The Boys in the Cave

by Matt Gutman

  “We were a little surprised that this was how Harry was telling us to do it,” said Rasmussen, who—like all of the Euro-divers—works in Thailand. They had not negotiated for immunity—hadn’t even thought of it; the Euro-divers, arguably more than anyone, would face life-altering consequences if a boy died or was overdosed. They feared they could be arrested, lose their visas, be separated from their families, or lose their businesses. There was no time to consult lawyers or families; anyway, details of the mission were strictly top secret. Choking down his fear, Rasmussen told the team, “Okay, if we have to do it we will do it. The downside would be a kid waking up [during the rescue].”

  Despite this last-minute wrench, the divers were increasingly confident they could execute their plan—the wild card remained the boys’ reactions. As they headed toward the mouth of the cave, Rasmussen revised his earlier calculation about the boys’ survival rate: instead of 80 percent fatalities—that is, only one in five boys would live—he now thought that one in four of the boys might survive the journey out. For the divers, rescue protocol and personal survival itself could necessitate an agonizing decision, which veteran diver and first-time rescuer Chris Jewell thought about this way: “I wasn’t 100 percent confident that I would come out with a live child. I was confident that I could get out of that cave myself, but I knew there could be a scenario that would force me to let go of the child and sort of have to abandon him in order to save myself. And one of my biggest concerns was that in order to get myself out I might inadvertently damage or kind of displace the full face mask that was ultimately keeping the boy alive.” That particular worry burrowed itself into the rookie rescuer’s brain and refused to leave.

  As the rest of the teams waited, the thirteen divers turned up the stairs for the hour-plus slog to Chamber Three. After them came a funereally solemn procession of over one hundred people.

  “We were nervous,” said Major Hodges. “My biggest concern was that we didn’t have any communication capability past the third chamber. So once that part of the mission started, it was, like, we’re hitting the Play button, and we’re just sitting back and thinking hopefully we’ve planned this well enough. Hopefully the contingency plans are solid enough. Hopefully everybody back there knows what the plan is, the way that we had rehearsed it. But yeah, we were nervous. But then it was just a long waiting game.”

  Rear Admiral Apakorn told his superiors that the boys would be cared for “like an egg in a rock,” which is a Thai idiom referring to a chicken that lays an egg and wonders how much safer its precious progeny would be if it were encased in stone, rather than in a fragile shell.

  The mission had officially started, yet the teams still hadn’t fully finished their preparations. The USAF Special Tactics team was still lugging equipment in for the Euro-divers and others and checking and rechecking all the rope systems they would be using in Chambers Two and Three. The Euro-divers still had tanks to place. And after the previous day’s misunderstanding over the location of Chamber Five, they would have to find the cache of tanks and equipment already there and place it one hundred yards closer to the T-junction. Along the route to Chamber Three, Thai Navy SEALs and others peeled off to take their positions. The deeper into the cave it snaked, the smaller the procession became. The flayed feet, the hands so infected that Vollanthen and Stanton had to routinely lance their wounds to let the pus ooze out, the debilitating cases of jock itch, the mysterious rashes welling up beneath wet suits, and the ailments divers were calling Tham Luang foot rot and Tham Luang lung—a hacking cough that lasted for weeks—were all ignored.

  About ninety minutes later, the Americans, Thai SEALs, and others were assembled in Chamber Three. Stanton was making a last cursory check of the equipment and the tanks they would take in, running his hands over them, when he brushed something that felt wrong. It was the oxygen tanks for the boys. At the top of any dive tank is a cylinder valve, which controls the amount of gas coming out like a spigot—be it oxygen or other mixtures of gas. Those valves have two different types of connection systems: an A-clamp connector and a DIN connector. Completely different sets of regulators and gear go with each—the difference is as big as that between a left-hand-drive car and a right-hand-drive car. The SEALs and the international teams had decided early on to standardize all their equipment. They would only use A-clamps for every one of the hundreds of air tanks prepared for them each day. But today, the first day of the mission, Stanton noticed that the oxygen tanks that would be used by the boys were fitted with DIN connectors—the wrong kind. Had they hauled them out to Chamber Nine, the divers would have been unable to connect them to regulators—meaning the boys would have no oxygen and the tanks would have been as useful as thirty-five-pound paperweights. The mistake set off a frantic search for the right connectors. There was no time to rush out of the cave, so Stanton and Mallinson decided they would cannibalize the right connectors from their own supply and fit them on the boys’ oxygen tanks. The procedure ate up forty minutes.

  Without fanfare, the American and Thai teams in Chamber Three watched the thirteen main divers slip into the water, each spaced a few minutes apart. They swam in file, but they swam alone. Cave-diving rescues are the most solitary kinds of rescue missions, and over the previous week most of the divers had spent more time inside the cave, alone, than they had outside it. For many, the shock of the cold water had become as familiar as their chronic fatigue. They weren’t bothered by the murk anymore—work in which they called diving blind or diving by Braille. Many had committed parts of the route to memory. Stanton or Mallinson could often anticipate a slack guideline leading into dead-end wrinkles in the tunnel, and they knew when to deflate their buoyancy vests as they glided toward some of the lower areas. Challen, Harris, Stanton, Vollathen, Mallinson, and Jewell went first. The Euro-divers and the BCRC support team of Roe, Bratchley, and Warny followed.

  Loaded up with air tanks and extra sedatives they prayed they wouldn’t have to use, each solitary diver began navigating one of the most challenging parts of the cave, which began right after the sump at Chamber Three and included the straw-tight, 150-yard-long passageway leading to Chamber Four. “It’s an awkward bit of underwater passage. There are several particularly tricky line traps, where the guideline we’re following can get pulled up into small cracks and make it difficult to navigate,” said Jewell. For most of that section the divers would have to slither—their bellies on the cave floor, their backs bumping its cheese-grater ceiling. It was just big enough that they wouldn’t have to take their tanks off. And it was that dreaded part of the cave that would soon lead Jewell into trouble.

  The Chiang Mai climbing team was among the groups holding the fort back in Chambers Two and Three. It was mission day, but they still needed to tighten a bunch of bolts and ensure that the lines were free of snags and the hand lines were firmly in place. There were to be no wildcatters today. Every single person in the cave was assigned a specified station and a specific task, with orders not to leave their posts. The entrance to the cave had a sign-in sheet and a board enumerating the exact number of rescuers inside at all times.

  In that day’s briefing they had also been given some auxiliary instructions. Said Wild: “We knew from the first briefings that some kids would not make it. We were to be prepared inside, if someone arrived dead, we would keep that person in there. Because they didn’t want the optics of bringing out a dead body.”

  Then everybody waited.

  About seven hundred yards from Mario Wild and his Chiang Mai rope specialists, Euro-divers Ivan Karadzic and Erik Brown had spent the previous half hour relocating what they had thought was Chamber Five to a new location one hundred yards away and double-checked that all the tanks were in order. It had taken them about an hour and a half to get into place and thirty more minutes to put the finishing touches on their work. And now, for the first time since Major Hodges had effectively commandeered them to his team four days earlier, they had nothing to do. It was “a bit of a
weird sensation sitting there,” recalled Karadzic. To conserve battery power and to better see the lights of incoming divers with kids in tow, they had dimmed their own lights so low that they could barely make out each other’s faces.

  “It was just me and Erik,” said Karadzic, “and it was the first time in a long, long time that it was quiet, no stress. And we looked at each other and wondered what the hell have we done. We are two kilometers [about a mile and a quarter] inside a cave. We were gobsmacked . . . so now we are going to take these kids out? We didn’t know how it would turn out.”

  Paasi and Rasmussen, on their way to a dry area in Chamber Seven, passed Karadzic and Brown. Their instructions were to tow their Skedco to a sandy spot in Chamber Seven and park there. But when they arrived at Chamber Seven something about the place felt wrong. The channel coursing beside the bank was still diveable—moving a boy through the water would certainly have been easier than hoofing him over the Martian terrain—so they wondered why they were there. Instinct told them to move; what they believed to be their mission orders dictated staying put—which they did.

  A couple of hundred yards closer to the boys, Challen and Stanton took up a position at the beginning of the long submerged straightaway tunnel that connected Chamber Eight to Chamber Nine. Stanton’s role, at least during the early phases of that first day, was to serve as “the feedback loop.” Stanton was to wait for the first boy, assess his condition, and swim that information back to Harris in Chamber Nine. “Harry wanted to get feedback; were the boys alive or dead or heavily sedated, before he sent anyone else” down the tunnel, Stanton recalled. The three other British divers—Vollanthen, Jewell, and Mallinson—were already nearing Chamber Nine. They would each take a single boy, alone. Mallinson says (in his Yorkshire accent, which omits certain consonants, making “water” sound like “war”) that “originally we had planned for two divers, one front and one back. Then we realized the conditions wouldn’t make the diver at the back any use. He would’ve been trapped to the back [of the mini-procession]. He wouldn’t be able to see what was going on even if that kid had panicked or his mask had flooded with water . . . and wouldn’t have been able to help.”

  So there would be no help in the swimming sections along the route, only at the predetermined “gas stations,” between which the divers would be entirely on their own. That meant about a thousand yards of gut-churning solo responsibility. There was almost no going back and no backup plan. If one of the boys’ masks came loose or ripped and the divers happened to notice it while diving, they were instructed not to stop. They couldn’t afford to fiddle with a mask once it had been carefully strapped on. And if one broke, there was only a single back-up mask that was bigger and older than the ones they were using. They just would have to make do.

  “If one of the boys’ face masks became filled with water,” said Mallinson, “there was no plan B. You just got to swim him out as quickly as possible” to the next spot—always forward, never back—to find a spot that offered enough headroom to breathe and hope that enough oxygen from the tanks remained in the boy’s system for a desperate resuscitation to succeed before he became brain dead or died.

  Dr. Harris arrived at Chamber Nine first. In Harris’s dry pouch was a note he’d dictated to a Thai doctor to translate; he handed the note to the SEALs, instructing them to read it verbatim to the boys. He needed to be able to manage the cave, so it was imperative that the SEALs followed these instructions. Dr. Bhak spoke to the kids, who seemed relieved. They could finally see the finish line, even if they wouldn’t be conscious when crossing it. The SEALs gathered at the top of the mound in Chamber Nine and read them the instructions: They were to swallow a pill that would make them feel funny. They would come down to the water and sit on Dr. Harris’s lap; he would give them an injection in one leg, then give them another injection in the other leg; they would fall asleep; they would wake up in the hospital.

  Harris had administered ketamine and atropine plenty of times. And he had been in caves plenty of times, even at pulverizing depths. But, he thought to himself, he had never administered the sedative “in the back of a cave on malnourished, skinny, dehydrated Thai kids before.” Cool on the exterior, inside he was pulsating with fear.

  Upon hearing the instructions, the boys didn’t flinch.

  Ignorance is bliss, Harris thought to himself. But it wasn’t just ignorance. The boys knew it was dangerous. But they had been born and grew up in a society that inculcates almost blind obedience to authority. And not just to the government, or its king. At the Wat Doi Wao temple and monastery, where Coach Ek and the boys had spent so much time, leading monks are so revered that if one of them was present the boys would not walk up to him to pass a message or ask him something—they would crawl on all fours.

  In the end, the boys sensed the danger, but they also trusted these authority figures instructing them on the way out of it. If they said this plan was going to work, then it would.

  Chapter Eighteen

  A Few Shots of Ketamine

  Mallinson had volunteered to go first. “I’m not one to hang around in the back. I’m pretty fast, so naturally I’m usually at the front, so I just volunteered.” He knew that would mean a little less silt in his face on the way out, but likely also problems that no one else had encountered and no one had previously troubleshot.

  He helped four boys into their wet suits, fit the inflatable vests on them, and readied an elastic band on each to help secure the oxygen tank. There were no formalities, and aside from cursory smiles, both the divers and the boys were all business. There may have been a reason the divers neglected to ask the boys’ their names—a desire to build an emotional firewall between the grim job before them and the very real children who might die in their care. On that day the boys were just numbers in neoprene suits.

  The SEALs led the first boy, Note, halfway down the slope, and the divers then led the woozy fourteen-year-old to the water’s muddy edge. The rest of the boys were kept in the nook where they slept at the top of the slope so that they wouldn’t freak out when they saw their friends anesthetized or bound. The Xanax had already pulled a gauzy veil of calm over Note’s nervous system; it felt like being drunk without the mood alteration. The Brit and the Australian dug their feet in for a firmer purchase on the crumbling bank as the boy was handed over. Dr. Harris stood in chest-deep water, posting one leg higher on the slope and making a sort of shelf with it for the boy to perch on. He then jabbed a syringe into each leg.

  Then there was the most troubling bit, the bit that the divers did not want the other boys to see. As Note faded from consciousness, Harris and Mallinson got to work, looping a zip tie around each wrist, then closing those loops with another tie and securing it with a carabiner. They had effectively handcuffed him. They also zip-tied the boy’s legs together. Now came the part that every one of the divers had worried about: they tightly strapped the full face mask onto the boy’s head. A leak could mean drowning. These were adult masks and—while some of the boys were tall—after twelve days of starvation their skin was so taut it looked as if it had been shrink-wrapped over their faces. The mask has five straps: one just above the forehead, two just above the ears, and another two where the jaw meets the ear. They yanked and they cinched.

  “If they had been conscious it would have been very, very uncomfortable for them, because we really strapped it down tight,” said Mallinson. For the next thirty seconds or so, said Harris, the first boy stopped breathing. Then his chest rose and he inhaled.

  The oxygen tank now fully secure in the elastic around the boy’s waist, he looked like a captured Martian. In Mallinson’s hands was a package of flesh in the shape of a human—a creature in a state closer to coma than to sleep. When he settled into the water, Dr. Harris had to test the seal again, dunking the boy’s head into the water.

  Again, apnea: Note stopped breathing. An eternal thirty seconds ticked by before the bellows of the boy’s diaphragm raised his belly and drew in air
. Still alive . . . the bubbles bobbed reassuringly from the side of his mask.

  The “package” was now in Mallinson’s hands.

  After nearly a quarter century of rescue diving, Mallinson says he usually doesn’t get nervous—now he was nervous. He fiddled with the boy’s buoyancy so that he wouldn’t float to the surface or sink to the bottom, and watched the little black figure disappear into the water beneath him. Gripping the two straps on the back of the boy’s inflatable vest and deflating his own vest, he started kicking. With decent visibility, he didn’t have to hold the guideline, as long as he kept it in sight. Instead he put a second hand on those straps. The support team had rigged a tether to the inflatable vest, but Mallinson chose not to use it—he feared it could get tangled in the guideline or the cave’s countless other snags. The first section of the dive back was the longest single dive of the extraction—about 350 yards. His eyes darted from the guideline to the release valves of the boy’s mask. Note’s breaths were slow and labored.

  If stadium lights could have illuminated them in the water, the strange pair in black neoprene might have looked like equally sized sea lions on a leisurely swim, one directly above the other. Mallinson, at five foot five, was shorter than several of the boys whose lives he’d volunteered to save—and about the same height as Note. He decided to keep Note close, with his own head protruding just ahead of the boy’s—so that his helmet would take the brunt of unseen stalactites.*

  That first part of the tunnel narrows down to the size of a city sewer. It was a long, continuous swim of over twenty minutes. Mallinson refused to let his mind wander. He was thinking ahead to a nasty bit of choreography. Toward the end of the passage there is a choke point, which looks to a swimmer like a curtain of rock—a dead end. The guideline drops to the bottom of the canal, but there’s only one way to fit through. Mallinson had to remember which side to put the boy on. If the boy stayed on his right, they’d get stuck. When they arrived, he tugged the boy to his left, so they were swimming abreast. He had to contort Note’s body to get it through.