The Boys in the Cave

by Matt Gutman

  Through his caving circles, Vern knew about a pair of crack British cave divers, Rick Stanton and John Vollanthen, who had led multiple cave-diving rescues over the past decade—something no one presently in Thailand had ever done. Over the previous twenty-four hours, Vern had watched the water conquer more and more of the cave, and he began quietly agitating for an international crew of scuba divers with enough skill to survive this cave. He had secretly called his caving buddy Rob Harper to put Stanton and Vollanthen on standby.

  By the late afternoon of Tuesday, June 26, Vern felt the time for quiet agitation was over. He buttonholed Governor Narongsak in the park ranger station, which had turned into the search’s headquarters. He told him the only way to find the boys, dead or alive, was to send in divers—the best divers.

  “You have one last chance, or the boys will die,” the excitable Brit told the governor. “You have to call in these divers, now.” But Vern says Narongsak seemed to ignore him, and walked off to a meeting.

  Vern knew that he had offended Governor Narongsak. He also knew that he’d lost face himself when he lectured the senior politician with multiple advanced degrees.

  As it turned out, Stanton and Vollanthen already knew all about the ongoing rescue before they got the call from Harper.

  Just weeks earlier, Stanton had met a woman named Amp. The thirty-seven-year-old had been a nurse at an assisted living facility in Chiang Mai, Thailand, which caters to foreigners—the care there is said to be excellent, and far less expensive compared to similar properties in England. The elderly couple Amp had worked with happened to be the parents of one of Stanton’s old caving buddies. In late May of 2018, Amp visited England, staying with the family in the south of England. She told Stanton’s friend she was interested in kayaking, so he asked Stanton—as avid a kayaker as he was a caver—to scope something out for them. Amp is petite, with a high forehead and bubbly energy. Stanton, fifty-seven, is not a particularly effusive person, but he describes being “quite taken” with her—which for him is akin to gushing. Amp worked in Chiang Mai, but in an uncanny coincidence happens to live in Chiang Rai, Governor Narongsak’s provincial seat and less than an hour from the Tham Luang Cave.

  Amp happened to be visiting Stanton in late June when the boys went missing, and early on June 24 she excitedly brought him the news bulletins being cranked out by her hometown news sites about a soccer team trapped in a cave. Stanton’s first call was to his partner Vollanthen. Stanton had limited his participation in big cave-diving expeditions in recent years as the muling of heavy gear and the logistics had become tiresome. He now preferred open-water kayaking. So he was ambivalent when he got Vollanthen on the line.

  “John,” Stanton asked, “is this something we are going to get involved with or shall we sit and wait?” Vollanthen, nearly a decade younger than Stanton and a father, voted for immediate action. In the end, the decision was moot, because the action soon came to them.

  The clock was ticking, not only for the boys inside the cave but also for the British divers, who by now had been on standby for twenty-four hours. It was vacation season in England, and Stanton and Vollanthen were about to go off the grid. Rob Harper, Vern’s caving mate and his main liaison to the rescue divers, was also about to head out for a holiday with his wife. On Tuesday night, with the rain pummeling the little park ranger station, Vern sat in on a meeting with Interior Minister Anupong Paochinda and Minister of Tourism and Sports Weerasak Kowsurat. It was around 9 P.M. in Thailand, 3 P.M. in London.

  According to Vern, he slid a note with Stanton and Vollanthen’s names and contact information across the chipped folding tables. The tourism minister opened it and asked, according to Vern, “What do you want me to do?”

  Vern, whose voice tends to rise and crack when he gets excited, blurted out, “What do you do? Call them now. Here’s my phone. Call Rob.”

  He had already opened the WhatsApp app to Rob Harper’s contact when he handed the phone over to the minister. Either the minister or Vern must have pressed the video call icon instead of the phone icon. The tension built as the phone rang and rang. Finally Rob Harper groggily answered—in his pajamas, lying in bed. The minister was taken aback. Wasn’t it the middle of the day in London? Why is this man, upon whom the boys’ fate might rest, in pajamas in the middle of the day? Harper explained that he is a veterinary surgeon who often works nights and sleeps in the day. Now he was fully awake.

  Within three hours he, Stanton, and Vollanthen would be on a flight to Bangkok.

  In a matter of hours, the boys had gone from a sidebar news item to a national obsession. The boys. The cave. The rescue. The pumps. The divers. The Thai SEALs. The banner headline in the Bangkok Post read HUNT GOES ON FOR KIDS IN CAVE. Narongsak, just two days ago facing the rapid demise of his political career, was now holding multiple daily press conferences that Thai TV ran live and uninterrupted.

  By Wednesday, June 27, there were about one thousand troops and rescuers at the cave. No expense was spared. Equipment started pouring in. It looked like an outdoor concert venue. Bundles of electrical wires, hoses, and pipes snaked into the cave—the mouth of which now glowed with stadium lighting. The cave complex’s parking lot had turned into an auxiliary camp that looked like Woodstock, with a parade of mud-washed people passing full kitchens whipping up hundreds of meals a day, a medic’s tent, lights, and barricades. The Wi-Fi routers and extra cell phone tower provided some of the fastest and most reliable connectivity in Thailand. (Bathrooms, however, would remain scarce throughout the entirety of the search-and-rescue mission.)

  Rescuers were sleeping in their cars. Soldiers flopped down at the cave’s sandy entrance, sleeping in their fatigues, so exhausted that neither the lights nor the racket made by the next shift disturbed them. The Thai Navy SEALs’ Embraer jets started to shuttle between their base outside Pattaya and Chiang Rai’s airport, carrying gleaming new air tanks and hundreds of Pelican cases cradling high-tech gear, including snaking videoscopes to peer into inaccessible creases of the cave, sonar, and radios. All of it was stacked neatly onto trucks for the forty-five-minute run to the cave.

  That Monday, June 25, an Israeli living in Bangkok had received one of the thousands of calls made to anybody in Thailand with the skill or connections to help the boys. Asaf Zmirly had been marketing Israeli high tech in Southeast Asia for the past eight years, specializing in military-grade emergency equipment. He had a load of contacts, one of them a contractor to the Thai Navy. He’d tried to sell them devices that would detect survivors trapped in rubble—a system that saved lives in the Mexico City earthquake of late 2017. The navy contact told him they needed durable communication devices that would work in a cave and could get banged around a bit: Did Zmirly have anything like that? He did: one of his clients was an Israeli startup called Maxtech Networks; Maxtech had developed a system of handheld radios featuring a “daisy chain” of wireless technology that—much like the Internet—employs a sophisticated algorithm to route data and voice communication via the best source available. It’s basically a robust, mobile Wi-Fi system.

  Zmirly contacted the company to ask if they could sell and ship the product that very day. When company CEO Uzi Hanuni learned where it was going, he offered the system free of charge, loaded a technician with seventeen of the devices, and packed him off from Tel Aviv’s airport to Bangkok. The technician arrived on Tuesday, June 26. But Zmirly and the tech encountered the same obstacle that had ground the mission to a stop: the water.

  The system worked well in the dry sections of the cave, but it didn’t work underwater, so Zmirly and the tech set off to the open-air bazaar that spills out from the Thailand border into Myanmar. They needed a long cable to connect units on either side of the sump at Chamber Two. Their first stop was at an internet and cable TV provider, where they grabbed the longest data cable they could find, a fifty-yard-long coaxial cable. At another store they found a soldering device, and at a third store the necessary waterproofing. During their thr
ee-hour shopping expedition, the Israeli pair never had to open their wallets: the Thai proprietors noticed the dried mud caked on their clothes, realized they were part of the search mission, and refused all payment. As they waited for the waterproofing in that third store, the foreigners were even brought savory rice bowls for lunch. “It’s impossible to overstate how generous everyone was. Every single person we met in Mae Sai was desperate to help in any way.”

  They hustled back to camp and began tinkering with the soldering device and the cables. Finally they had something they hoped might work. Maxtech’s lead engineer in Israel warned them that the system wasn’t designed to accommodate the kit they had MacGyvered, and predicted that it would fail. “Well, we dove into the second sump to the third chamber, turned on the devices, waited, and you know what, it worked! On the very first try.” The system became the main link from Chamber Three to the outside for days to come.

  The search-and-rescue mission now boasted some of the world’s best cave divers, hundreds of crack troops, world-class technology, and a bottomless supply chain. At their meeting that night, everyone agreed with Narongsak that water was the enemy. What they seemed to lack, according to military officials and foreign experts on the scene, was a coherent strategy. Arguably the meddling of cabinet ministers, top-ranking officers, and even members of the royal court—each with their own preferred mode of action—bogged down the process, creating a hydra-headed chain of command whose orders were nearly impossible to divine, much less follow.

  And in the corner of the camp, downhill from the headquarters where the generals and politicians sat, just off from the overflowing row of toilets, were the parents. Like everyone, they initially believed the boys would be found quickly and brought out to them—maybe in a day or perhaps two. There was now no proof their children were even alive. So again they beseeched powers a few rungs up from the ministers: the spirits of the cave. This time they presented them with a lavish meal set on a picnic blanket: fresh coconuts (with a plastic straw for the deity’s convenience), mangoes, papayas, lychees, melons, rice cakes, sodas, slushies (also with a straw), and several wreaths of orange marigold. They knelt there in the rain, on the edge of the picnic blanket, praying to the Sleeping Princess, the one who had killed herself and her own unborn child, to spare theirs.

  Coach Ek had promised the boys the waters would recede, but they hadn’t. In fact it had been the opposite.

  On their first night in the cave they’d made camp at Pattaya Beach; the water had woken them up and forced them to retreat farther away from the cave entrance. The second night, the water had pushed them back again. And finally they found ground high enough above the canal below to keep them dry—it would later be called Chamber Nine. They could not have known it, but this was likely the sole place in the cave along the multi-mile route past the T-junction that would stay dry throughout the monsoon season.

  If you could peer through the ropy canopy of bamboo and towering oak, through the ocher-stained sediment and the quarter mile of limestone that served as their roof and possible tomb, you’d see their habitation’s floor plan: Chamber Nine was a D-shaped cavern sculpted by millennia of eddying water, its floor slanting sharply upward toward the cave wall. A flatter area about the size of a bathroom served as their living and sleeping quarters. It was nearly impossible to get comfortable. The realization that they were stuck here brought on more whimpers of fear and longing. When one boy started to cry, the others would hold him and try to cheer him up. All of them had wept at one point or another. The cave leaked moisture everywhere, walls were damp, and while it provided them with drinking water, the sogginess was maddening.

  Four days in they began raving with hunger. The boys were skinny to begin with—soccer players who would shed calories by the hundreds chasing that checkered ball around the pitch in the sauna that is northern Thailand’s jungle-carpeted foothills. But now their bodies had pillaged their stores of glucose and turned to the only other source of calories available, the fat and muscle clinging to their bones. The cave offered nothing to consume—if they had been lost in the jungle above they could have lived for weeks on the wild bananas, breadfruit, lychees, and pineapples that grow everywhere. But here there was only mud and rock and the occasional cockroach-size translucent crab skittering across the mud.

  Not only had Night missed his birthday, but his cousin Nick’s birthday had come and gone on Sunday, June 24, their second day in the cave. Like Night, it was Nick’s first season with the team; he’d only joined a few weeks before, playing alongside Night on the 16-under team. Nick had turned fifteen, but as with Night’s missed birthday, the boys didn’t celebrate—no hugs, no cheers. It’s not that they didn’t care, it was just that they were too depressed and scared to celebrate anything.

  Since arriving, their bodies had not just been cannibalizing muscle and fat, but also the oxygen in the chamber. Their lungs would suck in air, scrub out about 4 percent of its oxygen, and expel the leftovers back into the womb of the cave. Slowly but surely, the amount of oxygen in the little den they inhabited a mile and a half into the mountain dwindled. Breathing was becoming more labor intensive, and combined with the hunger—for food, for their beds, for their parents—the thin gruel of air left them weak.

  In an effort to distract them from their hunger and fear, Coach Ek would lead them in meditation, focusing on the Buddhist tenet that “there is no body to be born, no body to die,” and therefore nothing to fear. The former monk also felt he had to give them a sense of mission, so he’d set them to work clawing at the cave. Toward the back, in a corner, was another little side cavern. It’s where the young athletes, inculcated in perseverance through years of soccer training, began trying to dig their way out. Slamming rocks into the wall, they scratched at their prison like chickens until their fingernails cracked.

  Chapter Six

  The Foreigners

  Even just a hundred yards into the cave it was perpetual night, and that’s where Ben Reymenants found himself, staring at what he called a “cappuccino whirlpool.” He was in Chamber Three, which had now become the base of diving operations.

  A cocky Belgian with an impish smile, Reymenants co-owned a dive shop in the resort town of Phuket that offered courses in cave diving, and when his friend Ruengrit had called to say they needed cave divers he offered his help. He’d already had all his dive gear packed because he and his wife were planning to leave the next day for a vacation in the Philippines. He put that trip on hold, asked his wife to stay put, and hopped the two-hour flight up north, arriving late on Tuesday, June 26.

  Now about a mile into the cave, late on Wednesday he found himself at the water’s roiling edge with a few Thai SEALs, peering into froth. The water and the close calls had apparently worn them out, so Reymenants and two buddies, Ruengrit and Bruce Konefe, a fifty-seven-year-old former American marine who now writes cave-diving manuals, debated diving in. Ruengrit and Konefe quickly realized that this was beyond their respective abilities. Ruengrit didn’t feel comfortable and Konefe was too big to fit through some of the squeezes; Reymenants thought he could do it, so he jumped in.

  The water was ferociously cold and the current was so powerful it had been ripping off divers’ masks. Kicking as hard as he could, pulling himself forward rock by rock, he progressed a measly 150 yards. He was trying to lay line—unspooling rope and setting down weights or tying it off in key locations to point future divers in the right direction. The bag of climbing rope the Thai SEALs had given him weighed about twenty pounds, forcing him to swim even harder. While this might not seem extraordinarily heavy given the dozens of pounds of gear a diver normally carries, as one diver told me, “these bags were bulky and floaty and caused a huge amount of drag . . . and totally appropriate given the conditions.” Reymenants couldn’t believe it. As he later recounted, “I was as exhausted as if I’d climbed Mount Everest.”

  One of the trickiest sections of the cave, with the tightest restrictions, occurred along the stretch be
tween Chamber Three and Chamber Four, where the rock ceiling dropped to barely two feet off the bottom. Reymenants says he had to let air out of his buoyancy control device (BCD)—or inflatable vest—to allow him to descend to the gravel on the tunnel floor. Alone in the water, he says he felt a suction flow—a diving term for a directional change of the current. It was pulling him where he didn’t want to go, “an absolute no-no in diving.” The man who had spent days in hyperbaric chambers, who had plumbed countless caves, who taught cave diving, was now in exactly the situation he dreaded.

  Suddenly, he says, a tractor beam of current started yanking him toward the blackness.

  “You get a red light going on in your head, and then a second red light, then a third, and a general alarm blares,” he says. “It was my first day, I was alone, and I chickened out.”

  It’s what likely happened to many of the Thai SEAL divers as well—who may also have realized how close they came to death. Getting inhaled by the cave’s currents to a blocked passage could lead to disorientation, wherein a diver could burn through an entire tank of air poking around for a way out and asphyxiate. Or the diver could get trapped, which could portend a less mobile route to asphyxiation. Unknown chambers present the challenge of unknown or unseen hazards that could sever air tubes or pluck a regulator out of a diver’s mouth. Sometimes that leads to panic, which, if uncontrolled, sends a diver into a spiral of progressively worse decisions and ultimately to death.