The Boys in the Cave

by Matt Gutman

  Just three hours later, lights started flickering through the black water from below. Onlookers saw expanding bubbles, the telltale signs of humans breathing underwater. Moments later a phantasmal figure started to flail toward the surface in Chamber Two. It was a bedraggled Thai man in orange coveralls. Observers were baffled. Stanton and Vollanthen had intended to explore the cave, but when they surfaced into Chamber Three and clambered out of the sump, four miserable-looking men came dashing into the beams of their helmet lights. They were pump operators with a water-management team who’d been marooned beyond the sump during the pell-mell evacuation. They had been stranded in Chamber Three for nearly twenty-four hours, the water and the rock blocking all cell and radio signals out.

  The rattled Thai crew had been perched on a rock above the sump and were pointing frantically to the water. Stanton, with his typical understatement, remembers that the water was rising “quite quickly” and the men “were quite keen to get out.”

  Stanton and Vollanthen had been unprepared for what’s called a “snap rescue.” They lacked the extra masks, fins, and even unattached tanks. Since experienced cave divers typically carry at least two tanks, each connected to a regulator—the mouthpiece attached to a hose through which the diver breathes—supplying the workers with air during the quick rescue would not be a problem. The problem was that it forced the rescuers to be physically attached to their panicky wards. Letting them go could mean letting them die. They easily cruised through the first part of the submerged cavern, but as they neared the silvery surface, that changed.

  The dive through the sump separating Chambers Two and Three was short, barely forty-five feet. An amateur free diver (who didn’t fear bashing his face against a rock or two) could have done it. But the workers couldn’t have known that, plus they were not “water people,” as Stanton put it, and perhaps the safety of a dry rock appealed more than the unknown of the glimmering black pool that was their only exit.

  The Brits had to use sign language to explain the mechanics of the rescue. They showed each man the spare regulator that was attached to a second tank on their backs, put it into their mouths, and acted out the swimming. They would be taken out one at a time, each diver with a single worker. The workers seemed to understand. What couldn’t be passed on via hand signals, though, was the warning, to just let the rescuers do their job and not to panic.

  It seemed to go well until the workers spotted the silvery surface. “Coming up, when they could see the air space and were trying to hurry up to get to it,” Stanton told me later, “they were trying to get away from us, and we were physically trying to restrain them. It was like an underwater wrestling match.”

  Panic is the single greatest enemy of divers, and during this initial, unexpected rescue, the flailing “casualties,” as the rescuers call them, clearly panicked. Flailing casualties could rip off face masks, sever regulators from their tanks—and, worse, grab onto their saviors, potentially dragging both down to a watery grave.

  Typically, divers prefer bailing out “casualties” who are either capable divers themselves, compliant, or completely inert—meaning unconscious or strapped down. The experience with the pump operators left Stanton and Vollanthen concerned. If it was this hard to pull four adult men who could swim out of a short underwater passage, how were they going to drag twelve scared kids and their coach through an underground river more than one hundred times as long?

  Parting ways, the Thai workers thanked them and shuffled off into the gloom. Stanton called the parting “a little anticlimactic.” With few people in the cave as the group emerged from the water, no one really noticed or seemed to care that four human lives might have just been spared. One team did make careful note of the British duo’s resourcefulness—the Americans, who had only pulled into camp hours earlier. If there had been doubts about the Brits’ ability, they were silenced.

  In the aftermath of the flooding that had left the cave submerged up to the entrance, the consensus at camp late on Thursday, June 28, was that diving the boys out was not an option. The current was unswimmable, the challenge insurmountable. At the very best, it was a bad option. The Thai Navy SEALs were already beaten up. The divers’ hands were being flayed by scrambling through passages carrying anywhere from forty to eighty pounds of gear on their backs. Their feet were succumbing to rot—the skin softened by water and then shredded by the shark’s-tooth rocks, even through diving booties; the cave was a breeding ground for bacteria and microbes, so infection crept into every crevice. The SEALs’ Facebook page began asking its 2 million followers for donations of medication and space blankets for the troops freezing from hours-long exposure to seventy-degree water.

  Stanton and Vollanthen had been told the conditions were not likely to improve—that typically, once the cave fills, its insides continue to churn until the monsoons wring themselves dry. At best it would be weeks before they got a chance to dive. So the Brits threw in the towel. “We don’t want to wait here for weeks, just for confirmation the children are already dead. It makes no sense for us, we have lives to lead,” thought Stanton. Also, a dozen dead boys was a grim reality they’d rather not have to face. Added to it all was frustration with the cultural differences and the search and rescue mission’s disorganization. So the world’s elite cave divers quietly looked into flights home, telling the Americans and their British Embassy liaisons that there was not much anyone could do for the boys.

  Chapter Seven

  The Shadow Quartet

  They felt half dead. But the dead can’t smell.

  By now the boys had mostly grown used to the stench. Though Coach Ek had the boys dig a latrine pit, after several days, the urea in their urine evaporated, crowding the chamber with the stinging smell of ammonia. It was accompanied by the distinct bouquet of human feces, sweat, and fear.

  The boys and their coach could tell by their digital watches that a week had gone by, but they almost couldn’t believe it. They didn’t know if anyone knew where they were or if anyone was coming. Tee, the captain, would hold his mouth open under a stalactite and swallow drop after drop until his belly felt full. They hadn’t eaten a meal since Saturday morning. With no light, their circadian rhythms were off and sleep came fitfully, each one of them squirming on the mudpack to try to nudge a bare shoulder into a more comfortable position. Eleven-year-old Titan’s jersey sagged to his lower thighs. He had been pulling it over his knees to keep warm. As their necks thinned and the shirts stretched, their collars started to hang, revealing sharp collarbones. The muscled trunks of their legs were turning twiggy.

  After about forty-eight hours without food, the human body begins ketosis. When the nervous system is unable to locate energy-rich glucose to consume, it orders cells to consume muscle and fat—and one of the byproducts of that chemical process in the body is increasingly pungent urine. The bigger boys, including Tee, Night, Nick, and Adul, had more body mass stored. But little Titan, who weighed less than seventy pounds, suffered fainting spells. Biw, with his fleshy face, was a class clown—often earning frowns from his English teacher, Carl Henderson, for doodling or scarfing down snacks during class. They tried not to think about food, but then that would only trigger more thoughts about food: basil fried rice, crispy pork, fried chicken. And then sometime on the fifth day, the ketosis fully kicked in and the hunger pains gave way to a great weakness, sometimes accompanied by what felt like flu symptoms. Now the only thing in their mouths was a strong metallic taste that made their breath reek. They slept most of the day, hugging themselves to keep warm.

  The temperature in the cave was 73 degrees, which would seem comfortable, even ideal. But this natural air conditioner was now a curse. Their bodies’ self-cannibalization had put their internal thermostats on the fritz. They were freezing—all the time. To keep warm they had cleared out an area where they huddled together during those semiconscious sleeping hours. Sometimes they slept by the water, desperate to hear the clatter of rescuers or their names echoing through th
e cave. Sometimes they heard sounds they could not explain, like dogs barking or children playing.

  In their waking hours, Coach Ek instituted a strict flashlight protocol, allowing the boys to use only one light at a time. Their sense of time became soupy. But in that haze a few days in, their ears pricked up. The coach shushed the boys. They listened. Was it divers? No. The sound of rushing water became unmistakable. They pointed their flashlight to the stream below and watched the water course past. Within minutes they noticed it wasn’t just surging forward, it was also pushing upward. They backed up the slope. And the water kept coming. The coach watched it rise nearly ten feet and ordered the boys to huddle higher up. They had been waiting for rescue, but suddenly they realized they might have to rescue themselves.

  Their routine was basic: guzzle water from the rising stream until their bellies felt full, then dig. Pee and repeat. They hacked at the brittle limestone for hours at a time, chipping away at their mountain prison. If the coach thought it was futile, he didn’t let on. Help had not arrived, and it was vital to keep the boys busy and focused on a goal day after day. They had carved out a mini-cavern several feet into the wall. After their workdays, they would creep back down to water’s edge to drink (if they found a clear current) and wait for the sound of rescuers.

  When they talked, it was no longer about food, but fantasies of how they would escape. With each fluctuation of the water level they would discuss whether the trend would continue, and whether now might be their chance. “Maybe now,” they would say. Maybe not. Now? No . . .

  They would test the water in their tomb. They realized its depth was only about an arm’s length above Adul’s head. He was brave enough to sink under—letting his toes touch bottom. But on either side of the passage, the ceiling dipped down to the water. Many of the boys went in, but no one was willing to dive into those sumps. Coach Ek wouldn’t let them—besides, by now no one had the strength. They would keep tabs on who had tested the water, who was due to go in, and who wouldn’t.

  Between the now-haphazard digging and talk of their confinement, there was little else to do. As the days dragged on, their weakness kept them confined mostly to their perch.

  As the boys clawed away from below, the Thai Third Army was hammering away from above—literally, with hammer and chisel. Dozens of men from the Third Army’s Thirty-seventh Military District in Chiang Rai had stuffed themselves into the crevasses thousands of feet above the boys, pecking away at the mountain, hoping it would reveal a mysterious entranceway. In fact, by Thursday June 28, when merely diving to Chamber Three required herculean effort, the rescue operation zeroed in on finding alternative ways into the cave: by drilling a rescue shaft that would somehow locate the boys, or finding an as-yet-unrevealed alternative cave entrance which would bypass some of the worst of the flooded tunnels and therefore give divers a fighting chance. And the other option relied on reducing the water levels in the cave—pumps inside the cave were barely maintaining the status quo, and proved finicky.

  The entire country had mustered to help the boys. Dozens of multimillion-dollar drilling rigs were parked by the side of Mae Sai’s roads. Their operators, sitting in their cabs smoking cigarettes, waited for orders. Owners of industrial pumps had chugged north to Mae Sai, hoping to help. Scuba gear was coming in from all over the world. Even Thailand’s king, Maha Vajiralongkorn, sent kitchen staff and trucks to feed the workers. He would later also donate diving supplies.

  In a matter of days, thousands of volunteers had arrived in Mae Sai. What had been the cave’s base camp turned into a jumble of mess tents and medics’ stations. The stairs leading up to the cave from the parking lot below had disappeared under orange and blue rows of thick hoses so densely packed that together they looked like a mud-slicked Slip ’N Slide down the stairs. Only a narrow section of stair was left for workers to trudge up.

  Those hoses led to a series of pumps arrayed inside the cave. The squat cylinders about the size and weight of a washing machine needed constant maintenance, and though the pumps themselves were enormously high-tech, getting them into the cave utilized prehistoric technology. Thai soldiers would thread a thick green bamboo pole beneath a barrel-shaped pump’s steel handle—which resembled a bucket handle—and hoist the pole onto their shoulders. To move a single pump required eight men. The hoses themselves weighed hundreds of pounds and required additional platoons of soldiers to hoof them in on their shoulders. With those orange, red, and blue hoses, the floor of Chamber Two looked like a messy fuse box. Physically wrangling and maintaining hoses that were being tramped on by hundreds of people a day kept dozens of workers busy.

  There had been no evidence that the boys were still alive. Governor Narongsak and other officials had informed the press of the plan to try and drill a relief well to the boys in the cave, but no real headway had been made.

  A man named Thanet Natisri had pulled into camp at about 7 P.M. on Thursday, June 28, and was quickly ushered into the cave for a briefing. He had come prepared with maps his associates at the Geospacial Engineering and Innovation Center in Bangkok had provided—state-of-the-art maps detailing the contours of the mountain and the estimated elevation and depth of the area above the Pattaya Beach section of the cave. He presented this information to the search mission’s chief engineer and a few military commanders, who were impressed because they hadn’t had access to that information. At 9 P.M. Thanet, who had been running multiple water-management projects in Thailand on and off for the past five years, started by lobbying Governor Narongsak for a seismic scanner to peer inside the mountain. The scanner, which required a permit from the Thai Department of Mineral Resources, worked by inserting firecracker-size charges a few yards into the earth, setting them off, and measuring the reverberations. Similar to sonar for mining, it’s often used to locate oil by detecting areas with different density—like cave chambers.

  Thanet had hoped that seismic tests could help detect the cave chambers. They could then drill down into them one by one, perhaps lowering microphones to listen for the boys. His plan called for dismantling the smaller drills at rescuers’ disposal, then slinging them to powerful Russian Mi-17 helicopters and reassembling them once they landed on the mountain. They had the manpower, they just needed a piece of paper permitting the seismic tests.

  But that Thursday, June 28, Narongsak, who has multiple master’s degrees in engineering, overruled both his engineers and Thanet—denying the request for a seismic-scanner permit. He approved of continued attempts to drill down to the boys but not the seismic tests, concerned that the boys might somehow be harmed thousands of feet below or that some seismic reaction might block access to the boys, complicating a future extraction. After all, they had no idea whether the boys were trapped only by the water, or by a landslide, or by both. It was also Narongsak’s responsibility to ensure the safety of the thousands of soldiers and volunteers now there. Instead, weaker sensors that could only penetrate a few hundred feet into the mountain were approved. But Thanet argued that drilling down into the mountain without a precise target in hopes of finding the boys could take years—or might be entirely impossible. Still, he was overruled. No seismic testing.

  It would have been easy to dismiss Thanet. A boyish thirty-two-year-old who looks twenty-two, he’s gangly, with a flop of thick hair dyed slightly orange. When he’s not managing water for rural communities in Thailand, he runs a Thai restaurant in Marion, Illinois. His was perhaps not the most illustrious of résumés at the cave site, given the number of generals, professional politicians, and world-renowned rescuers present. Yet he had impressed local government officials and military officers a month earlier in a nearby province during a lecture on water-management techniques. His Thailand Groundwater Recharge Project had helped farmers manage aquifers in the dry season and divert the increasingly severe floods in the wet.

  And that’s why his newfound military contacts had called him: he seemed to be a person with the magical power to make water appear or disappear.
Thanet immediately got to work as the search-and-rescue operation’s lead outside consultant on water management. If water was the enemy, Thanet knew he couldn’t defeat it. But he could divert it.

  One of the extensions to the Tham Luang cave that Vern had explored was likely the outlet for a stream that ran out of the cave, draining a few hundred yards south. It was called the Tham Sai Tong. That part of the cave was at a lower elevation than the main entrance, about six hundred yards south, and Thanet concocted a plan.

  He rounded up thirty drilling rigs. Then he drove around Mae Sai hunting for the men smoking cigarettes outside their industrial pumps. Bored out of their minds and eager to volunteer, they were easy to recruit. He then collared three hundred soldiers from the Thirty-seventh Military District lent to him by Colonel Losuya. Then, without seeking permission, he sent them down the muddy track to Tham Sai Tong. Excavators felled trees, leveled what had been one of those lovely little picnic areas near the cave, and carved out a wide flat of grayish mud. Then began a massive industrial drilling and pumping operation, in the middle of the jungle, six hundred yards from the camp. And no one knew about it.

  The goal was also audacious: to lower the entire water table of an area nearly the size of Manhattan. Governor Narongsak had already issued orders to reduce the water table near the cave entrance, but space was limited for the drills and pumps and the generators they required.

  In theory, Thanet’s idea was to create an artificial drainage point for the cave—on the assumption that if the water had a place to drain, it wouldn’t back up as much. The plan looked similar to the method used in drilling for oil, only Thanet was seeking to extract water. Using the drilling rigs, they would drill down until they hit water and then use industrial pumps to extract it.