harper: British veterinarian and frequent caving partner to Vern Unsworth. Harper served as the liaison between the BCRC and Unsworth.

  “Euro-Divers”

  Claus Rasmussen: Originally from Denmark. Father of three, head of “Euro-diver” team and cave diving instructor at Phuket’s Blue Label Diving. Posted in Chamber Eight with Mikko Paasi during the rescue.

  Mikko Paasi: Originally from Finland. Father of two. Diving instructor posted in Chamber Eight during the rescue alongside Rasmussen.

  Ivan Karadzic: Danish, diving instructor now based in Koh Tao, Thailand. Was positioned in Chamber Six with Eric Brown.

  Eric Brown: Canadian dive instructor based in Koh Tao, Thailand. Was positioned in Chamber Six with Karadzic.

  Ben Reymenants: First foreign diver at the cave, was there late on June 26. He put in more guideline than anyone other than Stanton and Vollanthen. Cave diving instructor at Phuket’s Blue Label Diving.

  Thai Officials

  Colonel Singhanat Losuya: Deputy commander of the of Thai Thirty-seventh Military District, Chiang Rai. Worked closely with Thanet Natisri. He played a critical role in compelling Thai leadership to heed warnings of foreign divers’ plans.

  Captain Padcharapon Sukpang: Thai Thirty-seventh Military District, Chiang Rai. First military officer in the cave. Saw the boys’ names and the handprints on the wall.

  Damrong Hangpakdeeneeyom: Head park ranger at Tham Luang cave.

  Kamon Kunngamkwamdee (Lak): One of the first rescuers on scene, joined Vernon Unsworth.

  Ruengrit Changkwanyuen: GM regional manager based in Bangkok. Cave diver who assisted SEALs during ther first few days and helped coordinate dive efforts until June 3.

  United States Air Force (USAF)

  Major Charlie Hodges: U.S. Air Force, 353rd Special Operations Group. Leader of the U.S. team at Thai cave.

  Master Sergeant Derek Anderson: 353rd Special Operations Group, Hodges’ head of operations. He was largely responsible for drawing up the details of the actual rescue plan.

  Captain Mitch Torrel: 353rd Special Operations Group, commanded USAF operations in Chamber Three, including medics.

  Sergeant Sean Hopper: 353rd Special Operations Group, pararescuer and ropes specialist, posted in Chamber Two.

  Australian Doctors

  Dr. Richard Harris: Australian anesthesiologist and world-class cave diver. Served as the only doctor on the rescue mission. Arrived July 6.

  Dr. Craig Challan: Australian veterinarian, world-class cave diver. Joined Harris in the cave. Arrived July 6.

  Swaziland

  Mabuyo Magagula: the tweeter who started Elon Musk’s involvement in the cave rescue by tweeting directly at him. Mabuyo had 500 Twitter followers; Musk had 22 million.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Tham Luang Cave Complex Map

  Figures Mentioned in The Boys in the Cave

  Prologue

  Part One

  1: The Moo Pa

  2: Some Birthday

  3: “How can I sleep when my son is inside?”

  4: Retreat

  5: “You have one last chance, or the boys will die”

  6: The Foreigners

  7: The Shadow Quartet

  8: Jungle Bash

  9: Contact

  Part Two

  10: Suicide Mission

  11: The Zero-Risk Option

  12: Letters Home

  13: The Wet Mules

  14: Sticking Your Neck Out

  15: Getting the Green Light?

  16: D-Day

  17: Like an Egg in a Rock

  18: A Few Shots of Ketamine

  19: The Complacency Gap

  20: Lost

  21: “Life Celebration Party”

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  They had surfaced in alien territory. A three-hour hard swim from help, they were suspended in a tun
nel darker than the remotest corner of space, where no radio or cell signal could penetrate. It was a spot so distant and hostile it had repelled rescuers for nine straight days—it was in northern Thailand, but it might as well have been on another planet.

  For hours, British cave divers Rick Stanton, fifty-seven, and John Vollanthen, forty-eight, had finned against the current, breathing heavily in their scuba regulators and carefully unspooling the pencil-thin guideline behind them. To keep the blue line more or less in the center of the passage, they would tie it around a hanging stalactite or a dagger of limestone jutting into the tunnel. It had continued like this until Stanton glanced down at the 250-yard spool, noticing that it only had about five yards left—which meant they had a decision to make. That guideline was basic diving protocol, and it was their sole link to the outside world—ensuring they wouldn’t get lost or trapped on the mile-and-a-half-long journey out of the cave.

  The cave-diving pair was now farther into the Tham Luang cave than any of the hundreds of rescuers before them had been. To survive they could rely only on what they carried: the three lights attached to their helmets, a few zip ties, their fins, a chocolate bar in a wet-suit pocket, and the two air cylinders each. Stanton checked the dial of his air gauge; he had consumed about a third of his air supply, another reason to turn back.

  If cave diving was a religion, the rule of thirds would be its first commandment: use a third of a tank on the journey in, save a third for the journey out, and always reserve a third in case of trouble—like getting lost even in well-traveled passages, becoming physically stuck in chokepoints where the cave pinches down from the size of a dining room to a dinner plate, getting tangled in their own guideline; all of these can lead to a diver running out of air and dying. Quicker deaths can result from equipment failure, landslides, flash floods, or just slamming headfirst into rock. And sometimes the end is generated from within—the boundless darkness itself leading to panic attacks, and panicking in the water often leads to death.

  It was Monday, July 2, and the two divers—skinny, pale, middle-aged Brits—were not planning on dying that day. They were among the world’s best cave divers, comprising the two-man tip of a spear in a rescue operation involving up to 10,000 soldiers, civilian rescuers, and volunteers. Twelve members of a local Thai youth soccer team and their twenty-four-year-old coach had gone into the cave on June 23 and had never come out. The cave opens with a series of hangar-size rooms and tapers down into passages as tight as the space between your car and the ground. In their search, rescuers had found ample evidence that the boys were in the cave: the backpacks they had dropped, cleats, their bikes parked outside. But they had zero evidence they were alive.

  Three hours earlier Stanton and Vollanthen had set out from what was known as Chamber Three, the dive launch point inside the Tham Luang cave in northern Thailand. The region, wedged between Myanmar and Laos, is known as the “Golden Triangle”—a term coined by the CIA, not for the region’s lazy sunsets, but for its centrality as a hub for the opium trade. Thailand wiped out the opium trade on its side of the border in the late 1950s, but the exotic name for the region, with its mist-crowned mountains, numerous tribal villages, and dense jungles, stuck. A fellow Brit, Vernon Unsworth had been drawn to the region by other attractions: its many caves. He knew Tham Luang better than anyone in the world and had hand-sketched a map for Stanton and Vollanthen. They had committed it to memory. It was believed that the boys might have retreated beyond a part of the cave locals called Pattaya Beach—after the famous Thai resort town. It had a high sandbar that typically remained above water even during the floods. As the divers swam past it that day unspooling their rope, they noticed that the floodwaters pulsing through the cave had swallowed up Pattaya Beach. Unsworth’s guess was that just a few hundred yards deeper into the cave beyond Pattaya Beach there was a side room that offered high ground, and that the boys might be somewhere around there. At least that’s where he’d go.

  People who so habitually expect trouble that they keep a third of their most precious commodity in reserve are naturally pessimistic. Cavers who don’t anticipate the worst often don’t survive long. Stanton and Vollanthen were veterans of multiple cave rescues in which they had sometimes brought people out alive; more often than not, they found corpses. To their knowledge no one with zero provisions had survived this deep in a cave for this long. They figured that, sadly, wherever these boys were, they weren’t alive.

  Whenever the divers noticed the cave ceiling rise enough to reveal an air pocket above, they would inflate their buoyancy vests and kick up to the surface. That they didn’t have maps with them and couldn’t get a GPS reading or communicate with the outside world mattered little to them. Decades of experience told the pair their most important tool was already attached to their faces. For the past several hundred yards, each time they noticed those air spaces they’d bob up and take a sniff—their noses supplying information their eyes couldn’t. Each time, Stanton would remove his mask, and take a couple of quick nasal inhalations—sample the air. Before he took his mask off this time, Stanton made a mental note to tell Vollanthen they should turn around soon because they were running out of air and guideline. And then he sniffed.

  This may have been terra incognita, but the smell—he recognized that immediately.

  It’s the distinct smell of human shit, he thought at first. Then, continued his short internal monologue, it’s so very pungent, so overwhelming, it might actually be the smell of decaying bodies. He nudged Vollanthen. “Hey, John. We’ve got them. Or got something. Take your mask off and confirm.”

  As the Brits began debating whether the noxious odor was the product of excrement or corpses, they heard voices. As they drifted toward the smell and the sound, a beam of light flicked on and scanned the water.

  Moments earlier, their twenty-four-year-old coach, Eakapol Jantawong, had heard something: men’s voices. They all had. The boys who had been digging stopped cold and the coach asked everyone to hush up. Silence. Then the voices again. The coach told twelve-year-old Mick, who was holding their flashlight, to go down to the water’s edge to check it out. But the boy froze with fear and didn’t move. The coach whispered, “Hurry, go quickly. If it’s a rescuer they might pass us.”

  The boys were unsure if what they were hearing “was real.” They had gone ten days without food, and so zealously husbanded their flashlight batteries that they spent most of the time in complete darkness. They were over a mile and a half into the Tham Luang cave; directly above were six hundred yards of limestone rock. Not a single photon of light penetrates this place—so when flashlights are switched off, there was nothing for the rods and cones of their retinas to adjust to. The darkness was complete. And lately, the boys crowded into their bathroom-size living area above the waterlogged passage had been straining to listen to a chorus of inexplicable sounds—dogs barking, roosters, even children playing. Hearing these new sounds, fourteen-year-old Adul Samon snatched the flashlight from Mick and moved toward the water.

  The boys saw lights, and two creatures that looked like spacemen with strange breathing hoses seemingly ripped from a car engine attached to their mouths and helmets bristling with lights. The semi-submerged figures were talking and, cautiously, the boys slid down the slope to greet them.

  “Officer! Officer, hello! Over here!” they called out in Thai. The voices didn’t answer.

  Adul, already stupefied that they had finally been found, was doubly confused when he realized the men were not speaking Thai. It was . . . English. He crept to the water’s edge. His mind sluggish after more than two hundred hours without food, all he could muster was a warbly “Hello!”

  The divers had surfaced about fifty yards away from the boys. By twenty or so yards out, their headlights illuminated a couple of the boys. They were relieved—at least some were alive.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  The Moo Pa

  It had started out as a pretty typical Saturda
y in Thailand’s northernmost town, Mae Sai, snug against the Myanmar border. At about ninety degrees, the air was a hot damp towel wrapped around them, but the boys practiced anyway—they always did.

  Most of the boys cycled to the pitch. They turned off the country’s Highway Number 1 and rode the gentle incline toward the spine of mountains separating Thailand from Myanmar. Then past the market on the southern side of the road, with vendors hawking stinking anchovies and rows of bok choy, cilantro, and ripening pineapple, for which the region is known. Up past the Wat Ban Chong temple, with its gilded Buddha crowned with neon lights. One final leg took them up the unnamed road past the honky-tonks that doubled as brothels, ringing out with midday karaoke and the croaks of beer-fattened drunks.

  The pitch was on a rise, above all of that. Shaved flat from the top of the hill, it had seen better days, back when you could easily make out the boundary lines. The heat and the rains had nibbled at the now ratty goal nets and bitten off chunks of the concrete viewing porch.

  They’d spent a lot of time there, the Wild Boars. The team’s head coach, Naparat “Nok” Guntawong, founded the team in late 2013, and they’d done Mae Sai proud ever since. A former semiprofessional midfielder, Coach Nok remained boyish and slim—even when he wasn’t anywhere near a playing field he invariably wore the polyester mesh of athletic clothing. The telltale sign of his profession as a shipping agent were his yellowing, half-inch-long pinky nails. Coach Nok had hoped to infect his daughter with the soccer bug, so a few times a week he would take her to kick the ball around. Sometimes her male school friends—who were much more interested in the “beautiful game”—would join them.

  In late 2013, those same boys got together ahead of a local youth tournament and asked Nok to coach the fledgling club they wanted to form. The name Wild Boars evokes sylvan ferocity. It conjures images of muscled young men, recklessly gunning for the goal. Sure, the team was ferocious, but it was actually named after its sponsor, which exports live pigs to China. In keeping with the company’s porcine theme he figured: we’re near the forests, boars are tough, why not Moo Pa, which translates to Wild Boars? It was close enough for the sponsor.