by Matt Gutman
Every plan they discussed that night seemed to offer an unacceptable probability of fatalities, including the grand-slam option. There was one controversial building block upon which the Brits insisted that every new idea had to be built—the boys had to be fully sedated. After their brief experience with the four flailing pump workers they’d rescued a week prior, Stanton and Vollanthen insisted they would not participate unless the “casualties” were completely inert. Binding the kids and swimming them through without sedation would have been terrifying for the boys and possibly dangerous for the divers, so the only option to mitigate possible trauma and enable the divers to do their job was knocking them out. Among the little group there was nearly a century of cave-diving or caving experience, but none of them could think of any precedent for such a rescue.
Regardless, they needed more divers. Two of the Euro-divers, Nick Vollmar and Mikko Paasi, were on their way in from Europe. The UK dive team also called in its own reinforcements, including Jason Mallinson—the Jason Statham look-alike who had been involved in that Mexico cave rescue with Stanton in 2004—and another rescue diver, Chris Jewell. Jewell was an expert cave diver and technician, but this would be his first rescue operation. They also called in three other support divers through the BCRC: Connor Roe, Jim Warny, and Josh Bratchley. Stanton felt comfortable with the team he was assembling; he had worked closely with all of them aside from the Euro-divers, whom he was growing to trust.
He also knew who he did not want on his team: the Thai Navy SEAL divers. He figured they would have been unable to communicate with the rest of the team, plus their recent mishaps proved them to be courageous but technically lacking—they just weren’t trained for cave diving. His primary concern, however, was his own (and his team’s) survival. He began with the assumption that if the Thais joined the effort they would send a massive team—more than was necessary. They would likely not be posted to the far reaches of the cave, which meant they would be somewhere near Chamber Four—the only way out. If the cave started to flood, he assumed that the Thais would react as any novice cave diver would—scramble for the exit. And since getting to the exit meant shinnying single file out of that manhole-wide 150-yard sump between Chambers Four and Three, a human logjam would stack up. The last thing he wanted was to be what he called a “tail-end Charlie” at the back of that line of divers.
Because sedation was nonnegotiable, the linchpins of the team would be two Australian divers, neither of whom was currently on-site: veterinarian Dr. Craig Challen and anesthesiologist Dr. Richard “Harry” Harris. If the elite British rescue team was a rare breed, then Dr. Harris in particular was a unicorn: one of the world’s most experienced cave divers, who happened to have participated in previous rescues, and who happened to be an anesthesiologist.
They were quietly put on standby, at the request of the Brits. Later that night Stanton started to consult Dr. Harris via text. He recalls, “I was talking to Harry [Harris] about how to go forward. [The team] had agreed that the sedation plan was the only conceivable option,” and that in terms of diving they shouldn’t count on the Thais in the far reaches of the cave.
Stanton wrote to Harris, “The Thais aren’t going to do anything, would you consider sedation?”—meaning, would Harris consider administering the sedation?
Harris replied, “Sedation not an option.” Meaning that he was not willing to be the doctor who anesthetized twelve boys and their coach, the majority of whom were expected to die on the way out. If things went south, it could land him in a Thai prison or, at the very least, pave the path to quick career suicide.
Stanton left him with a last message—something to think about overnight: “If not sedated they are not coming out.”
That night, Wednesday, July 4, Derek Anderson finally slept in a bed. He came back the next morning for a meeting with the divers and his team.
“As with all big problem sets,” he told the team, “you have to stop and take emotion out of it.” The divers had also gotten some rest and Anderson in particular was ready to attack this unique problem set anew.
“Okay,” he told them that morning, “you don’t think it’s feasible. But if we were to attempt it, what would this look like to you?”
They mapped out the massive manpower available, the number of air tanks already staged in Chamber Three, and the number of experienced divers needed. They took inventory of the gear they had, including the U.S. team’s four positive-pressure scuba masks—which pump a continuous flow of air into the mask, unlike other full-face masks, which provide air on demand and would prove essential for the rescue later on. They started scratching out new ideas. The removal en masse of all thirteen in a day was the first notion they rejected.
Anderson figured with the right plan, proper staging of equipment, and the right divers, it was possible. But only if both the weather held and the Thais budged from their demand of a “zero-risk option.” Any rescue plan meant the possibility of casualties.
None of it was possible without an anesthesiologist who was a world-class cave diver. And since there was only one such person, Stanton again reached out to Dr. Harris, this time in “a proper phone conversation.” They’d known each other for eleven years and shared the kind of trust engendered by watching each other’s backs in the world’s most unforgiving places—in the bellies of caves seven hundred feet under water. Stanton didn’t have to sell him too hard. Dr. Harris had slept on it and told Stanton that it might be done, but friends had warned him overnight not to set foot in the country until he was guaranteed immunity from prosecution. Stanton started scrambling around the camp to find an Australian embassy representative to arrange the immunity through official channels.
That night I ducked under the caution tape dividing the parents from the rest of the camp and straightened up inside the parents’ tent. The parents had been strictly forbidden to speak to the press. The government didn’t want any more tearful interviews with parents tightly clutching framed photos of children they might never see again. The parents’ now ever-present government minders looked up from their phones briefly. My translator and I told them we simply wanted to deliver a message. They saw that I was accompanied only by a translator and no cameras were in evidence, so they resumed their scrolling. I went over to Biw’s mother, sitting patiently in a plastic chair under that blue tarp amid a cast of exhausted parents—many of them in surgical masks. A large flatscreen had been set on a folding table, and parents absentmindedly watched. But mostly they just sat there hollow-eyed. It was dark now. Biw’s mother had a broad face, with high cheekbones and deep laugh lines from better days. She agreed to talk with us and ushered us quietly to the area behind the tent. The smell of runoff from the overflowing bathrooms nearby was ferocious. She was wary, but warmed up as soon as I presented my phone to her, with some pictures I’d taken of her son’s artwork.
A couple of days earlier I had visited Biw’s private school, a different one than Prasitsart. At this school the kids were also dressed in khakis, but with neckerchiefs tied around their necks, looking more like Scouts than British colonial officers. I chatted with the students and English teacher Carl Henderson, a former IT consultant, about Biw. The girls coquettishly giggled, covering their mouths at Henderson’s gentle description of him as a popular kid but a bit of a ham—quick with a joke and just as quick to smuggle in bags of fried snacks. Biw also liked to doodle as Mr. Henderson rattled on about conjugations and tenses.
When I asked to see a sample of his doodles and artwork, a couple of the kids ran into the classroom and came back with Biw’s notebook and a T-shirt, as if they were sacred relics. The children flipped through the pages—some attempts at English, a few math problems, and a bunch of perfectly symmetrical geometric drawings in Magic Marker. Biw had also drawn casts of cartoonish characters of his own design. The T-shirt that he’d made was populated by those same characters. The design looked like a city skyline, but dwarfing the spired skyscrapers were giant anthropomorphic fruits vaguely
resembling the old Fruit of the Loom characters. There was a giant pencil and palm tree, a building-high skateboard, and the Eye of Providence—the wide-open all-seeing eye at the top of a pyramid you see on a dollar bill.
It shattered the vague two-dimensional image I had of these lost boys. They were just kids, who daydreamed and doodled, who had friends, who suffered through the tedium of classes so they could get outside for playground soccer. They were humans, who came back sweaty and stinky from running around, who acted tough in the schoolyard and then fled home to the bosoms of their mothers.
And now Biw’s mother’s face was lit by the glow of my iPhone screen. She’d seen all his drawings before, but not on someone else’s camera. She looked up at me and the translator, smiling—her suspicion melted away, but not her worry. Maybe I had made it harder on her. I’m not sure. Moments later, one of the minders—realizing his ward had gone astray—called her in and forced us out.
The families had been kept on a need-to-know basis. Biw’s mother knew, of course, that her son had been found, that he was safe for now, and that Thai SEALs were now hunkered down with the boys, come what may. But they were never informed about rescue plans ahead of time, much less consulted about their opinion of, for instance, waiting out the monsoons versus an immediate rescue. The SEALs were going to bring the boys out. The families had faith in them. And so they sat, waited, and prayed.
Chapter Twelve
Letters Home
Many of the workers and divers looked as though they had been punching rocks. Their hands were bloody and infected. On a given day a couple hundred people would go in and out of Chamber Three. A main traffic node, it had become the depository for hundreds of air tanks. It had also become a depository for urine and perhaps other bodily excretions. In addition to what looked like a messy fuse box of giant pipes, there was now trash building up and the smell of a never-cleaned highway rest stop. Normally cavers pee in bottles and take them out when they leave. But not here. There was too much work to be done.
Perhaps, then, it’s unsurprising that it was unlike any cave Chris Jewell and Jason Mallinson had ever been in. Caves are typically solitary places. They are quiet and peaceful and largely untouched by humans. With the pumps whirring, dozens of voices in half a dozen languages pinging off the walls, the pounding of handheld jackhammers, and the clanging of scuba tanks, this was far from peaceful. Back in London, Jewell had been acting as the British Cave Rescue Council’s liaison with Stanton and Vollanthen in Thailand. After the two Brits located the boys on Monday, July 2, Jewell had run a marathon of interviews on Tuesday. At six the next morning, he and Mallinson received the call to come out. It would be Jewell’s first rescue operation.
Both were a good fit for the job. Mallinson is a rope access technician, using his caving and climbing skills to access hard-to-reach places—like skylights in malls or the glass skins of high-rise buildings. He was just a pup when he started, back when he had hair atop his big impressive dome. He started caving at seventeen and then taught himself the basics of cave diving. He had been caving and diving with Stanton for nearly twenty years, and along with Stanton and Vollanthen had set a world record for longest cave dive back in 2010. Like many cavers, he is serious and intense. He almost invariably wears cargo pants and a T-shirt that had seen some tugging at the collar. Jewell is an IT consultant and looks like one: slightly nerdy, bespectacled, with a frank, open face. At thirty-five, he is younger than Mallinson and Vollanthen by at least a decade, and twenty-two years younger than Stanton. But he was a rising star in the caving world, having led an expedition to the Huautla cave in Mexico, considered one of the deepest in the world—plumbing a spot called “one of the most remote yet reached on earth.” The fifty-seven-year-old Stanton said the choice of Jewell was a no-brainer: “There was no one else, and I can’t go on doing this forever. There’s only one way to get a diver like that experience, and this was it.”
Within hours they were bound for Thailand with mounds of gear—including a resupply for Stanton and Vollanthen. The tiny clique of the world’s best cave divers carried their own customized kits, many of them homemade or produced in small shops.* This explains why Jason Mallinson drives around the UK and Europe in a van stuffed with his homemade or customized equipment. There are side mounts, underwater scooters, tubes to carry materials, and his own tanks. In an underwater world where you have only yourself to rely on, Mallinson trusts his own jury-rigged gear.
Because the American and British teams had ruled out the resupply mission to stock the cave with enough food and supplies to last the four-month monsoon season, the international teams had come to believe that they now had a small window of opportunity to dive the boys out. The international teams didn’t know if diving out the kids would ever be approved by the Thai government, especially since they’d been unable to get the attention of the Thai leadership to brief them about the existence of the plan. But because preparations take time, they started to prepare as if the mission was a go.
In addition to packing some more food for the boys and their coach, they needed to get them diving supplies. Mae Sai is not a diving hub. The nearest dive shop is in Chiang Mai, more than four hours away by car. Many of the divers at the cave had brought extra wet suits, but they were for grown men, not emaciated boys. A floppy wet suit is worse than no wet suit. But the Chiang Mai Rock Climbing Adventures team contacted a company that manufactures wet suits for the apparel company Reef. They made a special order of kids’ wet suits and had a driver deliver them immediately to the cave.
Under the ubiquitous blue tarps, Anderson’s soldiers, Mallinson, and Jewell all got to work packing the wet suits and a few extra MREs they had scrounged up, tossing the castoff napkins, heating kits, and tiny Tabasco bottles into a growing pile of trash.
Mallinson set off first from Chamber Three. Jewell followed a few minutes later. Like their compatriots, the British duo of Jewell and Mallinson were accustomed to these wretched conditions. The sumps they explored in northern England were equally murky and even colder. Even so, Jewell and Mallinson found the going tough.
“The actual speed of the water was of a quite high velocity, and I’d be fighting against the flow in several sections,” recalls Jewell. But since there were no other divers beyond Chamber Three, Jewell considered the visibility “quite good.” For him that meant the ability to see three feet ahead of him, or about as far as his outstretched arm. It was enough for Mallinson and Jewell to start building a mental map of the route they would be taking several more times.
As if fighting the current weren’t enough, the water itself was foul. Urine was being dumped into it from both Chamber Three and Chamber Nine—where feces was now being added into the mix. They were also concerned that there was runoff from animal farms up above, namely fertilizer and pig excrement, so they tried not to let too much water into their mouths.* But all divers end up ingesting some water. No one who worked inside the cave would end up leaving without a microbial memento.
Mallinson surfaced in Chamber Nine first. Before he saw anything, he could smell that the seventeen people in the tomb had already tucked into the MREs; the smell of highly processed American food was now added to the aroma of human waste and sweat.
Mallinson began pulling himself up the steep bank and detaching his gear. In his kit was another confined-space air-quality monitor—the one the USAF Special Tactics team had flown in on the C-130. He and Jewell had been tasked with taking another reading. He didn’t need to check it. He began panting as he crawled up the bank. The air was thin, and it reeked. It was hard to breathe.
“We had spent a lot of time in caves and other places with bad air quality, so we quickly determined that the air had deteriorated,” Mallinson recalled. There was no circulation in the chamber, so whatever air was there had been entombed with the boys when the water closed off any exit. It wasn’t only that oxygen was decreasing but also that carbon dioxide, the by-product of breathing, was increasing. Carbon dioxide is like oil
in a salad dressing. It’s heavier than oxygen, so if left unstirred it sinks to the lower parts of the chamber, building up exactly where everyone is trying to breathe—it can be especially dangerous when a group is sleeping.
Rising to his feet, Mallinson saw thirteen spectral figures hanging back in the darker recesses of the chamber. One or two of the boys stirred and came down. The boys looked like little spacemen wrapped in their foil blankets, stick legs poking out from below. One of the Thai Navy SEALs had stripped down. He was in his underwear, wrapped in a foil blanket—he’d given all his clothes to the boys. For his suit of underwear and silver “cape,” he earned a nickname from the boys: Superman.
Mallinson introduced himself, and Dr. Bhak served as translator. The children, he said, “were pretty chilled out”—hardly panicky. They “understood the situation they were in and they were just hopeful that we could help them out.”
Mallinson pulled up his tubes and started unloading the food and the wet suits. With Dr. Bhak translating, Mallinson, who is as chatty as a brick wall, did his best to work up a rapport with the boys. He asked if they were okay. “Okay, okay,” Adul and the others responded. He got out his oxygen meter and began preparing a fingertip pulse oximeter and blood oxygen sensor—the kind many primary care doctors use to quickly determine oxygen saturation in the blood and a patient’s pulse. Most of the boys’ oxygen levels were above 94 percent—which wasn’t great, but was hardly terrible given their circumstances. Slightly more vexing were their heart rates. Some of the pulses he measured pounded away, others were more sluggish. The air-quality meter beeped 17 percent oxygen in the room. But having been in confined spaces many times, Mallinson wondered, much as Stanton had during his reading, if the meter had been properly calibrated. After thirty years of diving and rescue, his gut feeling was that if the air quality dipped much further the boys would be in grave danger.
