Miracle in the Cave Read online

  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 that of 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-racking 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 farther. Swimming through the sump the first day, reasonable visibility, I could see sort of three feet in front of me.”

  The first dive was a long one, about 380 yards. 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 would help 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 650 feet, long enough to require removing his diving gear. With the tank and lead weight, the boys were just too heavy to easily maneuver. 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 okay 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 all costs. The two biggest dangers underwater were Note waking up and panicking, and 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 fifteen inches 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 afterward that that was a mistake—the measurement for a restriction some divers had taken in error, which was actually for a side passage. In fact, the smallest choke point was located near Pattaya Beach and was less than a yard high, probably more like twenty-four inches. 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 the 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 guideline. If you lose the guideline, 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 center at Chamber 3.

  With the chamber just barely illuminated by the hanging lights, they turned off their headlamps so they could watch for the telltale 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 light neared the surface. Then a dark silhouette emerged from the water. It was Jason. He was moving slowly—too slowly, thought Erik.

  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 toward the diver and his precious package.

  “I ran closer and I could now see that 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 toward their space blanket de-gearing station. Once Erik 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, a little over two hundred yards 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.

  “Aw
esome,” Ivan remembers thinking. “One kid, alive, everything looked swell, no problems, all the equipment’s working. Okay, 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 unmanned. 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 p.m., 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 traveled 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 realized 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 zip line to the entrance, the terrain varied. The stretcher was carried, floated through a three-yard sump, carried, floated through a ten-yard 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 United Kingdom, Finland, Denmark, Canada, Belgium, the United States, 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 on 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 among the rescue workers. This cheer spread backward, 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 geared 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 percent determined that my child was going to survive.”

  He descended into the water, holding Tern close.

  Once John and Tern had disappeared, Dr. Harry realized 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 toward 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 toward 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—Note—had gone 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 gear 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 realize 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 100 percent. 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—Note and Tern—appeared to be doing okay, Note completely, and Tern at least as he went through the first sump.

  Next, Nick was called down.

  Unbeknown 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 fifteen-year-old 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 United Kingdom. “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 head and his body to hit the rocks, not Nick’s. Underwater, he reached out his other hand for the guide rope and started the journey out.

  Mark had been 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 anesthetist 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 boy
s 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 oversedated,” 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 yards down the track.”

  It was Chris Jewell who took hold of Night.

  “The boys were extremely brave,” said Chris, in a later interview with the United Kingdom’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—of which Chris and the other recovery divers were all too aware.

  “We knew that any attempt we made would have a probability of not total success. We had a probability of losing one of the boys, ultimately. And there was some pressure on us obviously because of that.”

  As they emerged, the four boys were taken by ambulances from the cave mouth to the field hospital. They were checked by doctors and then put back in the ambulances and driven down the hill to a flat piece of land. If the boys hadn’t been so groggy, they might have recognized the place: the Ban Chong soccer field, where they had played their friendly match fifteen days earlier. They’d come full circle.