The Cave

by Liam Cochrane

  It was hard-going. They slowly progressed about 350 metres until they came to a room-sized chamber. There was nothing visible on the steep muddy bank. John took the spool further on and swam to the next fully flooded section. Rick was about to go back and cut the line, so they could save a few metres and tie on again for the next dive. He took off his mask and gave the air a sniff. He called to John.

  ‘Take your mask off and smell,’ said Rick.

  ‘I did and I could smell what we both feared was decomposing bodies.’

  * * *

  Just beyond Pattaya Beach, on the ledge of Nern Nom Sao, the youngest of the Wild Boars was fading. His tiny body was wasting away.

  ‘I felt faint and lacked energy and I was hungry,’ said Titan. ‘When I was very hungry, I tried not to think about food because it would make me even hungrier . . . but I was thinking about fried rice and nam prik ong [a Northern-style dipping plate].’

  Food fantasies played on their minds constantly. It had been about 245 hours since any of them had eaten anything. Their faces were gaunt, their cheekbones protruding.

  ‘By July 2, almost everyone was weak,’ said Tee later.

  Their decline was not just physical. As another day passed, their spirits were fading too.

  ‘By the tenth night, we were losing patience, hope, physical energy and courage. We could not do anything to help. The only thing that I could do was pray,’ said Adul, the only Christian of the group.

  ‘I prayed, “Lord, I am only a boy, you are an almighty God. You are holy and you are powerful. Right now I can’t do anything. May you protect us. Come help all thirteen of us.”’

  It was almost another birthday, this time for team captain Dom. Tomorrow, he would turn fourteen. He rallied the boys together, saying he wanted a birthday present tomorrow. He wanted them to help him dig with renewed energy and break through the back wall. He wanted to find a way out of the cave.

  His teammates said they would help.

  As it turned out, Dom’s birthday present came early.

  * * *

  At around 8 pm, the boys and Coach Ek were up on the higher part of the muddy ledge near their pee hole, now rather fetid. Some were digging, others resting.

  ‘At that moment, I heard people talking,’ said Adul.

  Coach Ek asked everyone to keep quiet. They froze in the darkness, straining to hear. At first, the boys thought their minds were playing tricks on them. Some came to an even scarier conclusion: ghosts.

  ‘Pee Ek asked Mix to go down first, because he had a torch with him at the time,’ said Adul. ‘Pee Ek said to hurry and go down, that was the sound of humans, hurry before they leave. Mix was afraid to go, so I said I’ll go. I took the torch from Mix and went down.’

  Adul took off down the slope towards the water as fast as his weak body would carry him. But as he got to the edge, where the bank became steep and slippery, his legs went out from under him and he slid into the water. Once he clambered back on the ledge, he saw it was true. It really was people. Two men in diving gear.

  ‘It was a miracle moment,’ remembered Adul. ‘At first, I thought they were Thai, officials or something, but the fact is they weren’t. After they come up from the water, I was surprised, they were British. I didn’t know what to say to them, so I just said hello.’

  By this stage, the rest of the team had walked down to the water’s edge. Rick counted them as they came down and saw they were all there. A torch scanned across each one, a roving spotlight on a muddy stage. John turned on a camera, given to him to film the T-junction for the SEALs and for proof of life/death. He wasn’t even sure if it had audio. It recorded the now-famous exchange.

  Various Boys: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

  John: How many of you?

  Rick: [faintly] They’re all alive.

  Adul: Thirteen.

  John: Thirteen?

  Adul: Yes.

  John: Brilliant.

  Most of the boys couldn’t follow the conversation in English, only Adul and Biw.

  ‘Anyone who knows English, please translate,’ asked Coach Ek.

  Biw started to relay what he could understand from Adul and the foreigners. Tee urged him to translate faster.

  ‘I can’t catch everything they say, be cool,’ Biw told Tee.

  Coach Ek touched Adul’s elbow, urging him to ask the question they most wanted answered.

  Adul: When will we go outside?

  John: Not today. Not today.

  Adul: Not today?

  John: It’s two of us. You have to dive. We are coming. It’s OK. Many people are coming. Many, many people. We are the first. Many people come.

  Boy: What day?

  John: Tomorrow.

  Rick No, no, no, what day is it, they’re asking.

  John: Monday. Monday. One week and Monday. You have been here ten days. Ten days. You are very strong, very strong. Let’s get up [on the ledge].

  The British divers stayed on another bank to the left of the passage, separated from the boys by a channel of water. It was a deliberate precaution. They had no idea what state of mind the boys and Coach Ek would be in. They feared the starving, desperate team might to try to rush them and grab their diving gear to escape. But after a few minutes, they quickly realised the boys and Coach Ek were calm and posed no threat.

  John: OK, get back. We come. We come.

  Boy: We hungry.

  John: I know. I know. I understand. We come. OK, we come.

  The boys and their coach moved back from the water’s edge to allow the British divers to clamber up. The audio becomes unclear as the camera submerges. There is the sound of bubbles, interspersed with distant snatches of Thai.

  Boy: [in Thai] Tell them we are hungry.

  Boy: [in Thai] They said they know.

  John: We come, we come.

  Boy: [in Thai] We haven’t eaten. We have to eat, eat, eat.

  Boy: [in Thai] Already told them.

  The audio again becomes hard to follow, as the divers talk between themselves and the boys talk to each other in the background. Adul’s voice cuts through the chatter, carefully pronouncing each word.

  Adul: I am very happy.

  John: We are happy too.

  Adul: Thank you so much, thank you so much.

  John: OK.

  Adul: So, where do you come from?

  John: England, the UK.

  Boys (in unison): Woah.

  They seemed genuinely amazed that two men from so far away had popped up in their cave.

  * * *

  John and Rick spent about forty minutes with the Wild Boars on their ledge. John took his four-millimetre line to the very top and buried the spool in the mud. He realised the boys had chosen an excellent spot to seek sanctuary. It may only have been about 2.5 metres wide at the bottom, but Nern Nom Sao widened as it inclined, eventually ending about twenty metres above the waterline.

  ‘It must be the only aven [vertical shaft in a cave] in the cave where there’s that much height, that’s easily assessible,’ said John. ‘An absolute blinder.’

  John and Rick wanted to raise the kids’ spirits, so they asked them to cheer for the camera – a cheer for Thailand, a cheer for America, a cheer for the UK, and on it went. The boys’ physical condition was remarkably good. They were gaunt but uninjured and didn’t appear sick, even managing a smile.

  The divers gave them torches. They had no food to leave, for the simple reason that they couldn’t carry it. They already had three 15-kilogram cylinders and a big bag of rope to try to manage as they pulled themselves through the jagged passages. John and Rick had pushed themselves beyond their usual safety limits and towards the end of their own carefully calibrated risk thresholds just to get that far into Tham Luang.

  The divers promised they would send the SEALs in with food as soon as possible and that they would also return. They said farewell and started back through the sump, this time being carried along by the current. The trip took several hours but w
as relatively uneventful.

  When John and Rick emerged into Chamber 3, they passed on the good news. They briefed the Thai navy diver supervisor and handed over the camera. The British divers gathered their gear and started the walk out. But by that time, wifi had been installed through to that forward operating base. News of the boys being found alive reached the world before Rick and John even got to the cave entrance.

  * * *

  Outside the cave, two of the fathers, Sak and Boon, watched from afar as Governor Narongsak strode over to the command centre, as he did most nights for a press conference. They didn’t think much of it; it would likely just be the usual: another night of slow progress, water levels, hopes and determination.

  Then a huge cheer erupted. The fathers ran over to where the media was crowding around the governor. All of a sudden, they were being manhandled, passed from bear hug to bear hug.

  They’d found the boys!

  They were all alive!

  Sak’s face was wet with tears. A big Thai soldier grabbed him and wrapped him up, his face clenching away the emotion that found expression instead in heavy slaps on Sak’s back. Sak was happy, but bewildered. It seemed the impossible had come true.

  ‘It’s a miracle,’ thought Sak.

  He struggled to explain it. Ten days in there. No food. He decided it must be due to karma – the good deeds of the boys winning out in the end. He thought that the mystic monk Kruba Boonchum was probably to thank too. He’d predicted they were alive and would be found soon. And, finally, he thought the vengeful spirit of the Nang Non princess must have relented.

  ‘I believe she let them come out,’ said Sak. ‘I think she felt she kept them too long and felt sorry for them.’

  * * *

  When the good news reached the resort hosting the volunteer foreign divers, including Ben and Maksym, the fatigue of their big day underground vanished. The Ukrainians produced a bottle of vodka and celebratory shots were poured. They all downed one.

  ‘Stop, stop, stop!’ Ben raised his voice. ‘We might need to go back into the cave and help.’

  The bottle disappeared and the team headed back to the mountain.

  ‘I was still in my wetsuit and immediately returned to the site where I found what I can only describe as a rave party full of cheering and crying people,’ Ben would later tell the Phuket News.

  They’d done it, they’d found the missing soccer team. Now, they had to somehow get them out.

  15

  Options

  WITH THE BOYS AND Coach Ek located, the priority was to get back to them with food and other supplies as soon as possible. The Thais took control. A team of four was chosen for the mission: a Thai army doctor named Lieutenant Colonel Dr Pak Loharachun and three SEALs, whose full identities were never disclosed, which is typical for special forces soldiers. The original idea was for two of the divers to stay with the boys in what was now being called Chamber 9 and two were to return with an update. They took a small amount of food with them.

  The current was very strong and it was hard-going for the Thais, who were not trained cave divers. It should have taken around six hours to dive and walk to Chamber 9, and about five hours to get back out, helped slightly by the flow of the water. But that time passed with no sign of the Thai team. As each subsequent hour went by, concern mounted. What could be taking so long? Had one of the boys died overnight? Had a diver run into trouble? The rescuers waiting at Chamber 3 could only guess. The SEALs decided to send in three more divers to try to find out what was going on.

  In fact, the journey in to reach the boys had been far more difficult than the Thai divers imagined. The water was cold and the dive was long. They suffered from cramps and were forced to rest. They eventually made it to Chamber 9 and met the boys and Coach Ek. But getting there had used up most of their air tanks. They changed the plan. Dr Pak and three SEALs stayed behind with the boys, vowing to remain there as long as needed – even if that meant waiting half a year, until the rainy season ended (around October) and the cave drained (around December).

  The other three SEALs took the remaining air tanks and dived back out. It was a slow trip. ‘Everyone was worried,’ said SEAL commander Rear Admiral Arpakorn. ‘They vanished for the whole night.’

  Finally, the three divers emerged at Chamber 3. They’d been gone twenty-three hours.

  * * *

  Deep inside the mountain, Dr Pak and the SEALs got to work. The urgent need was to get some energy and nutrients into the boys’ systems without overloading them. For ten days their small bodies had been in life-support mode, slowly breaking down the fat and muscle to supply a trickle of energy, enough to keep the heart pumping and the lungs expanding.

  At a chemical level, no food meant no glucose – the essential sugar that acts as an energy store for the body. As a result, their supplies of insulin – which regulates the blood sugar – dropped way down. In fact, many of the body’s chemical processes had stopped, changed or reversed. They were at risk of what doctors call refeeding syndrome, something first discovered in prisoners of war and now more often seen in anorexia patients. At this point of starvation, too much food could kill the Wild Boars. The rush of glucose would overload the body’s by-now fragile systems. It would send their levels of phosphate, potassium and magnesium into chaos. It would mess with their retention of fluids and sodium. The result could be delirium, seizures, respiratory failure, heart failure, coma or even death.

  Although the boys were hungry and dreamed of huge plates of rich pork dishes and fast food, they had to be patient. The SEALs and Dr Pak had brought in little squeeze packets of high-energy gels, the sort used by triathletes and long-distance runners. For now, these tiny shots of life would have to suffice, gradually bringing their bodies back from the brink.

  For boys used to the tropical heat of Thailand, the twenty-three degrees Celsius temperature inside the cave felt cold. And after so many days, they felt the chill reach into their bones. When they managed to smile, their teeth looked oversized in their gaunt faces. Dr Pak examined each of the Wild Boars. Amazingly, there were no serious injuries. He placed all thirteen in the green category of emergency response triage, meaning they needed medical care but not urgently.

  Dr Pak applied some antiseptic solution to the boys’ scratches. ‘This will kill the infection first,’ he told one boy, as he swabbed his foot. ‘Then once you are out, we will find you a beautiful nurse.’

  * * *

  The joy of finding the team alive was felt around the world. This was now the biggest news story on the planet. It had echoes of the Chilean mining rescue in 2010, when thirty-three men were trapped deep underground for sixty-nine days, before being winched out, one by one, all alive. There is something about people being trapped underground that makes for an irresistible story.

  Many countries have had a similar incident that has garnered huge media interest. There was the case of eighteenmonth-old baby Jessica McClure, who fell into a twenty-centimetre-wide well in Texas in 1987. Rescuers were relieved when they heard her singing a ‘Winnie the Pooh’ song and managed to dig a parallel shaft to safely extricate her after fifty-six hours.

  For Australians, it would be the case of Stuart Diver, who was trapped in the rubble of a ski lodge after a landslide in the popular resort town of Thredbo in New South Wales. He survived sixty-five hours in sub-zero temperatures; but his wife and every other person in the lodge was killed. Australians would also remember Tasmania’s Beaconsfield gold mine rescue in which two miners were found alive two weeks after the mine’s collapse.

  For Li Shuo and the audiences in China, it was hard to know where to start. Incidents of people falling into wells and mine shafts were disturbingly common.

  But the fact that this time it was children trapped, and with the added element of the approaching rains, made the story incredibly dramatic, a real-life thriller.

  The footage of the boys huddled in the dark on the muddy ledge was replayed over and over, with millions of
people sharing John Volanthen’s feelings: ‘Brilliant.’ But for those responsible for getting the boys and Coach Ek out, the celebration didn’t last long.

  ‘Initially it’s a huge sigh of relief,’ Major Charles Hodges told ABC’s Four Corners. ‘OK, the boys were able to find a high-enough ground, they’ve survived this long . . . But then it was – it was scary, because we realised how far back they were in.’

  People had been rescued from caves before – even flooded caves. But never had such a difficult set of problems faced a rescue party: the ages of the children; their malnourished state; the long, flooded route out; the uncertainty of the weather. It all added up to a stomach-churning dilemma for those now beginning to coordinate the extraction.

  In an ideal world, the pumping teams would be able to suck enough water out of the sumps for the Wild Boars to wade out the way they walked in. But this wasn’t a viable option – some of the passages were five metres deep, and more rain was coming. There was just too much water.

  Drilling was also out. While Suttisak’s drill team might have been able to bore a hole into the side of the mountain, it would be far too small for even the littlest boy to squeeze through. It would only be a way of dropping in supplies, and even that was a long shot.

  That left three other options for getting the Wild Boars out of the cave. But which was Plan A, B and C depended greatly on who you spoke to and when.

  The cautious move, at least for the moment, was to wait. The boys and Coach Ek were alive and they now had energy gels, medicine and company. Yes, they were all emaciated but, incredibly, none of them had any serious medical issues. Perhaps they could simply wait out the monsoon, camping out on that muddy bank for the next four to six months, until the rains stopped and the flooded passages slowly drained.

  There was also the possibility of extracting them via a yet undiscovered shaft, which would likely have been the safest option. But this also wasn’t a feasible alternative – at least, not yet. Though much hope had been placed in the birds nest collectors of Libong Island and all the others searching the top of the mountain, so far they had found only dead ends.