They had a briefing at the airport with Governor Narongsak. The divers asked about the weather forecast and whether any of the boys had preexisting medical conditions, and were surprised when they found out that that information was not known. One thing was made clear to them, though: the military was in charge of the diving operation.
There were several government departments involved in getting the British divers to Thailand, and each agency had sent cars to drive the three cave rescue divers to Tham Luang, about forty miles away. So in the end it was a convoy of about ten vehicles that sped down the highway that Wednesday evening. They got to the cave around 8 p.m.
But after flying around the world and racing to the cave, the British divers were puzzled at finding themselves left to fend for themselves.
“We arrived on-site, and we were abandoned,” said John Volanthen. “We had no real introductions, nothing. On that day, it was utter chaos, with people everywhere. . . . We were effectively left to our own devices.”
The team found a room to set up as their base of operations, a place for their diving gear. Their first priority was to fill up their cylinders, which had been emptied for the flight. Eventually they managed to borrow a small old compressor. The SEALs “kinda didn’t want to help,” it seemed to John.
They found Vern, who took them to meet the diving supervisor, a military man stationed in the cave mouth. The entrance was theatrically lit, glowing orange from the yard-wide spherical lamp and other smaller lights. The soccer team’s bikes still leaned against the handrail, a powerful reminder of the lives at stake. Below, hundreds of people swarmed around the cavern.
The first meeting between the SEALs and the British experts did not go well. The commandos had been working hard, well beyond their comfort zone, and bristled at the idea that John and Rick, “two middle-aged men” (John’s words), could do something they couldn’t.
“There was significant tension,” said John. “We had no rank, we had no sway. . . . As much as we didn’t know how to communicate with the military, they didn’t know how to communicate with us, either.”
Inside Chamber 3, the water level was now rising about twelve inches every ten minutes. The military had ordered that all diving be suspended due to the dangerous conditions.
“The SEALs team didn’t allow them to go in,” said Pae. “It was bad enough that the issue escalated up to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Eventually, Rear Admiral Arpakorn Yuukongkaew [the top SEALs commander] said, ‘Just let them go.’”
Someone muttered, “If they die in there, don’t expect us to retrieve their bodies.”
Vern and Rob helped carry the air cylinders in with Rick and John. About a half mile in, they came to an arch followed by a dip that was about waist deep. Rob helped them through the half-filled sump, into the forward operating base the military had set up in Chamber 3. The water was rising visibly up the cave wall, and Rob returned through the rapidly filling S-bend, so he didn’t get trapped without diving gear. The SEALs and other Thais inside hurried to clear Chamber 3.
By the time John and Rick got their tanks and masks on, the lowest point had fully flooded. They dived into the sump and laid a line back through as a guide, securing their exit in case conditions worsened. The line, a little over one-tenth of an inch thick, was made of polypropylene material similar to nylon but nonabsorbent, with neutral buoyancy, and would be strong when wet. It was the first in a series of guidelines through the cave that would come to play a crucial role in the diving operation.
“We stopped that night, because it was very clear the cave was flooding,” said John.
The British divers emerged after midnight, rejoining Vern and Rob on the other side of the flooded dip. As they walked out, Vern predicted that the cave would flood to the entrance in about four hours. It did exactly that, prompting an urgent evacuation of all people inside the cave.
Earlier, before dawn that Wednesday, Major Charles Hodges got a call from his director of operations. They were stationed on the Okinawa military base, as part of the US Indo-Pacific Command.
“Hey, sir, I’m sure you’re tracking that there’s a soccer team stuck in a cave in Thailand. Uh, be ready, ’cause we’re being notified that we might head out” is how Major Hodges later remembered the conversation to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Four Corners program.
“Awesome,” he thought. “That’s exactly the type of mission we want to be called up for.”
Major Hodges’s Special Tactics Squadron trained mostly for battlefield scenarios, but the prospect of saving civilians, especially children, was highly motivating for these already highly motivated soldiers.
Hours later, a team of around thirty personnel from the Japanese base were loading up an MC-130 transport plane. Many of those deploying were from the US Air Force’s 353rd Special Operations Group, trained in personnel-recovery techniques. There was also a survival expert, a cave diver from the 31st Rescue Squadron, and civilian support staff.
The Americans arrived at Tham Luang around 1 a.m. on Thursday and immediately assessed the situation, walking in as far as the floodwaters would allow.
“So we go into the cave, and it was completely dark, and, like, I’m walking in thinking, ‘This is so surreal,’” said Captain Jessica Tait, an air force public affairs officer, who would become the face of the US mission over the coming days. “It’s so dark. A few of us had headlamps. I did not, so I’m trying to tag along as close as I can to some of the other members of the team. But I could just sense, like, oh my gosh, there’s twelve children and a coach in here, and I’m just in the entranceway, and I’m spooked out.”
Coach Ek was also starting to get spooked by the grim situation he and the boys found themselves in.
“The most worrying things for us were the darkness, the water, and hunger. The water kept rising all the time. The darkness limited our awareness of whether we could survive in this shelter. Hunger was a big obstacle. When everyone was so hungry, it could cause conflict with each other.”
Then a dark thought entered his mind.
“Imagine if all this led to eating your friends, eating your own people.”
He laughed at the paranoia that had seeped into the dank cave. It must never come to that. They knew someone was looking for them; they just had to be patient and stay alive.
Just hours after their first dive, the British team dragged their jet-lagged bodies back to the cave around 10 a.m. on Thursday to try again. One thing about their appearance immediately stood out: the inner tube that Rick wore as a buoyancy device. He called it his “lucky wing.” It had been part of his gear on several successful rescues and had become something of a lucky talisman, as well as an in-joke. But to anyone who didn’t know these cavers, it may have branded them as amateurs. (When another diver saw it, his first thought was: “These guys are going to get themselves killed.”)
Cavers are known for using whatever equipment is necessary to push deeper into a cave, not bothered by fancy products or what other people might think. Rick already knew the cave search would not involve great depths, and he and John were used to improvising gear. For years they had strapped doormats to their chests for heat retention in the cold sumps of the United Kingdom. Eventually a dive company borrowed their idea and released a similar product. They had used chest-mounted and side-mounted rebreathers long before the practice became common. These highly technical systems absorbed carbon dioxide from the diver’s exhalation and reused the oxygen, allowing longer dives. But a small number of the British cavers operating at John and Rick’s level took things even further; they developed rebreathers that could be taken apart and reassembled underwater, in case of a failure. Their technical understanding was top-level, but Rick’s rubber ring might not have done them any favors as far as their being taken seriously when they first arrived at Tham Luang.
That morning, though, it was a struggle for Rick and John to even get into the water.
They had already been delayed once when
they were asked to move the air compressor they were using to fill up their tanks away from a building in which meetings were being held. They’d just set it up again when it fell silent. It was out of fuel.
It was a frustrating moment. These divers, who had pulled off some of the toughest cave rescues in history, had flown across the world to help, only to be thwarted by a few gallons of gas.
Everyone around them looked busy, and nobody seemed to care. But then a man wearing a yellow name tag—discreetly marking him as a representative of the king—approached to ask if they needed anything. A supply run to a local gas station was arranged. Soon, they had their air compressor rumbling again.
Rick and John finally dived into the first murky pool at around 11 a.m. There were now three separate flooded sections before Chamber 3: a fifty-foot sump; another about thirty feet long; and the S-bend, which now involved about fifteen feet of diving. The water was pulsating, the result of being forced with considerable pressure through narrow passages and into more-open “swirl chambers” like Chamber 3, creating thrumming eddies as it continued to rise.
The British divers surfaced, and in the darkness they saw movement. For a moment they thought they’d found the Wild Boars. But as their lights focused, they were astonished to find four men—Thais from one of the pumping teams. They’d been working in the cave for two days and on Wednesday had decided to take a nap in a quiet corner of the large, sandy chamber.
“When I woke up I thought to myself, ‘Why is the cave half flooded?’ So I ran out to look toward the entrance,” said Surapin Chaichompoo, the president of the Thai Well Water Association, in an interview later. “I looked back and ran to the high mound where we were sleeping. It turned out everyone had left and it was only the four of us left. I told my guys, ‘Wake up, wake up.’”
Somehow, in the rushed evacuation, nobody had noticed the missing men. They spent the night inside Chamber 3. They hoped that the water level would go down and they could escape. On Thursday morning, the men heard clanking sounds from the water. Surapin Chaichompoo threw a rock toward the sound, trying to attract attention. The clanking got louder, but there was no human response. So he threw another rock. Then he saw light under the water, and the divers surfaced.
The foreigners were stunned.
“Okay, oh my god,” one said, according to Surapin.
The British divers had to temporarily abandon their search for the Wild Boars while they rescued the rescuers. They took it in turns, with the non-diver lending his mask to one of the Thai men, who breathed from a spare mouthpiece attached with a twenty-inch hose to one of the three side-mounted tanks.
“I borrowed Rick’s mask,” said John. “I put one guy under my arm and then essentially dragged them out through one sump, then returned with my mask, and Rick and I swapped.”
The Thais tried to assist, swimming in the right direction, as the British divers held them with one hand while the other hand felt along the line they had installed the previous evening. But any movement by the men was counterproductive.
“We both realized how difficult it was to do that [even] with people who were trying to help, over a short sump,” said John.
It took up precious time, but they had no choice: these, too, were lives that needed saving. Bizarrely, the Thai military initially tried to deny the incident, even to the divers who had just experienced it.
“They categorically said, ‘That didn’t happen,’” recounted John.
It was only when the American military backed the British divers’ story and brought over a senior military man to hear the details that the Thai top brass begrudgingly admitted that the impromptu rescue had in fact taken place. For the four members of the pumping team, there was no doubt about the role John and Rick had played.
“I really owe my life to these two divers,” said Surapin Chaichompoo. “You have to understand that these foreigners have a bit of crazy in them. They like to do crazy things. But they are very good at diving.”
One of Surapin’s colleagues said the close call had a lasting impact.
“If you want me to go up a tree, I’ll go up a tree . . . but no caves anymore, they’re scary.”
While the British divers dragged the four Thais from the flooded cave, thousands of soldiers and volunteers scoured the hillside above, looking for alternative ways in. There were plenty of possibilities. In total they would check more than four hundred sinkholes and caves, seriously exploring twenty-eight of them. Vern and Robert Harper joined the search for a day or two, leaving John and Rick to do the diving while they utilized their caving knowledge. They hiked around but, in the end, decided the chances of finding another way down were slim. They stopped looking and returned to the cave site, but thousands of others carried on.
The surveying of Doi Nang Non Mountain revealed just how much water was being brought from across the watershed and concentrated above Tham Luang. This was working against the efforts of the pumping teams below. Something had to be done. Crews of rescue workers, volunteers, and soldiers began diverting the creeks away from the cave. They dug channels and dammed streams, hauling pipes up the mountain to make artificial drainage systems. It was hot, humid, and rained frequently. Everything had to be carried up the mountain, often by hand. It was a task that was not widely applauded, but, creek by creek, they started to stem the flow.
The international influx continued.
On Friday, June 29, a team of Chinese rescue specialists from the Beijing Peaceland Foundation arrived at Tham Luang. One of those was thirty-six-year-old Li Shuo.
Li Shuo had cut his teeth as a rescue worker during the colossal Sichuan earthquake in May 2008. That earthquake was everything you don’t want an earthquake to be: strong, shallow, and in a populated area. More than sixty-nine thousand people died. Almost five million were made homeless. The land buckled and broke, with two hundred thousand landslides and “quake lakes” formed by rivers blocked by debris.
By day, Li Shuo worked for a private contractor that supplied risk assessments for overseas deployments of China’s army. He likened the firm to the infamous American contractor Blackwater, which made billions of dollars by supplying modern-day mercenaries in Afghanistan, but stressed that his company provided analysis only, not soldiers.
When disaster struck, he would deploy. He’d gone to Nepal after the massive quake there in 2015, but most of his rescue work had been within China. In a country of 1.4 billion people, there was always someone who needed a helping hand when nature turned nasty.
Li Shuo first heard about the situation in Thailand from messages posted on a group chat for rescue workers on the hugely popular Chinese app WeChat. The Beijing Peaceland Foundation quickly chose six people, plus a team leader, to go and help. Four of them had experience rescuing people from caves, including Li Shuo. He had done one cave rescue in China, but it had involved ropes, not diving. He had done plenty of open-water diving, but never in a cave. Two had done the cave-rescue training, but hadn’t put it into play in the real world, with lives on the line.
The six rescue workers and their team leader gathered nearly nine hundred pounds of gear and boarded a plane for Thailand. When they arrived at the cave site late on Friday, it was already dark. Li Shuo was impressed at how organized the scene appeared to be. The other experts were friendly.
But at that stage, Li Shuo wasn’t too fussed, thinking this would be “just another rescue.”
The very next day, the Australian team was deployed.
It was an overcast day in Canberra that Saturday, but the rain stopped while the Australian airmen loaded up the C-17 Globemaster, a hulking beast of a thing in military gray. Big blue crates of specialist equipment, army camouflage backpacks, and mountaineering carryalls were carried up the back ramp and stacked inside. There was over a thousand pounds of gear to load, but that was nothing for this cargo plane; you could drive a tank onto it if you wanted.
It was a Royal Australian Air Force plane, but its key passengers were members of
the Australian Federal Police (AFP)—highly trained men with experience diving in flooded caves and operating in zero-visibility situations. Six of them from the AFP’s Special Response Group had been selected for this mission, and there was also an Australian Defence Force member who would join the rescue coordination in Chiang Rai city. Accompanying them was a diplomat who would help coordinate, as well as a specialist psychologist and chaplain, in case the worst happened. While this was a search-and-hopefully-rescue mission, nobody was kidding themselves. Those young boys and their coach had been in the cave for a week now without food. The men getting on that cargo plane knew there was a very real chance their trip to Thailand might involve recovering the bodies of dead kids.
As they walked single file onto the tarmac to board the C-17, a rainbow arched across the sodden sky.
11
Hope and Heart
By Wednesday, a few of the boys’ parents had decided to take a break from the intensity of the cave site and were waiting at a nearby resort, talking and crying. Early on, doctors had told them not to worry: people could survive for days without food as long as they had water, which the boys did. But it was day five. There was a growing doubt. Were their boys still alive?
“I always thought—and I told my wife this—as long as our son has not been found, or his body has not been found, we still have hope,” said Titan’s dad, Tote.
Secretly, Sak had lost hope of finding his son alive days earlier, after he had felt the chill of the thin air inside the cave and seen the water rushing in. But he was determined to at least bring Biw’s body home for a proper funeral.
For Night’s dad, Boon, day five was when his hope started to waver. It was hard not to imagine their weak little bodies wasting away in the darkness. What were they doing? Were they scared? How long could they survive?
Miracle in the Cave Page 7