The Cave

by Liam Cochrane

  Note walked down the slope to Dr Harry, and sat in his lap. The Australian anaesthetist was known for his calm, reassuring bedside manner. He prepared two syringes and eased them into each of Note’s legs. Note was quickly unconscious.

  He was then put into the rest of his diving gear – a buoyancy vest, the modified harness with a handle on the back and an air tank strapped to his front. They chose not to use helmets for the boys because it interfered with the fit of the masks, but they placed packing foam inside the wetsuit hoods to give their heads some protection. The air was turned on and the all-important full-face mask was fitted. The divers carefully checked and re-checked the silicone seal to make sure it was tight against Note’s face. It took about thirty seconds for Note to start breathing normally through the face mask.

  Then, they did something that wasn’t revealed to the public. They tied cable ties around Note’s wrists and clipped them behind his back. It was a final measure to secure the child and make sure that if he did wake up from his ketamine slumber, he wouldn’t try to rip off his face mask, endangering both his life and his rescue diver. It must have felt strange to handcuff the sleeping boy but it was for his own good.

  Then it was time for Dr Harry to do the final check – a nerve-wracking leap of faith.

  ‘When I did my first test of pushing their face in the water – which . . . feels very wrong I can tell you, the first time you do that – again about a thirty-second gap and they’d start breathing again.’

  Jason Mallinson volunteered to be the first recovery diver.

  He took hold of the harness strap on Note’s back and carefully submerged. He held the boy close, in roughly the same position as a tandem skydiver and their instructor, strapped together. Jason watched for bubbles in front of him as he began swimming cautiously through the first flooded tunnel.

  As he recounted later, ‘So, with the diving, we’d submerge with the kid. And depending how the line lay, we’d either have them on the right-hand side or the left-hand side, either holding their back or holding their chest. I’d have a face here [gesturing just below his chin], depending if we were likely to hit the roof or not. Or if we could see what was going on, we’d hold them out a little bit further. Swimming through the sump the first day – reasonable visibility, I could see sort of a metre in front of me.’

  The first dive was a long one, about 350 metres. When Jason surfaced in Chamber 8, Craig Challen was ready to do a quick medical check. Rick Stanton was also there. The divers were so unsure of whether the plan would work, they had arranged for a stop-and-check after the first boy. Rick had stayed in Chamber 8, so he could help with the first boy and then swim through with a message to Chamber 9, letting Dr Harry know whether the child had survived the long dive.

  Rick and Craig helped carry Note through the dry section. Mikko and Claus were still on their way. They brought Note out of the water and placed him on what they called a ‘drag stretcher’, which they would use to transport him across to the next sump. The dry section was around 200 metres, long enough to require removing his diving gear. With the tank and lead weight, the boys were just too heavy to easily manoeuvre. And the divers didn’t want to risk the heavy tanks bumping into the unconscious children and injuring them as they struggled over the rocks.

  Craig checked Note’s vital signs to ensure he was OK to continue. Satisfied that Note was stable, they placed his diving gear back on, again paying attention to his full-face mask, ensuring it was tightly sealed around his face.

  Then Jason was on his own again, completely responsible for the life in his hands.

  * * *

  In the second sump, Jason felt his way along, avoiding bumping the boy into rocks at any cost. The two biggest dangers underwater were Note waking up and panicking, or his mask leaking. It wouldn’t take much water to turn that plastic and silicone bubble of life into a death trap.

  He passed through the narrowest restriction of the whole dive. Outside, the media – myself included – had been told the gap was just thirty-eight centimetres and reported that to our audiences. It became a factoid that resonated widely. Imagine squeezing through a hole just barely bigger than your head. But I learned long afterwards that was a mistake – the measurement for a restriction some divers had taken in error into a side passage. In fact, the smallest chokepoint was located near Pattaya Beach and was less than a metre high, probably more like sixty centimetres. Considering the boy had a tank strapped to his front, that left little room for error.

  Preventing the mask from becoming dislodged was a constant concern. The route was perilous. There were stalactites and rocks in their path, and another tricky point where the tunnel went vertical.

  Jason’s description later to ABC’s Four Corners vividly captured the treacherousness:

  You don’t remember where the vertical section is and the only time you find out about it is when your head bangs against the wall there. And you’re trying to get yourself through this vertical section, but you can’t remember exactly how it’s laid out. So, I’m trying to get myself through it, but I’m also trying to get a kid through it, who’s sort of horizontally in the water. Trying to post him through – no, that doesn’t work; pull him back. Trying to post myself through – that doesn’t work. And you could spend several minutes at . . . just one obstacle to try and find your way through. And you know, eventually we did it, but it’s a very slow process and quite, quite daunting.

  Protecting the child often meant taking a hit himself. The recovery divers all talked about bashing their helmets again and again into the cave ceiling, and using their bodies to provide a fleshy cocoon around their charges. And all the time, Jason and the other divers had to remember that number-one rule of cave diving: ‘The main thing is, you’ve always got to keep in contact with that guide line. If you lose the guide line, you’re in a lot of trouble.’

  * * *

  Erik and Ivan had been waiting for hours in the cold of Chamber 6, the halfway point between the boys and the command centre at Chamber 3.

  With the chamber just barely illuminated by the hanging lights, they turned off their head torches so they could watch for the tell-tale glow in the water that would signal the arrival of the first boy and his British transporter.

  After what seemed a very long time, the water began to glow yellow, getting stronger as the torch neared the surface. Then a dark silhouette emerged from the water. It was Jason. He was moving slowly – too slowly, thought Eric.

  The Canadian peered into the darkness, trying to work out what that slowness meant. To him, it could be one of two things: ‘Things are either fine and there’s no point rushing, or there’s no point rushing because I can’t change the situation; we’re f*cked.’

  As Jason and the motionless boy came closer, Erik could start to make out more details. Ivan was already in the water, wading towards the diver and his precious package.

  ‘I ran closer and I could now see the kid’s face was still in the water and everything is black, dark, hard to see, but I could see bubbles coming out from the regulator. That’s all I needed to see – that means the kid is breathing and is alive,’ said Ivan.

  ‘This is actually working,’ thought Erik.

  The calmness with which Jason moved and spoke left a lasting impression on Erik.

  ‘When I say “stone cold”, I mean that in a completely positive way,’ he explained. ‘Maybe “focused” is a better word to use . . . The precise movements of someone with that much skill level . . .’ Erik shook his head in amazement. ‘There wasn’t one ounce of panic or hurry.’

  Ivan took hold of the boy, and swam him on the surface towards their space blanket de-kitting station. Once Eric and Ivan were near the bank, they inflated Note’s buoyancy vest to get him upright and onto the land. There, they removed his mask, tank and harness. They ran through the medical checklist: breathing, saliva levels. Everything looked good.

  ‘Slowly, slowly, take it easy,’ Ivan murmured to the boy in Thai, but it wasn
’t clear if he heard a thing.

  After putting Note’s gear back on, they checked the full-face mask. Usually this would take five seconds, but the men spent more than a minute making sure the seal was perfect, with no gaps or strands of hair under the double-skirt of soft silicone. They knew that if they got this wrong, the kid would die.

  Satisfied, the three divers slowly swam with Note to the other side of the chamber, about 200 metres away. Ivan guided Note through the water to allow Jason as much rest as possible, saving his energy for the next dive.

  ‘Are you good?’ asked Ivan, as he handed Note over to Jason.

  ‘Yeah, I’m good,’ said Jason.

  ‘Good luck,’ said Ivan.

  Then Jason and Note disappeared underwater, quickly consumed by the brown murk.

  ‘Awesome,’ Ivan remembers thinking. ‘One kid, alive, everything looked swell, no problems, all the equipment’s working. OK, what do we do now? Well, we wait.’

  * * *

  Methodically, Jason carried Note through the rest of the flooded cave, diving and wading. He stopped at Chamber 5 where Connor and Jim assisted. Chamber 4 had spare cylinders stashed but was un-manned. Jason carried on. The dive between Chamber 4 and Chamber 3 was particularly tricky, with plenty of pipes and cables to snag on.

  Once at Chamber 3, Jason’s job was done. At around 4.50 pm, he handed Note over to the US military team to do a medical check. All good. The boy was loaded onto the stretcher. The Chiang Mai rope team pulled him up to the top of what Chinese rescue worker Li Shuo called the ‘little mountain’. The Sked travelled along the zip line, down to the American and Chinese men below. Vern was there to help too.

  At first, Li Shuo was worried. He didn’t think the child was breathing. He felt frightened. But he soon realised there was breath, though it was slowed by the drugs and difficult to notice in the tense moment.

  As Note was passed along, one man stayed by his side, a member of the rock climbing team called Toto. Even though the boy was unconscious, Toto whispered encouragements to him as he was carried out.

  ‘You’re almost there . . . keep it up . . . you’ve come so far . . . your big brothers are here to look after you,’ whispered Toto.

  The rescue workers used the large orange water pipes installed in the cave as a rail for the hard plastic stretcher to slide on, carefully guiding it over the boulders. ‘We had to use a rope system to pull the boy’s stretcher through this narrow section. We had to sit on the rocks to pull the rope in order to get the boy’s stretcher through,’ said Li Shuo.

  From the end of the zipline to the entrance, the terrain varied. The stretcher was carried, floated through a three-metre sump, carried, floated through a ten-metre sump, and passed on again. There were more than a hundred people involved in this high-stakes game of pass-the-parcel – one slip of a rescuer’s boot could bring the whole thing undone. At every moment, arms stretched out, waiting to carry or to catch Note.

  This was truly an international effort, with the boy lifted to freedom by rescuers from Australia, the UK, Finland, Denmark, Canada, Belgium, the USA, Thailand, China, Singapore and possibly other countries. Political and personal tensions dissolved in the darkness, as the big messy world focused down to one thing: keeping that boy alive.

  ‘Once he was handed over to us, we were down at his face mask, just listening for that breath,’ said Senior Constable Matthew Fitzgerald of the Australian Federal Police. ‘He was breathing – there was instant relief.’

  All the while, Note lay unconscious in his stretcher. The full-face mask remained on and an air tank was strapped into the stretcher, pumping the special mix of oxygen-rich air. As he reached the entrance of the cave and was passed over to the Thai medics, a cheer went up amongst the rescue workers. This cheer spread backwards, like a wave, through the tunnel, a moment of happiness and relief.

  They’d done it.

  Now just twelve more to go.

  22

  Three more boys

  Fourteen-year-old Tern had watched his schoolmate Note go bravely down the hill; now it was his turn. The injections knocked him out quickly and he was kitted up for the dive. This time, John Volanthen would have the momentous task of guiding the boy through the most dangerous sections of the cave. For days, John had been mentally getting ready for a truly horrible scenario.

  ‘I was prepared to take a live child underwater and bring out a corpse,’ he said.

  And yet John also had a conflicting thought that was even stronger.

  ‘I was 110 per cent determined that my child was going to survive.’

  He descended into the water, holding Tern close.

  Once John and Tern had disappeared, Dr Harry realised something – he’d forgotten to wait for the all clear from Rick before sending Tern. He paused the operation in Chamber 9 until he had word from Rick.

  In fact, Rick was already swimming up the long flooded tunnel towards Dr Harry. As he made his way up the passage, he was surprised to bump into John going down, carrying a boy. They carefully moved around each other underwater, allowing John to carry on towards the Chamber 8, and Rick to dive on to Chamber 9. Rick emerged and passed on the positive news to the Australian doctor: the first boy went through fine, their plan seemed to be working.

  * * *

  In Chamber 6, Erik and Ivan were cold.

  ‘The first thirty minutes, we were active,’ said Ivan. ‘[Then] absolutely freezing.’

  The first two boys had come through with no major problems. Ivan and Erik helped replace the divers’ air tanks if needed, and sent them on their way.

  Then they waited. And waited. They had no idea that Dr Harry had paused the operation at Chamber 9.

  In the cold, dark doubts emerged.

  ‘All the maybes, possibilities, what-ifs – all that started to surface,’ said Ivan. ‘When everything becomes silent and you’re not preoccupied with a job, you start to think about, “Oh my god, they’re coming out, do you think they’re going to be alive?” Every minute you wait, you start to be, “Oh f*ck, they f*cked up, something’s gone wrong. Why are they not here? Mate, it can’t take them three hours to kit them up. What happened?” You’re very aware of every little sound.’

  There were numerous false alarms. The two men would hear something and jump up with pulses racing, only to realise it was nothing, sit back down on the muddy bank and resume their chilling wait, eyes trained on one end of the black pool.

  ‘I thought [the chances of success] were high . . . otherwise I would not have participated in it. But not one hundred per cent. In the back of my head, there was the risk that maybe not everybody would make it,’ said Ivan. ‘They were very long hours.’

  * * *

  Despite everyone’s fears, the first two boys appeared to be doing OK, at least as they went through the first sump.

  Next, Nick was called down.

  Unbeknownst to him, photos of the Wild Boars, taken from their social media accounts, were being circulated around the globe. Nick had drawn the short straw – the one of him used by almost everyone was an unflattering shot. His eyes were closed and his head tilted on an angle, with his index fingers pressed into each cheek – a pose more befitting a cutesy female K-Pop starlet than a sixteen-yearold boy. It was the sort of thing that most teenagers would be highly embarrassed about, but as it was, he had no idea. And considering all he’d been through, he probably wouldn’t have cared anyway.

  Dr Harry gave him his injections and Nick was strapped into his diving gear. Then Rick took over.

  ‘They were basically a package with a handle, like a shopping bag,’ Rick would later tell ITV in the UK. ‘We’re used to transporting all sorts of things underwater, but to transport a human life is about the ultimate responsibility.’

  Rick took the handle on the back of the harness, holding the boy close, as the other recovery divers had done. Like them, he wanted to be able to see, hear and feel the bubbles coming from the full-face mask, and he wanted his helmet and his b
ody to hit the rocks, not Nick’s. Underwater, he reached out his other hand for the guide rope and started the journey out.

  * * *

  Mark was eager to leave in the first group, but the rescue team couldn’t find a mask small enough for him. Even though he was two years older than the youngest, Titan, he was tinier. He would have to wait another night in the cave.

  Night would go next instead. He swallowed his tablet of alprazolam and walked down the slope to the Australian doctor.

  So far, the rescue was going well. Dr Harry was relieved the drugs appeared to be working. But there was always a nervous moment as the anaesthetist put the boy’s body into a state between life and death. Each time a sedated boy entered the water, he would stop breathing for about thirty seconds.

  Night sat on the doctor’s lap, as the other three boys had done. The two injections went into his legs. But this time there was a problem. Night had a chest infection – possibly early stages of pneumonia. His breath became irregular. He was reacting badly to the drugs.

  ‘He was over-sedated,’ said Dr Harry. ‘I ended up lying on a bit of sand with him for half an hour, sort of spooning him, I guess, holding his airway open, thinking, “This is what I predicted was going to happen.”’

  After about thirty minutes, the boy started to recover.

  ‘He sort of fired up,’ said Dr Harry, adding with a laugh, ‘and needed another dose to put him back in the water about 200 metres down the track.’

  It was Chris Jewell who took hold of Night.

  ‘The boys were extremely brave,’ said Chris, in a later interview with UK’s 5 News. ‘They did everything right in order to make it possible for us to be able to rescue them. From when they were first trapped in the cave, conserving their light for the nine days until they were found, all the way through to how they acted when we started the operation. I never saw a whimper or a tear in the eye, extremely calm, very brave and really strong, determined young men.’

  But the boys had the benefit of not fully understanding the risks. Chris and the other recovery divers were all too aware.