by Matt Gutman
The boy was certainly easier to swim with, but instead of stifled breathing, Titan was breathing at a rate of about twenty times a minute. That near hyperventilation began just after Harris had plugged him with the drugs, and Stanton asked if it was all right. Harris said he thought so, and offered the same answer he’d supplied two days prior: “There’s nothing we can do about it. As long as he is breathing, just keep going.” Stanton was worried the boy would consume all his air. But he soon realized that Titan was only taking little sips of air, and besides, his lungs were so tiny there was no way he’d burn through all that oxygen.
They wound through the maze of passages until finally Stanton neared the nasty squeeze just before the home stretch that had stalled Vollanthen minutes earlier. It was Stanton’s sixth time navigating this junction, and each previous time he had approached it differently. Only now he couldn’t find the opening. The days’ two earlier dives had made visibility go from a few inches to absolute zero.
Stanton had one hand on the guideline and the other on the boy. Minutes went by and Stanton grew frustrated. He was so close to the finish line, he could actually hear the reassuring whir of the pumps thrumming away in Chamber Three.
Titan was tethered, so Stanton let him go and ran his hand over the rough limestone. Finally he found the opening. Relieved, he picked Titan up and swam. As the sound of the pumps grew louder, Stanton was suddenly blinded by what seemed like an airplane searchlight. He kept swimming, bumping the walls toward its source, which turned out to be one of the Chinese rescuers who had jumped in the sump to light up the runway for Stanton. He had instead completely blinded the cranky Brit, and with a good deal of sign language and head shaking was lectured not to do that to the other divers.
It is hard to fault the Chinese rescuer. There were only two more boys left. The dives had gone smoothly, and like clockwork each rescuer had come out about thirty minutes after the other. Chamber Three was stuffed with food and ranking commanders. Rear Admiral Apakorn and a consignment of rice, noodles, and meat—and the less-local fare of Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s—had arrived through the hour-long obstacle course of walking, crawling, and sumping. The admiral was wet and the food was cold, but the mood was jubilant. Mixing in the air with the rank odor of days-old urine was the distinct whiff of glory.
Stanton plopped down next to Vollanthen, wolfed down a cold noodle dish and KFC, and was content. Each of the three divers had made record time. Coach Ek was already completely out of the cave. On the first day it took a full hour for the stretcher bearers and the groups handling the ropes to navigate the boulders, sumps, and chest-deep water between Chamber Three and the cave entrance. On that third day, they hustled Coach Ek through in thirty-seven minutes.
Still, Stanton and Vollanthen were not done with their worries. Both desperately wanted to avoid being in the cave when the rains kicked up. Thanet’s dam had held, but with the amount of rain they saw that morning, flooding in the cave was a near certainty. They chatted for about thirty minutes, and right on schedule the rope vibrated and Special Ops Sergeant James Brisbin called out, “Fish on!” alerting them that Chris Jewell, with the second-to-last boy—Pong—was just 150 or so yards out. The Brits didn’t pay much mind and kept talking. Then the rope went still.
On the other end of that line, Chris Jewell’s dive had been smooth until suddenly it wasn’t. He’d collected the fourth rescuee that day and began chugging toward Chamber Eight. As usual, the child received a couple of additional shots of ketamine on the way. Jewell was 150 yards from Chamber Three when he encountered the same awkward vertical line trap that had stumped Vollanthen and Stanton. But as he attempted to solve this puzzle yet again, he’d gotten into trouble. He was switching Pong from his left hand to his right when he lost the guideline. Visibility was zero in this section—his lights seemed only to illuminate more blackness. It was as if someone had spilled Wite-Out all over his mental map of this section. Jewell had led multiweek cave-diving expeditions into the pit of the Huautla “supercave” in Mexico—a place so deep that it is often referred to as an underground Everest. Yet this sump stopped him in his tracks.
He believes that in the split second he had let go, the tension on the rope sent it pinging up into a snag. Normally it wouldn’t be a problem to untangle, but a diver had to find it first—which Jewell couldn’t, despite windmilling his arms hoping to snag something. Nor could he find the way forward through that eighteen-inch-wide squeeze. And now, twisting and turning in the water and with no visible landmarks, he had become disoriented. Imagine going into a completely darkened room, spinning around several times, and then being asked to point out the exact direction of an exit the size of a doggie door.
The minutes ticked by; clawing his way on the cave floor with one hand and still gripping the boy with the other, he felt something. It was one of those leftover electrical cables. He assumed he could follow it to Chamber Three; so, hovering low, the boy’s air tank serving as a sled, he followed it. But it led him to a chamber he didn’t recognize. It felt like the Twilight Zone.
By now more than twenty minutes had gone by. Pong had been submerged in 70-degree water for two hours or so, and while ketamine arrests the body’s normal reaction to the cold—shivering and chattering teeth—Jewell could tell by touch that the boy was hypothermic. He was also worried about his air. He only had that one tank. So he hauled him onto dry ground in that mysterious chamber and unfastened his mask and tank. He also took off his own diving gear and began exploring, hoping to spot a landmark. He wondered: The cave’s main passage is more or less a straight shot, so how the hell did I wind up in an unfamiliar chamber?
Mallinson and Harris made quite the pair, with Harris the better part of a foot taller than Mallinson and thick-set. They were the last two foreign divers back in Chamber Nine. The SEALs had guided the last boy down to them and had begun preparing for their own exits.
As Harris successfully sedated the last boy, Mark, both he and Mallinson realized they had a problem. Mark is thirteen and they expected him to be small, but not that small. In fact, he is a hair shorter and even slighter than Titan. (He’s the boy in the second navy SEAL video whose face was so thin that it seemed his chin was about to pierce his skin.) He might have weighed seventy pounds with his wet suit on. But the problem wasn’t his body, it was his face.
They had one last positive-pressure mask. It was a backup, the older Interspiro model, with a slightly wider build around the face and a flappy skirt—the rubber part that creates a waterproof seal around a diver’s face. Harris had already sedated Mark and the men had spent the next twenty minutes yanking and tightening the mask. Mark’s nose was squished up against the Plexiglas and there was still a thumb-wide gap under his chin. The mask also had a tricky double skirt. When the men tried to clamp the mask tightly on the boy’s face, the skirt would flatten out and water would dribble in. They could not secure a seal, so they decided to dump that mask.
As a secondary backup, Mallinson had brought a pink full mask designed for children—but it was not a positive-pressure mask. Instead of pumping air into the mask—as all the other masks had—this one provided air or oxygen on demand. It would require the boy to be actively breathing, sucking in air. Given the problems encountered by some of the previous boys, Harris and Mallinson were worried that Mark would be the only one to die.
In theory, the safer route would have been suspending the rescue and waiting until the next day for a mask they knew would work. But because of the weather, they didn’t have a day. As Mallinson said later, he was “nervous about going in that day anyway, and we knew we didn’t have any more time, and we knew this was the last option. If we had not been able to get a seal on that second mask, then potentially we would have had to pull it back and leave him in there for however long.”
It proved a tricky problem to solve, even for master improvisers. In fact, they messed with the second mask for an additional thirty minutes to get it snug, by which point so much time
had elapsed that the sedation had started to wear off. Harris dosed him again and Mallinson cautiously steered the boy into the water.
The seal was so tenuous that Mallinson half-timed it to Chamber Eight. In the previous dives, the boys had taken dozens of little knocks to the head. The divers had even ripped parts of the SEALs’ tank boots—the rubber or foam protective sheaths that slide onto the bottom of scuba tanks—and stuffed them beneath the boys’ neoprene hoods to give their heads some cushioning. But Mallinson feared a single bump could dislodge the mask, and the visibility was so poor he wouldn’t be able to see it or wouldn’t have time to fix it. That first section took him half an hour, nearly twice as long as it had on his previous dive that day. The boy’s regulator was on his right side, so Mallinson gripped the straps on his flotation device with his left hand, curling them right under his chin, so he could hear the reassuring grumble of the bubbles coming up or—at the very least—feel them sliding up his own face. And still the boy’s head banged and ground in the tighter spots of the cave. But the seal held.
At Chamber Eight, Mallinson told Challen and Rasmussen not to take off the boy’s mask—that seal was too precarious. So, as they switched out his oxygen tank for a fresh one, Mallinson stuck a finger through the quarter-size rubber flap on the side of the mask called a purge valve. It allows a diver to clear water from the mask without taking it off, but doesn’t let water in. By sticking a finger in and pushing the rubber flap up, Mallinson could ensure that air did get in. If left unsealed, it would act like an open window on a submarine and cause the mask to start taking in water or free-flowing air, which at the very least would rapidly deplete the tank. At Chamber Six, they did the same routine. But this time the valve stuck, and just as Mallinson put the boy in the water he noticed the open rubber valve and snapped it shut.
After Mallinson disappeared into the water and out of Chamber Nine, Harris put on his gear and followed him as a rear guard. But when Mallinson got to Chamber Four he was stunned to find Jewell waiting there, lonely as a hitchhiker thumbing for a midnight ride. Both divers were a little confused. Jewell had been waiting for Mallinson to come by, knowing he would be the last diver with a boy. But it had taken so long, doubt had begun to colonize more and more of the younger diver’s mind. In his exploration of this chamber he had found a used space blanket and wrapped it around the boy, trying anything to keep his temperature from dipping further. A person is considered hypothermic when their core body temperature falls below 95 degrees, and Pong’s would soon be measured at around 84 degrees. Had Pong not been sedated, the hypothermia would have immobilized him and left him unable to respond to stimuli, and could have possibly led to a coma.
The pair realized that Jewell had blindly meandered into an alternative route—shaped like a jug handle—to Chamber Four and had perched himself on the sandy median to look for the telltale lights of a diver. Reoriented, Jewell suited up for the short trip to Chamber Three just as Harris arrived.
“Howzit gaoing?” drawled the big Aussie. Jewell explained how it had gone: not that well. To his credit, Jewell had managed not to panic and had found a way back to a dry area, but Harris could tell he was rattled.
“Do you want me to take the boy?”
The answer was an emphatic yes. Harris was already suited up and in the water. Jewell had no intention of being macho about this—the boys were everyone’s primary concern. He assembled the tank and regulator, refitted the boy’s mask, and handed him to Harris, who began finning to the very spot that had flummoxed Jewell. This time they made it through, heading toward the reassuring hum of the pumps in Chamber Three.
Harris and the boy were pulled out of the water with Jewell right on their tail. Within minutes the Euro-divers followed them out, and cheers went up. There were photo shoots with the divers, the rear admiral, and the SEALs. The Euro-divers were more effusive than the Brits, hugging and backslapping. Erik Brown pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and they swigged from it. Rounds of “Hooyah!” echoed in the chamber. The USAF’s Captain Torrel jokingly texted his team that the Euro-divers had stayed with him and were “requesting beer and cigarettes,” which caused quite a hoot back at the camp’s headquarters.
Stanton wanted a drink, but he wasn’t feeling right. Maybe it was the cold food or his infected hands. Maybe it was the prospect of the hour-long return to the mouth of the cave, where the weather was on the outer edge of dangerous.
Almost immediately after the Euro-divers made it to dry land, the teams started packing up. The Chiang Mai rock-climbing team started unbolting the joints they had drilled into the cave walls, the rescuers removed the extra scuba tanks, and the pump workers began to organize equipment so muddy it looked like just another geological feature of the cave floor. All the boys were out. The mission seemed like it was over.
Major Hodges reminded everyone the job was not done, texting the team on its WhatsApp page, “We’ve got four more SEALs left. Our mission is not complete until everybody’s out of there.”* They had been working with the SEALs for weeks, and in his mind they were as much a part of this rescue mission as his U.S. unit. So he added, “Hey, good job. Stand by, ’cause we got four more.”
Euro-divers Rasmussen, Paasi, and Brown were asked to stay just in case the four SEALs ran into trouble. At the time it seemed like a formality.
Outside, the rains had resumed. The pineapple field was by then a stew of mud and mashed fruit. Journalists—including my producer—were wiping out everywhere, with splats and subsequent groans, followed by futile attempts to wipe mud off gear and bodies. As the mud deepened and seemed to swallow our gear, we had put down toppled pineapple plants to use as mats for surer footing. Despite the leaks coming from Chamber Three, reporters still didn’t know if the SEALs were out, or the order in which the boys had been extracted (that secret was held for another six weeks). The parents didn’t know, either—which meant that until this moment the parents of the children who had been in the hospital for two days had had no idea if their own children were safe. They were not even allowed to see the first rounds of boys, who were finally conscious and recuperating at the hospital. The government decreed that when all the boys were out, their parents would be allowed to see them at the hospital together.
The Thai government had kept the order of the boys’ exit strictly secret, to the extent that when the boys were transferred from the ambulances to the helicopters, squads of umbrella-wielding health workers screened them off (this was also to protect their sensitive eyes from light). Officials hinted that they wanted to avoid an incident in which the euphoria of a family whose child had been rescued could collide with the despair of a family who had lost theirs. It was the kind of policy—benefiting the collective, but temporarily damaging to the individual—that could only be pulled off in a country that lacked some of the transparency of a democracy. Some of the boys were clearly hardy, but until they knew all the boys were out, little Titan’s parents had been disconsolate. Their son was the youngest, the least developed, and consequently, they thought, the weakest. They feared that if anyone died, it would be their precious Titan, he of the big smile and big heart.
There was much handshaking on the way out. Stanton and Vollanthen ignored the searing pain of their infected fingers each time another rescuer or worker clamped a hand onto theirs: “It seemed like there were a thousand people lining the last hundred [yards] of the cave. We went from handshake to handshake. I couldn’t give everyone a proper shake—had to offer my left hand.”
As soon as Stanton and Vollanthen descended the staircase out of the mouth of the cave, cleansed partly of cave junk by the rain, they were asked to visit with the families. It was their first time meeting them. Until that point there had been an invisible barrier between the people who could have lost everything in a rescue and the team who hoped to pull it off. And there they assembled just outside the headquarters, with Josh Morris officiating this unusual and much-delayed union. Most of the thirteen families stood in one line and
opposite them stood the lead British divers and their support divers. The Brits had wanted to wait for the Euro-divers, still acting as backup in case something should go wrong with the Thai SEALs, but everyone seemed anxious to get the ceremony under way.
The parents spoke and Morris translated, or tried to. “I had a very hard time, I couldn’t keep it together. I was having a hard time getting the words out.”
Tears flowed more easily than words. One parent spoke for the rest. But it was Titan’s mother who looked directly at Stanton and said, “[I] had died, and now got a second lease on life.” Then the Thai parents began a round of hugs—physical displays of affection with strangers are reserved for extreme situations in Thai culture. It was a tender moment that only a member of the tribe of “stiff-upper-lip” Brits could have called “a little awkward”—which Stanton did. Mallinson offered hugs in return, but says he wasn’t particularly emotional. And then Titan’s mother, petite, with a big-toothed smile like her son, took Stanton aside. She hugged him and—with Morris translating—told him that she had been so worried about Titan; he was so much smaller than anyone and she feared he would struggle. She had been worried the whole time, mad at herself for letting Titan join the soccer team, and now Stanton had brought out her boy alive.
Morris, a life coach as well as a climber, was unable to fully process the moment, his emotions “swimming around in my head.” He began thinking of his own children, close in age to the boys in the cave, and his own antics on ropes and in caves in years past. And after two weeks of keeping it together, he unabashedly wept, right along with the families.
As the rains raged outside, in Chamber Three the Euro-divers, a squad of Thai Navy SEALs, and the U.S. team of pararescuers waited for the SEALs still threading their way back; they were the only rescue personnel beyond the sump at Chamber Three, but there were still dozens of workers packing up equipment in the chambers leading to the cave entrance.
