The Boys in the Cave

by Matt Gutman

  The swim back was easier. The current basically spat Reymenants out into Chamber Three. Collecting himself and his gear, he passed the Thai SEALs and stopped to talk to Ruengrit.

  “We should tell the [SEAL] commander that we cannot do it,” Reymenants said to his friend. “It’s suicidal.” He didn’t let on, but he was shaken. Hours later, in a sweaty slumber, Reymenants had nightmares about it.

  On his way out, somewhere between Chambers Two and Three, Reymenants met the British divers Rick Stanton and John Vollanthen. The two groups formed an instant dislike of each other—tension that would persist throughout the entire rescue attempt.

  It was after 10 P.M. on Wednesday, June 27. Stanton and Vollanthen had been on the go, packing and traveling and unpacking, for about thirty-six hours. It was raining when Stanton and Vollanthen were driven to the cave complex. Over the noise of raindrops pounding the windshield and the metronomic clicking of the wipers, Vollanthen turned to Stanton and said, “I hope you’re not planning on wearing your inner tube when we get there.” Most divers, like Reymenants, use some form of inflatable vest or “wing”—which retail at over $300 and control their buoyancy in the water. But Stanton favored a fourteen-year-old patched-up car inner tube that he’d jury-rigged for just that purpose. “But it’s my lucky wing [inner tube],” responded Stanton, and reminded Vollanthen that he’d used it in all of their previous successful rescues.

  Vollanthen genuinely dreaded accompanying Stanton with that amateurish-looking donut on his back as he walked into the cave before hundreds of cameras. “You’ll look like a cockwomble* before the world’s press,” Vollanthen warned him—and like a mischievous spouse, Stanton may have relished inflicting a bit of good-natured embarrassment upon his friend. And Stanton was indeed photographed later in the search trudging through the mud towards the cave wearing that black inner tube on his back, prompting a flurry of questions on Facebook—the very kind Vollanthen had anticipated—asking if Stanton was learning to swim.

  When they finally pulled into the cave site, there was so much traffic in the central parking area outside that their van had to stop well short of headquarters. It made them easy prey for news crews hungry for anything new. And they swarmed, dozens of cameras blitzing them with light. Microphones were shoved in their faces; people were even live-streaming the “event” and taking selfies.

  “What the fuck is going on here?” Stanton muttered to Vollanthen. “This is total chaos.”

  The ex-firefighter did not particularly like the media and he liked disorganization even less. The pickup that was carrying their gear was stuck in the human traffic jam and could go no farther.

  The media certainly knew they were there, but the British team that included Rob Harper couldn’t find an official to register them. There were dozens of military police in uniforms and soldiers, but no one seemed quite sure what to do with the suddenly famous Brits. And the Brits had no idea where to go, either.

  “It felt like we’d been abandoned there,” said Stanton. But Vern and his partner Tik were there, and the couple instructed the divers—whom they had never met before—to grab their gear and follow them to the ranger station. There they commandeered a room, dumped their gear, and began to assemble their diving kit. Outside they found one of the Thai SEALs’ compressors and filled up their tanks.

  Regardless of the commotion, they needed to see the inside of the cave. After an hour or so Stanton, Vollanthen, Vern, and Harper—the group’s main liaison with the British Caving Rescue Council, arguably the world’s preeminent caving rescue group—headed in.

  In the practice of caving, the compulsion to discover subterranean patches untrammeled by man eventually slams into the inevitability of submerged passages. If caves breathe, as cavers like to say, then mountains drink—absorbing huge quantities of rainfall, with caves acting as their veins, flowing with runoff. Naturally, some early cavers evolved into cave divers. Caving was already dangerous. Early cave diving was even more so—so dangerous that divers sometimes use the analogy that an early cave diver had the life expectancy of a World War I pilot—somewhere between eighteen and forty hours.

  Some cavers in trouble didn’t die, but simply became stranded. Stranded cavers needed rescuers. In the United Kingdom, little groups of rescuers eventually banded into the British Cave Rescue Council, which became the main British cave-diving rescuer umbrella organization. Its vice chair, Bill Whitehouse, says adrenaline is the enemy of divers. Many have a Zen-like quality—at least in the water. And perhaps none are as near flatline as Stanton and Vollanthen. Combined, they had been cave diving for nearly sixty years.

  Rick Stanton grew up in Essex, England, just outside London. When he was thirteen, he sat down with much of the rest of the country to watch the documentary The Underground Eiger, about two British explorers’ record-breaking effort to crack the West Kingsdale Master Cave, not far from Vern’s hometown in Lancaster. The film features a pair of shaggy-haired divers, Geoff Yeadon and Oliver “Bear” Statham, as they spent years hunting for the ultimate cave. They eventually managed to connect two cave systems—about six thousand feet of underwater hell—squeezing through obstacles with names like “Deadman’s Handshake” while narrowly avoiding rock falls, asphyxiation, and drowning and using what would now be considered Stone Age diving equipment. It deeply appealed to the young Stanton, who, like so many other British diving greats, began his caving career with the local Boy Scout troop.

  Through high school and college he continued to cave and picked up diving—much of it self-taught. He began joining ever-more-difficult expeditions, even after he joined the British Fire Service in 1990. Vollanthen also became a caver through the Boy Scouts in the late 1980s. He studied electronics at university and now runs his own firm, employing about ten people. Vollanthen has had one set of experiences that sets him apart from Stanton—he’s a father to a thirteen-year-old son. When his son was old enough, he enrolled him in the scouts—thereby hoping to get him interested in caving as well. Though one of the world’s most experienced cave divers, Vollanthen got certified as a caving instructor so that he could lead his son’s scout troop into caves. In a short time, he went from having almost no experience with children to becoming something of an expert on tween boys. This helped him develop a bedside manner that would prove enormously helpful later on.

  Over the years Stanton and Vollanthen would become known as the United Kingdom’s top cave divers. The pair had worked together for two decades; along with another self-taught British cave diver, Jason Mallinson, they had set the world record for longest exploration dive of a cave—the Pozo Azul system in Spain. Their expedition lasted two and a half days and took them 28,871 feet—just sixty feet shy of Mount Everest’s height.

  Years earlier, in March 2004, Stanton and Mallinson were called to the Alpazat cave complex southeast of Mexico City. Technically, at least, it was a straightforward job. A group of British soldiers had planned on spending thirty-six hours exploring the cave. When a flash flood cut off their exit, they got stuck. Six soldiers clung to a ledge above a subterranean river in relative comfort: they made hot meals, even slept in sleeping bags. In a series of six forty-five-minute swims Stanton and Mallinson pulled the troops to safety, one at a time. The water was relatively clear and warm.

  The rescue itself took a day. The diplomatic fallout would linger for over a decade.

  The purpose of the mission that brought the soldiers to Mexico was unclear, perhaps shadowy, and the British officer in command—who had escaped the cave before the flash flood—reportedly waited for days before alerting local officials. Once he did, he allegedly refused to work with them, demanding that only a British team conduct the rescue. This may have had something to do with the soldiers having entered Mexico on tourist visas, prompting then president Vicente Fox to rifle off a letter to London: “We are asking the British government to tell us whether these people are military personnel, and if they are, what they are doing there.”* Regardless of the politic
s, Stanton and Mallinson completed the rescue successfully, and their renown as the world’s preeminent rescuers only grew.

  Based on that reputation, Stanton and Vollanthen would also be called up for rescue dives in Ireland, Norway, and France. In the last of these, in October 2010, the French government made a special request for Stanton and Vollanthen to rescue Éric Establie, forty-five, who was mapping the Ardèche Gorges underground tunnel complex in southern France. Establie was a world-class cave explorer, the owner of an underwater engineering business, and a friend of both Stanton and Vollanthen. They spent eight days prowling the sumps about two thousand feet into the cave, finally pushing through a rock slide to find his body. Both said they had expected to find him alive—hoping that somehow he’d found an air pocket and clung there. It was a painful blow to Stanton and Vollanthen, who left his body in the cave because they were unable to pull it through the large rock fall that had effectively sealed off his exit and killed him.

  Only a small subset of the earth’s population is comprised of cavers, a smaller subset of that is comprised of cave divers, and a select few members of that group are cave-diving rescuers. In the insular world of cave diving Stanton and Vollanthen had shown time and time again that they understood how to navigate some of the most complicated underwater passages on earth. They were the specialized rescuers who could bring hope to seemingly impossible situations, which is why they were called to Thailand.

  Hoping to get the lay of the land, Rick Stanton, John Vollanthen, Vern Unsworth, and Rob Harper zigzagged around the hundreds of workers manning pumps and hauling in cables and snarls of electrical wire. Though well over a dozen pumps were now draining an output measured in the hundreds of thousands of gallons a day, they were unable to compete with Mother Nature’s input of many millions of gallons a day. The Brits struggled to comprehend the chaos. At one point that night a translator attached himself to the team. Stanton asked him which group he was with. The man answered, “No group—I just came to help.” He had no problems getting into the cave, and Stanton said he’d proved himself extraordinarily helpful, but Stanton could not help shaking his head at this lack of coordination. He worried that it would lead to somebody getting lost, hurt, or killed. Alongside their new sidekick, it took the Brits over forty-five minutes to reach the passage leading from Chamber Two to Chamber Three. It was near midnight between Wednesday and Thursday when they heard the sound. It was the same noise the boys had heard days earlier.

  “It was deafening,” recalls Vern, “the floodwater was coming in at such a pace!”

  The two divers and Vern hung back as Harper waded through the sump from Chamber Two to Chamber Three. In the few minutes Rob was gone, the water rose relentlessly. Vern started shouting down the hole, “Rob, get back!”

  The sixty-five-year-old Harper is bespectacled, round, and topped with a jowly face that belies his agility as a caver and his fearlessness. But bravery wasn’t what kept him in place. He couldn’t hear Vern and the other men shouting for him to get back. He was so far into an alcove in Chamber Three that he didn’t notice the narrow passageway filling up behind him. He had no idea that the other three men were watching as the rising water sealed him in, one inch at a time. Harper had no diving gear, and getting stuck would have forced a rescue.

  “Get the fuck out of there!” came the more urgent shouts, as the water neared the roof of the sump.

  Harper still couldn’t quite make out what was being said.

  “What’s happening?” he yelled back. Scanning around, he immediately noticed the sickening surge.

  There was less than a foot of air between the water and the jagged roof of the cave. By the time Harper wiggled back, he had just two or three inches of breathing room. Tilting his head upward, he bobbed his way through, sucking in available air in the thumb’s space between his lips and the ceiling. In his dash out he’d dropped his backpack, which was actually Stanton’s—Harper had been carrying it for him. So Stanton threw on his diving gear and chased his bag. It was not the start the preeminent rescue group had hoped for.

  Within two hours or so, the water had begun filling the second chamber and pooling in the first. It was now clearly visible from the mouth of the cave. It didn’t help that some of the pumps were not working. The operation had switched from diesel pumps to giant industrial ones that ran on electricity, but some lacked parts and others demanded quantities of electricity that could not be wired all the way into the cave where they were needed. And because electrical current weakens over distance, some of the pumps deep inside the cave that were wired to generators hummed at about half power. Given that hundreds of rescuers were standing or swimming in water, and that tangles of electrical wires now wound through the cave, there was a persistent threat that some poor soul would be electrocuted.

  On the fourth day of the search, it happened. A soldier accompanying a pump crew staging equipment deep in toward Chamber Three began wading into a canal when, zing, he was electrocuted. He suffered minor injuries but survived. A message was passed back to the cave’s entrance on the little Israeli walkie-talkies, and within minutes the message bounced back inside: nobody move. No one was allowed to even set foot in a puddle until a team of electricians inspected the length of the cave. It was like a game of freeze involving hundreds of workers. It took hours for the electricians to test fuse boxes and cable connections. Finally, the all clear sounded, and the cacophonous slap of footfalls in mud, the grunting of workers, and the whir of pumps started up again.

  The news of the rising water was relayed to the Thai military, which suspended diving operations and ordered a hasty evacuation of the entirety of the cave beyond the entrance hall. Hundreds of rescuers, soldiers, volunteers, electricians, and pump operators straggled out into the steamy jungle. Among them was an American Special Forces team, the U.S. Air Force’s 353rd Special Operations Group, headed by a tall major with a head shaved smooth named Charles Hodges.

  Early on the morning of Wednesday, June 27, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, overseeing U.S. military operations for 52 percent of the globe, from the Indian subcontinent nearly all the way to Hawaii, received an urgent request for assistance from the Thai government. The Thai Special Forces needed all the help they could get. The assignment that morning filtered down to Major Hodges during his workout at the air force’s county-size base in Okinawa, Japan. Over the next few hours he assembled a team, packed multiple pallets’ worth of gear and enough rations to last a few days, and loaded it all onto an Air Force C-130—a rugged pig-shaped transport plane. And then they waited, team belted in, engines running. One of the team’s pararescuemen, a cave-diving hobbyist and staff sergeant named James Brisbin, was making his way back from vacation. He raced from Okinawa’s commercial airport to the air force base and scampered onto the plane, still wearing his board shorts and flip-flops.

  The members of Hodges’s unit are trained to be human Swiss Army knives, capable of dealing with anything that comes their way. They are trained to parachute into hostile territory to treat downed military personnel, call in air strikes behind enemy lines, and direct air traffic in disaster zones. But they are also mountain climbers, scuba divers, sky divers, geologists, surveyors, and organizational whizzes. The unit provided Haiti’s only air-traffic control in the hours after the country’s 2010 earthquake, surveyed runways during the 2011 Fukushima tsunami and nuclear disaster, and led some humanitarian efforts following the 2004 Indonesian tsunami. Chaotic, fluid emergencies are their preferred element. Hodges describes their job even more succinctly: “We solve problems.” In Thailand that meant “figuring out what was going on. Figuring out which resources are available to us. Connect the right people together. And then effect a positive outcome.”

  When they landed at Chiang Rai airport, pulling up beside the Thai Navy SEAL planes, they were greeted by an embassy liaison who had scrounged up vans and trucks to take them wherever they needed to go. Hodges sent most of the team to sleep, but he personally needed to survey the ca
ve to see what they were up against. He selected a small team. They arrived at the cave just past 1 A.M. on Thursday, June 28, not long after the British team. It had grown relatively quiet. The first thing Hodges noticed were the mud stains about twenty feet up in the first chamber—indicating how high the flows can get. But as they went deeper into the cave that night, like the rest of the rescuers, they didn’t immediately notice the water rising. And initially they ignored calls to pull back.

  “A few minutes later,” Hodges recalled, “we heard more urgently, ‘Get back. The mouth of the cave is starting to fill with water now.’ Even though where we were, we really didn’t see much. And so we started walking back. It took us two or three minutes to get back to the mouth of the cave. And in that five-minute or so period, water had started coming in. And the floor of the mouth of the cave was already flooding. A fifteen-hundred-square-foot area already had two to three inches of water in it. And so that all happened in about a five-minute period.”

  Hodges had two realizations as he watched the water eat away the remaining floor space of the cave’s entrance. The first was that the water didn’t only come from a single source, but seemed to ooze in simultaneously from everywhere at once. The second was that conditions within the cave could change in an instant.

  The scattered retreat from the flooding cave that night spurred the Thai Navy SEALs to order the suspension of all diving operations, but they continued their efforts to stockpile scuba tanks. Multiple reports indicate that these suspension orders included the British divers. But the next day, Brits Stanton and Vollanthen pulled on their Wellington rubber boots to protect their feet, grabbed air tanks and spools of guideline, and headed in for an exploratory dive. They were not sure if the ban applied to them, and frankly, didn’t care. They needed to inspect the cave. They were celebrities in camp already, so the guard at the mouth of the cave didn’t challenge them—perhaps figuring the eminent divers could be trusted to look after themselves. When they stepped off into the new body of water at the edge of Chamber One, they expected to be gone for seven hours. Vern and Harper decided to wait for them outside the cave.