For other parents, the news came much later. Titan’s dad, Tote (Tanawut Wibunrungrueang), was at home when his friend called to say he thought he’d seen Titan’s bike on the news. The reporter had said something about kids in a cave. Tote turned on the TV and soon saw for himself the boys’ bicycles leaned up in a row against the handrail at the entrance of Tham Luang. His friend was right: one of them was Titan’s. He left immediately and arrived at the cave around midnight. As he rushed to the entrance, he paused momentarily to place his palms together and wai the shrine (that is, make a prayerful gesture) where the mannequin versions of Princess Nang Non stood with their plastic stares. He then climbed the last rise and surveyed the scene.
The cave mouth was lit up by an industrial light, the sort that might be placed near roadwork at night. A generator hummed. The search had escalated quickly and the entrance had been transformed into a command center. Members of two local rescue organizations were there early: Siam Ruanjai Mae Sai and Sirikorn Chiang Rai Rescue Association. Rescue workers came and went; others stood around.
The chief of Mae Sai District, Somsak Kanakham, arrived around 10 p.m. and took charge. He knew these boys, these local soccer champions. He hadn’t yet had time to make good on his promise of recognition, money, opportunities, and citizenship for those who were stateless. He phoned the provincial governor, Narongsak Osottanakorn, who was preparing for bed. Governor Narongsak had been in the role only about a year but had gained a reputation for being an honest and effective leader. He drove from Chiang Rai—an hour away—and arrived about 1 a.m. Dressed in a white shirt tucked into black trousers, he stood in the cave entrance, listening and talking to a group of searchers as they updated him on progress.
At about 4 a.m., the generator went quiet. Tote’s spirits lifted. “They must have found them,” he thought. But as he watched the searchers file out of the cave, he saw no kids. He was confused: Why were they stopping the search if they hadn’t found the boys?
The rescue was just being paused. The diesel generator was fuming out the cave, stinging the eyes of those inside. They needed better equipment and fresh manpower. They’d start again first thing in the morning, now only a couple of hours away.
There was no point in going home. The parents settled in to wait at the cave.
Exhausted from digging, Tee asked Coach Ek if they should perhaps find a place to camp for the night. The Wild Boars walked back through the cave system to the Planetarium, about 650 feet from the T-junction. They decided to sleep there, on the sandy slope. There were no comforts; they simply lay down on the cool ground. A few of the boys had phones. They tried to call their families, but there was no reception deep inside the mountain. Hunger and thirst were starting to affect them. They had no water or food: they’d eaten all their snacks at the soccer field hours earlier.
“At that stage, we were not at all afraid,” said Coach Ek. “We thought that the water would go down by the next day. Before going to sleep, I asked everyone to pray to Lord Buddha.”
In a low monotone, the boys chanted a well-known Pali-language Buddhist prayer. One by one, they turned off their flashlights—all except for Note, whose flashlight was jammed and wouldn’t turn off. They went to sleep with its light reflecting off the calcite crystals on the roof, creating white sparkles that looked to the boys like stars in the night sky.
6
The Search Begins
Caving was a passion that had gripped Englishman Vernon Unsworth since he was sixteen. The pocked karst mountains of Chiang Rai Province were a perfect place for the now sixty-three-year-old: a catalog of barely mapped caves beckoning the avid explorer.
It was not a gentle pursuit. He often returned covered in red welts from squeezing through crevices and bashing into rocks. He loved it.
Vern had moved to Chiang Rai seven years earlier, after meeting his partner, Woranan Ratrawiphakkun, known as Tik. She ran a nail studio called Elegant near the Mae Sai foothills, catering to the students at a nearby university. Tik had no interest in caving at all. She was supportive of Vern’s hobby, but preferred to stay above ground. Almost every weekend, she’d send Vern and his regular Thai caving buddy, Lak (Kamol Kunngamkwamdee), off to yet another underground adventure. Lak is a former parks officer who had been drawn into caving via Vern’s passion for exploring the region’s underworld. He even had a cave named after him. Tham Lak could be accessed via a crawl space between boulders in the Tham Luang entrance chamber. From there a series of small passages (known as Tham Nang Non) headed south until it opened out into a large complex chamber—Tham Lak. A colony of bats lived there.
Lak Cave is not for the fainthearted, with a chimney to the surface barely wide enough for Lak’s lean shoulders. He and Vern probably had the best working knowledge of the labyrinth under the Mountain of the Sleeping Lady of anyone in the area.
Despite the amount of time Vern and Lak had spent exploring, Tham Luang and the caves around it still held many secrets. Vern was often joined by other caving enthusiasts, including Martin Ellis, another British caver who had moved to Thailand. Martin had just published a book called The Caves of Thailand: Volume 2, Northern Thailand, a companion volume to his previous work about the caves of eastern Thailand. The new book included a fresh map of the Tham Luang cave complex, updating the previous 1987 French survey. Martin Ellis’s map credited Vern as the main source of information and extended the known length of the cave to 10,316 meters (nearly six and a half miles), making it the fourth-longest cave in Thailand.
But Vern suspected it was longer still. For years he’d pushed and pushed until now only about 165 feet separated the end of Lak Cave from Saitong Cave next door. He thought there was a link connecting the two cave systems, but finding that link was tough work.
If Vern and Lak could find a passage linking this cavern to Saitong Cave, it would probably become Thailand’s second-longest cave. This was the sort of thing that cavers live for, and Vern was determined to find the connection—even if it meant taking the risk of exploring the caves alone.
These journeys into the caves by himself were Vern’s secret. He knew Tik worried about the dangerous solo missions, with nobody to go to for help if he should fall. So he would tell her a little white lie—that he was off to the office or on an errand.
Of course, Tik quickly worked out what was going on. She knew it was no use trying to stop him, but she had a secret of her own: she had the phone numbers of all the national parks staff stationed outside the various caves. Whenever Vern disappeared on one of his missions, she would do a call-around.
“Is Vern there? Okay, just call me when he comes out safely.”
On the night of June 23 and into the morning of June 24, Vern Unsworth’s phone rang hot.
The staff from the Department of National Parks were calling him. One of the boys’ parents had called Vern, too. But his phone was on silent. When Vern and Tik woke at 6 a.m. that Sunday, there were twenty missed calls.
He called the parks officer back and was brought up to speed: Boys lost in Tham Luang. Get here as soon as possible. Bring a map.
Vern grabbed his caving headlamp, a blue helmet, a heavy orange belt fastened with a big carabiner, and his favorite caving shirt, a long-sleeve fluorescent yellow-green polo shirt. It was laid out already; Vern had been planning a trip to Tham Luang himself that weekend. He didn’t bother with a map; the map was in his head.
Vern rushed to the cave, just a fifteen-minute drive from Mae Sai. It was clear from the sodden roads and fields that it had been raining heavily overnight.
“Nam thuam?” Vern asked one of the officials, using the Thai for “flooding.”
“Yeah” was the answer he received.
“Really?” said Vern, feeling somewhat disbelieving. After all, he’d been planning to go in himself.
Vern and the officials inspected a map, and Vern pointed to the T-junction, throwing his few words of Thai into the conversation to try to ease communication.
“If nam [water
] there now, we have a problem,” said Vern, pulling his fluoro shirt over a dark undershirt. “Where’s Lak?”
Lak was ten minutes away. When he arrived, he and Vern walked toward the cave. They paused while Lak lit some incense, motioning for Vern to join him, kneeling in front of the two shop mannequins. The men put their palms together for a moment to pray to Nang Non’s spirit.
All around the cave entrance, the boys’ parents were conducting similar rituals, placing incense and wreaths of jasmine on the ground.
Then Vern and Lak headed off, past the entrance, through the large open cavern with a big sandy slope about a half mile from the entrance—named Chamber 3 by the rescue team—and on to the T-junction, Sam Yak.
“You could see the water gradually getting higher and higher, working its way to coming out of Sam Yak and . . . down to Chamber 3,” said Vern afterward.
He waded into the pool and felt around with his foot, marking the direction of the passage with two notches on the roof. Though the water wasn’t up to the roof yet, the experienced caver had a sense that the situation was only going to get worse. Vern was not going any farther and returned to the entrance. Over the course of the day, he made the trek from the T-junction to the entrance five times. Mostly it was to update those on the outside and call for more equipment and people: there was no way to communicate inside the cave; any message had to be delivered in person. He watched as divers from the volunteer Sirikorn Chiang Rai Rescue Association had a go at descending into the whirlpool at the junction, but their bubbles stayed within view. The torrent was so fierce, Vern worried for their safety.
In an effort to stop the water, Vern asked for sandbags to block the water coming in from Monk’s Series—the passage on the right at the T-junction—but it was no use. The powerful torrent pushed the sandbags away. The twenty-five-hundred-foot crawl through the passage at Monk’s Series was too tight for a person to turn around in; you could only go forward or wriggle backward, doing what Lak called “ninja turtles”—scraping the mud in front and pushing with your legs, to inch along the rock tube. It was a claustrophobe’s worst nightmare. If the boys were in there when the flash flooding hit, they would have stood little chance.
“If they’ve gone this way, no, they died already,” said Vern later that day.
He had noticed that the water coming from Monk’s Series was relatively clear, probably flowing in from undiscovered shafts and down the relatively short “ninja turtle” tube. But the water from the left of the T-junction was muddy, the porous limestone of the mountain acting as a sponge for the entire watershed and feeding water through the silty main cave passage like a huge drainpipe. A pump was brought in. But it ran on diesel, and soon noxious fumes were again filling the cave, a haze hanging in the air.
On one of his trips to the front of the cave, where there was phone reception, Vern received a call from his friend Robert Harper in the United Kingdom. Rob was a fellow cave explorer and had just visited Chiang Rai, exploring and mapping the underworld. Vern and Tik had farewelled him the day before the Wild Boars entered the cave. But word had traveled quickly, and Rob was calling to say he knew some British cave-rescue divers who could help if needed. Vern noted down their names and returned to the cave. Back inside, it was a free-for-all, everyone doing whatever they could to find the boys and their coach. Vern worked in the cave until after midnight, but they made no progress against the water that blocked the junction.
For Nick, Sunday morning was a lousy way to start his fifteenth birthday—waking up on the hard dirt, trapped in a cave. In fact, four of the boys had birthdays in late June or early July. Night had already missed his party, and it looked as if Nick might, too.
Night thought about his ice-cream cake, still in the freezer. It was breakfast time, and the boys were hungry. It was hard not to think about pieces of pork sizzling on the side of a volcano grill. Note’s flashlight was still jammed, the precious battery draining away.
7
Seals Don’t Live in Caves
On Monday, June 25, well before dawn, the first team of the Naval Special Warfare Command, Royal Thai Fleet, arrived. There were around twenty of them, and they were better known as the Navy SEALs.
Like the American commandos—who helped establish the Thai unit in 1956—they took their name from a rough acronym of where they could operate: sea, air, and land. They were Thailand’s most fearsome warriors—supremely fit, highly trained, and dedicated to their often-secret missions. Whereas their command center was on a lovely bit of the Gulf of Thailand, about a two-hour drive from Bangkok, one of their main areas of operation was in the three southernmost provinces, known in security circles as the Deep South. There, Muslim insurgents fought a slow-grind separatist campaign against the mostly Buddhist state, with shootings and bombings most weeks. The SEALs also had men stationed in northern Thailand, who were focused on the Golden Triangle—the region where the borders of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar meet, and where drugs flow along the Mekong River, along the highways, and along mountainous paths.
Whatever clandestine thing the SEALs were doing that day, they dropped it when the call came in to help. This was no ordinary mission. The personal secretary of King Maha Vajiralongkorn had spoken to the interior minister to pass on the king’s concerns and encouragement.
This was big.
The call came late at night—2 a.m., in fact—but the commandos moved fast. By 7 a.m., the SEALs had deployed to Chiang Rai, been briefed on the situation, walked into the cave, and were ready to dive.
The SEALs were tough, driven men, strong swimmers and trained in combat diving. But none of them were cave divers. When they reached the T-junction, the conditions they faced were something completely new: a churning brown pond with basically zero visibility. Everything had to be done by touch. Their standard scuba rigs were clumsy in the confined spaces, with a cumbersome tank protruding from their backs, and air hoses reaching from back to front, that were at risk of getting torn off or becoming tangled. A torrent rushed through the cave with such power that it could rip their masks off if they turned their heads sideways.
The bravery needed to go into that unknown cave system, completely blind and ill-equipped, was extraordinary. Everyone who saw it was impressed. Experienced cave divers would later shake their heads and marvel. There was no question these men were risking their lives.
The main obstruction preventing the divers from getting to the next chamber was just beyond the T-junction. A narrow passage was blocked by mud and debris. Scraping and hacking underwater with shovels and by hand, the SEALs managed to widen the restriction and eventually pushed through. But when they emerged into the big chamber beyond, the boys were nowhere to be seen.
The next restriction was even tougher, and the divers were getting smashed by the oncoming current.
The SEAL team turned back. This time, instead of fighting the surging waters, they were swept by the current down the rocky passageways and spat out at the T-junction.
When forty-two-year-old technical diver Pae (Ruengrit Changkwanyuen) first saw on television that the Thai Navy SEALs were diving in the cave, he knew immediately they were out of their depth.
“Wow,” he thought. “They’re going to throw their lives away trying to do that.”
The giveaway was the back-mounted air tanks the SEALs were using—a standard setup for recreational diving, but ill-suited to what cave divers call “overhead environments.”
“Why don’t we lend them a hand?” thought Pae. “Or at least get them the right equipment to do the job.”
Pae had gone through the usual progression of a passionate diver—from completing his open-water course, to becoming a divemaster, then instructor, and then finally getting into technical diving, exploring wrecks and caves. A new job took him to Florida before he could finish his cave-diving course eight years ago, and once he returned to Thailand, it was hard to find time to get back into it. But he knew many people in the Thai diving community. And he could see there
was a problem here that needed solving.
“I didn’t even think about the boys,” said Pae. “Because I know if the rescue team can get in, they will get to the boys. But we need to provide them with the skills, with the equipment, for them to safely go in and rescue those boys.”
He talked about it with his sister, Pichamon Changkwanyuen. Her nickname was Chang, which in Thai means “elephant,” an ironic nickname for the petite woman with short hair and fashionable round-rimmed glasses. Chang worked as a personal assistant to a Thai celebrity named Narinthorn Na Bangchang. Pae and Chang started discussing how they might help. Chang wondered how they would get the boys out, if they did indeed reach them inside the cave.
“That’s an easy solution: use full-face masks,” Pae told her. “Go tell the governor’s office that we have that equipment.”
He left it at that and went to pick up his daughter from school.
If there’s one thing Narinthorn Na Bangchang knew how to do, it was how to harness the media for a cause. Over the years, she had hosted several charity concerts, using her celebrity status to raise money for the Nepal earthquake recovery efforts in 2015, underprivileged communities of conflict-wracked southern Thailand, and other worthy causes.
Ae, as Narinthorn is known to her friends, is a singer, an actress, and the producer of a TV singing contest—a well-known face in Thailand’s celebrity-mad entertainment scene, despite now being “too old to do television,” she chuckled modestly when I spoke to her. Her social-media avatar has blue hair, tattoos, and a rock-star pout, but in person she is elegantly groomed and friendly.
When I met them, Ae and Chang were a charming double act. They often finished each other’s sentences, words overlapping, sometimes swapping back and forth several times during the course of a single thought. Between Ae’s celebrity status, Chang’s organizational skills, and Pae’s cave-diving knowledge, they were sure they could somehow help those poor boys and their coach. Now they just needed to work out whom to tell that to.
Miracle in the Cave Page 3