One eerie night, that very thing happened. ‘I did hear someone call “Biw”.’
He didn’t dare respond. He just lay in the dark, unmoving.
* * *
Barefoot in the mud, Kruba Boonchum formed the centre of a moving scrum of people crowding around to catch a glimpse or take a photo. The 53-year-old monk was dressed in dark maroon robes, with a knitted beanie and a walking cane. Upon hearing of Nattanuch’s dream, he had come to visit Tham Luang that Friday to try to connect with the angry spirit of the princess Nang Non.
He walked to the cave entrance and performed rituals, lighting candles and incense. He meditated for a while. Many of the parents had a deep reverence for the monk, and watched on as he appealed to the spirits of the mountain, in particular to the ghost of Nang Non, asking her to open up the cave and let the boys and Coach Ek out.
District Chief Somsak Kanakham was given the job of escorting the esteemed monk to and from Tham Luang that day. As he walked with the monk back from the cave mouth, surrounded by devoted Buddhists and eager journalists, Kruba Boonchum offered him some words of encouragement.
‘Don’t worry – in a day or two the children will come out,’ the monk told the official.
The local media caught this and it spread quickly. Soon every Thai in the country had heard about Kruba Boonchum’s prophecy that the Wild Boars would soon be rescued.
The Mae Sai chief was politely sceptical.
‘For me, [the prediction] might be guesswork, something to lift the spirits of the people,’ said Somsak.
If lifting people’s spirits was the aim, it worked.
When the parents of the Wild Boars heard the prediction, their hope rose once again.
* * *
Kruba Boonchum made another visit to Tham Luang the following day, Saturday, but this time focused on the rescue workers. A loop of turquoise prayer beads hung around his neck, outside his maroon robes. His feet were bare, as always, and covered in the caramel-coloured mud.
‘The SEAL divers are not far from the boys,’ said the monk.
Again, Thais around the nation took great encouragement from his words. But this time, Kruba Boonchum had something tangible to distribute too: dozens of lucky bracelets. They were red cotton threads with small white beads. In the days to come these red charms would be an immediate sign that the wearer was an inner-circle member of the rescue team, much like a backstage wristband at a concert.
The boss of the Navy SEALs, Rear Admiral Arpakorn Yuukongkaew, took the bracelets for his men. Kruba Boonchum removed a chunky bracelet of big wooden beads from around his own wrist and gave it to Rear Admiral Arpakorn. For most Thais, an object touched by such a revered monk becomes itself spiritually charged, so this was indeed an honour. The navy man slipped the bracelet of wooden beads over his own wrist.
Spiritually deputised, the SEAL commander stood amongst the air tanks and diving gear, as his men lined up. One by one, he tied the red thread around their wrists, passing on the blessing from Kruba Boonchum. But it didn’t stop at SEALs. The Australian Federal Police lined up too, and the Americans. The international and Thai divers took their place. The line stretched out. Each received a red bracelet with white beads.
‘It’s normal to have a monk who is respected, to chant and give mental support to keep on fighting,’ explained Rear Admiral Arpakorn. ‘It’s like the soldier when they go to war, they need a morale boost . . . Kruba Boonchum is someone to hold on to . . . Fighting against nature is something very difficult.’
The timing of the monk’s gift was excellent. The rain had stopped. The divers were determined to push farther into the cave. Rear Admiral Arpakorn made a rousing speech. Their mission had been blessed and their hands united in this red thread of brotherhood.
‘That was a turning point, I think that’s the critical point,’ said the SEAL chief. ‘I tied this [bracelet] to everyone’s wrist and announced: “Now we will fight.”’
A shout of ‘HOOYAH’ echoed across the mountain.
12
Unravelling
WHILE KRUBA BOONCHUM’S PREDICTION was reassuring for some, it did little to alleviate the tension of others. The situation was getting more dire by the day and stress was clearly starting to take a toll.
When the British divers arrived at the cave on Saturday, 30 June to continue diving, they were again blocked by the SEALs, who thought the British divers were arrogant and secretive. This, after all, was their country and their rescue mission.
For Rick, John and Rob, it was a strange predicament.
‘We were brought over by the Ministry of Tourism but were unwanted by the military,’ said John.
The reason for this schism became clear to them when they saw a diagram of the command structure for the rescue. At the very top was the Thai King, and from there two lines stretched down to military and non-military branches.
The British divers considered leaving. Having seen how fast the cave had flooded, they seriously doubted the soccer team was still alive in there. They had no compressor (the SEALs had taken back the one they were using) and little support. The Americans were also discussing ‘downsizing their package’ and scaling back their operation. Nobody wanted to sit around on a mountainside and do nothing while kids died.
* * *
Inside the cave, time was running out, quite literally. Of the three watches they went in with, only Tee’s was still working.
The watch had a date function and had already been programmed to beep at 6 am and midday. The boys left the alarms on, so they could keep some kind of routine in the darkness. In the morning, they would fill their bellies with the water running off the stalactites and head up to the top of the slope to dig or to rest. When Tee’s watch told them it was night, the boys lay down on the hard dirt to sleep. It wasn’t comfortable; they found themselves constantly slipping down the slope. When they slept it was usually in short snatches, before they woke up to rearrange themselves on the angled ground.
But there was something else that kept them awake at night. Or rather, someone else.
Even at home, Titan was a restless sleeper. He would sometimes sleepwalk to the toilet. But in the cave, it was worse. He would talk and shout in his sleep, keeping the other boys awake. Sometimes he would even jump up, still asleep. It was annoying for his teammates, but also potentially deadly. If Titan was to wander off in the middle of the night, he might hit his head or fall into the water at the bottom of Nern Nom Sao. So every night, Coach Ek would hold on to Titan, sleeping lightly, always wary that his youngest player might dream himself to death.
After the fourth day, Note’s jammed torch had finally run out of battery. From then on, the boys had had to contend with the darkness. They still had other torches, but they rationed the light, knowing it could be many more days until they were found.
They had never experienced a darkness like the one inside of the cave. It was a profound blackness, almost like a physical substance, oozing around their bodies. After a while, the darkness started to get into the boys’ subconscious minds. One night, Dom dreamed he was being chased by a black tiger.
Titan continued to cry out in his sleep, because of his nightmares. One was particularly terrifying:
I dreamed I was in a hut with all of us, then I saw Pee Ek turn into a warrior, holding a sword and chasing me, trying to slash me. He was Pee Ek at first and then suddenly he turned into someone else . . . with a red magic tattoo. [The other boys] . . . all disappeared and I was alone.
Titan woke up shouting.
Sometimes, the line between sleep and wakefulness was unclear in that darkness. One night, Pong started to stir. At first, the boys didn’t know if he was awake or asleep. ‘He pointed his finger at me and said, “Aay, aay, aay,”’ remembered Biw. ‘I was lying down next to him and he pointed at me: “Aay, aay, aay.”’
It was only much later that Pong told the others what he had seen that night: ancient warriors, wearing red pantaloons and brandishing swords. He was terri
fied. Was his vision drawn from the Nang Non legend? Were these the King’s warriors who had chased after Nang Non’s lover and killed him? Or were they perhaps Pong’s memories of the hit TV series Love Destiny which had obsessed Thais that past year, a new spin on a period drama featuring a time traveller going back to ancient Thailand? Either way, Biw said his mates dealt with Pong as teenage boys are wont to do.
‘[Pong] pointed at Tee and said, “Aay, aay, aay.” Tee gave him a hard shove with his foot,’ recalled Biw, laughing. ‘Then Pong didn’t hallucinate any more.’
As the days dragged on, all of the boys had moments of despair and shed some tears. But Note wept more than the others. He simply didn’t think they were going to get out alive. On Sunday, 1 July, it was his fifteenth birthday. But there wasn’t much to celebrate. They were alive, but time was running out.
After nine days, they were inching closer towards death, their bodies wasting away. Coach Ek was about the same build as the bigger boys, the younger ones were tiny. Their cheeks were hollow, their skin grey. With no food to turn into energy, their bodies’ normal chemical processes slowed and then shifted, ingeniously rearranging themselves to seek sustenance elsewhere. The protein in their muscles was broken down into glucose, their fat turned into fatty acids and ketone. Their bodies were consuming them from the inside, fuelling the life-giving fundamentals. The heart must keep pumping blood. The brain must keep thinking. They must stay calm, conserve their energy. They must survive.
13
Getting closer
BY SUNDAY, 1 JULY, it looked like the rescue mission might have caught a lucky break. The weather was easing. There’d been no substantial rain for the last thirty-six hours. Thanet’s groundwater team made the most of the opportunity.
Outside Saitong Cave, a drill bored fifteen metres down and pierced into the underground aquifer, sending water shooting two metres into the air. That pressure was a good sign for Thanet. It suggested the water was seeping down from the cave system, filling the groundwater space to bursting, and forcing the rest of the water to stay at the surface, inundating the cave. If they could reduce the amount of groundwater, the surface water would be able to soak down through the limestone into the aquifer. That was the theory anyway.
They started the super pumps. Water gushed from the dragons’ mouths. It was hard to say exactly what would work – the hydrology of the cave system was complicated, and they didn’t have time to figure it out exactly. So they pumped from everywhere. Some sucked water from directly inside Tham Luang, trying to drain the passage and regain access to Chamber 3, while another pump placed outside the entrance to Tham Luang also tried to lower the groundwater. At full power, each dragon pump could drain 5.6 million litres an hour – enough to fill more than two Olympic swimming pools.
But all this water had to go somewhere, as rice farmer Mae Bua Chaicheun soon found out.
Rice farming is painstaking work. Mae Bua had spent long days shin-deep in paddy water, reaching down to place rice seedlings into the mud. One at a time, row upon row, bent double for hours on end, feet wet for days. It was lonely work for her. She was a widow and her children had no interest in the labour-intensive job of rice farming.
She had just finished transplanting her seedlings from their nursery to the open paddy when she heard about the boys trapped in the cave, just up the hill. She volunteered to help and spent the next five days near the cave entrance, cooking food to feed the rescue workers, the media and those pumping millions of litres of water from the cave.
When she finally came down from the mountain, she saw where all that water had gone. Her five acres of fields were inundated by half a metre of water, the baby rice plants long dead. And it wasn’t just her field – a hundred other farmers also had their crops destroyed.
But most welcomed the damage, if it meant saving the boys.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mae Bua said. ‘I just want the children to get out alive. Children are more important than rice. The rice can always regrow. But we can’t regrow the children.’
The farmers’ sacrifice was worth it. By Sunday afternoon, the battle against the water in the cave began to shift. Yellow measuring sticks set up at various points within Tham Luang started to show the water level dropping. The lack of rain also certainly helped. At around 3 pm a colonel called Thanet to inform him that with the conditions in Tham Luang improving, the SEALs were going back in.
* * *
By Sunday, the resolve of the SEAL divers was hardening. The cave was still flooded, but the water flow was becoming more manageable, and the torrents weren’t as strong. Behind the scenes, Ae and Chang had been steadily bringing supplies in, and there were now enough cylinders and diving gear to make a big push beyond the T-junction.
That day, the SEALs were determined to lay their guide rope to the T-junction and see how much further they could go. They were working closely with the team of diving instructors, which by now had a few more members.
Ben had invited Maksym Polejaka, a Ukrainian-born former commando who had served in the French Foreign Legion, and Vsevolod ‘Seveo’ Korobov, another Ukrainian technical diver based in Thailand, to come and help at Tham Luang. Two other divers had turned up of their own accord – Israeli Rafael Aroush and his son Shlomi. The pair had driven from their home in Udon Thani on Thursday to see if they could help and now joined the other foreign volunteer divers.
Together with Pae and his diving instructor Bruce, these Thai-based volunteer divers were the earliest makings of what would come to be known as the ‘Euro team’. In fact, the Euro team would eventually include divers from Canada as well as Thais, but the Euro tag stuck and was a way to differentiate them from the US and British teams. The Euro team worked closely with the Thai Navy SEALs, who gave the foreigners dark-blue long-sleeved T-shirts to wear, with ‘Royal Thai Navy’ on the back.
With the arrival of these experts, Pae took on a slightly different role as dive supervisor and interpreter. Not only did he have to translate between Thai and English, but he also translated between the highly technical cave-diving jargon and the language of regular scuba divers like the SEALs. Bruce also stayed out of the water, to help coordinate.
In terms of where they thought the Wild Boars might be located, Pattaya Beach was still the hot favourite, because of the muddy handprints and crawl marks spotted during their first couple of days. But it was still just an educated guess.
The SEALs and the Euro team started work around 3 am on Sunday and slogged on throughout the morning. They dived through the sump, tying the thick guide rope to stalactites or rocks as they went.
That afternoon the British divers John and Rick made more solid progress, laying more line and coming to an old rope that had obviously been in place for a while, something to help tourists get through Tham Luang in the dry season. Now, with the tunnel full of rushing water, the British divers used the tourist line to inch forward. Visibility was poor, and often the first they knew about an object was when they bumped into it. The men were bracing for the worst, and diving blind made them constantly on edge.
‘I found – twice – a flexible hose floating in the passage and I shouted back to Rick, “There’s something in the water,” that I was fully prepared to be a body,’ said John later.
John and Rick had tried to commit to memory the map of the cave, and checked their progress with compasses they carried. In particular, they were looking for a sharp right-hand turn, which would mean they were approaching the T-junction. (This tight turn would become Chamber 6, but for now it was completely flooded.) Upon finding it, they made the hook right and swam on.
Eventually, John came to a section he recognised from Vern’s description: a warm, clear gush of water was coming in from the right – where the water had flowed down the short Monk’s Series tube, not for long enough to cool or pick up much sediment. From the left, the water was cooler and muddy, after its long journey through the big passageways of Tham Luang.
They had battled their
way back to the T-junction.
* * *
While the divers advanced inside the cave, Suttisak’s drill plans were yet to get off the ground. At a hastily fashioned helipad not far from the cave site, an Mi-17 military transport helicopter sat waiting.
Suttisak and his drill team had chosen the spot on the mountain where they would position their rig. But before any drilling could begin, they needed to create a flat area to work from. To do that, they required an excavator, but the problem was the excavator’s weight. The pilot told Suttisak that the maximum weight that the helicopter could safely lift was three tonnes. This was going to be a challenge – most common excavators weighed around twenty tonnes. So the engineers immediately sent word out to their buddies in the construction business: we need a baby digger.
Soon, a tiny excavator arrived. Its operator looked confused. All he knew was that his boss had ordered him to go and help someone. It wasn’t until he arrived that he found out he and his digger would be lifted by a helicopter onto the side of a mountain to assist a search mission being watched around the world.
An hour later, the drill team bowed their heads and squinted their eyes, as the helicopter’s rotors churned up dust and vegetation. When they looked up, the baby digger dangled from a long cable, silhouetted against the deep blue sky. The perfectly proportioned miniature excavator made the helicopter above it look surreally large.
By Monday, they had managed to create a flat ledge and put the drilling machine in place. The drilling machine was relatively lightweight and had been easy for the military chopper to lift up and fly around the mountain. But the air pump was still to come and it was the heaviest part of the rig. It needed to be powerful enough to blow the particles of smashed rock back through the inside of the 300 metres of drilling rods. This one was 500 kilograms over the pilot’s three-tonne limit.
The engineers stood back and looked at it.
The Cave Page 9