The Boys in the Cave Page 15

  Jewell surfaced as Mallinson was measuring the air. He knew he was in the right place because he could hear the beeping of the air-quality monitor. He swam to the ramp, noted the thickness of the smell and the thinness of the air, and clipped his cylinders to a rope that Stanton and Vollanthen had rigged on their second dive.

  The boys’ bodies had been stripped of muscle and fat. Their lungs strained for air. Some exhibited symptoms of pneumonia, including hacking, malaise, and shortness of breath. But, says Jewell, “I was very impressed with their state of mind. They took everything in their stride and they never showed any signs of doubt or upset or discomfort. Very brave boys.”

  That was essential, because he and Mallinson had some news to deliver. They needed to have a frank talk with the boys. Through Dr. Bhak they explained that they had two options. They could stay in Chamber Nine for three to four months until the rains stopped and the water subsided. At that point they might be able to walk out. Or, Mallinson told them, “There is a possibility that the expert divers could dive you out.”

  Mallinson and Jewell knew the boys had a weighty decision to make. The boys likely didn’t want to stay in this stone prison for a minute longer. But being dragged through a treacherous tunnel of roiling black water was also unappealing. The divers told them they should discuss it among themselves, think it over for the night. The civilian Australian team of divers headed by Dr. Harris would be coming in the next day to conduct a more thorough medical checkup and assess their fitness for a possible dive. The boys could inform them of their decision.

  They turned to leave. But suddenly Mallinson had an idea. A Thai Navy SEAL major had given him a waterproof pad and pen containing a set of written orders for the SEALs. Mallinson had also used it to jot down the boys’ medical readings. And the thought struck him: These boys and their parents haven’t communicated in two weeks. It’s not a telephone line, but it’s better than nothing.

  “It was quite impromptu. So I passed the pad to each of the kids and said, ‘You’ve got half a page there, write a message to your parents.’ ”

  Mallinson saw their eyes widen with delight. They spent a few minutes jotting down two or three lines each to their parents. “I think they wanted to put their parents’ minds at rest. They wanted to say, you know, I’m in a situation, but I’m doing okay. Don’t worry about me too much,” said Mallinson.

  Watching the boys scribble away, he was struck by a depressing thought: these could be the very last messages the boys sent to their families. Their very last communication.

  Mallinson, the veteran rescuer, knew that the boys were one torrential downpour away from being marooned for weeks, possibly months. They had enough food to last them a week, maybe two. How long they could subsist on that fetid air was a complete mystery. “So it was quite emotional for me to be able to pass those messages back,” said the man who had warned me at the start of our interview that he excelled at detail but wasn’t so good at emotion.

  Mallinson and Jewell packed their gear and headed back into the gloom. It would be hours before they arrived back at camp, bearing what Mallinson expected might be the boys’ last communication to their families.

  What Mallinson did not expect was that within hours of his return the letters would be published—and that suddenly every news outlet carried them verbatim:

  Eleven-year-old Titan wrote:

  Mom, Dad,

  Don’t worry, I’m OK, please tell Yod to prepare to take me to eat fried chicken.

  Love you

  Thirteen-year-old Dom wrote:

  I’m fine, but the weather is quite cold. But don’t worry. But don’t forget my birthday. (Which had been on July 3.)

  Fourteen-year-old Adul wrote:

  Now, don’t worry about us anymore. I miss everybody. I really need to go back home.

  Sixteen-year-old Night wrote:

  Night loves Dad and Mom. Don’t worry about Night. Night loves everybody. (Beneath the bubbly Thai writing he signed off with a pair of hearts and his name.)

  Thirteen-year-old Mark wrote:

  Mum, are you at home, how are you? I’m fine. Can you tell my teacher.” (He was apparently worried about his upcoming exams.)

  Fourteen-year-old Biw wrote:

  Don’t worry, Dad, Mom, Biw has just disappeared for only two weeks, I will go back and help Mom at the store as soon as I have a free day. I will rush to go back.

  And Coach Ek’s letter to the parents was particularly poignant:

  All the kids are fine. There are people taking really good care of them. I promise I will take care of the children the best I can. Thank you for your support. I’m really sorry to the parents.

  A few days after the Sleeping Princess swallowed up the soccer team, a midlevel Thai monk had gone to confer with the cave spirits. According to Thai officials who met with him, he came away shaken. The monk told them that the spirits of the cave demanded the sacrifice of a cow, a buffalo, and two men. However, even the more superstitious rescuers didn’t pay much attention to the prophecy until the morning of Friday, July 6.

  As the British diving team worked on getting supplies to the boys, the Thai Navy SEALs were still working on their oxygen hose project. Petty Officer First Class Saman Gunan, the square-jawed ex-SEAL who was photographed in some of the higher-level planning meetings, had been working at the site for days; because of his smattering of English and can-do attitude, he’d become acquainted with foreign rescuers like Stanton, Vollanthen, and Vern. Late on July 5 and into the early morning of July 6, Gunan was ferrying tanks in the sump between Chambers Two and Three. It was a short dive, but he had apparently gone back and forth a number of times and was already exhausted. It was the end of his shift and—according to the Thai SEALs—his last dive of the day. Gunan was a chiseled triathlete. He was arguably one of the most fit men taking part in the rescue. But something happened on his way from Chamber Two to Chamber Three. For unknown reasons, Gunan’s mouthpiece and mask popped off, according to Rear Admiral Apakorn.

  The SEALs say he was carrying three tanks with three regulators, but they were apparently floating octopuslike in the water—making them more likely to snare on the loose wires, stalactites, and hoses littering that sump. His dive buddy later said that through the murk, it looked like Gunan was trying to grab one of them, but he couldn’t find it, or perhaps his hands had become snagged on something. His dive buddy started kicking frantically toward him. By the time he reached him, Gunan had gone limp.

  His dive partner tried to plug his own regulator into Gunan’s mouth, but he was already unresponsive. His dive buddy dragged him back to Chamber Three. As soon as he reached the air, he spat out his regulator and screamed for medics. The Thai SEALs had hoped to resuscitate him, as they had the other foundering SEAL only a day earlier. But Gunan wasn’t breathing. They tried to scramble a quick rescue, but it would take well over an hour to get him out of the cave. He died somewhere along the way.

  While Rear Admiral Apakorn has spoken about the incident, the Thai Navy SEALs have not released a comprehensive report on Gunan’s death. Some of the foreign divers quietly blamed the ill-fated hose project or wondered if he had been given an empty tank by accident. They also wondered whether he had been inadvertently poisoned. International divers told me that somehow during one of the support team’s nightly refills of the camp’s air tanks, carbon monoxide from the compressors was mixed with the air in some of the tanks. That might help explain how a spectacularly fit man had died on a thirty-foot dive—a swim about as long as two Volkswagen Beetles parked end to end. It was a stark reminder of just how high the stakes were.

  The death sent jitters through certain parts of the Thai rescue community. At the hotel where the ABC team was staying, the head of communications for the cave site told me they were forging ahead anyway, but his men were spooked. Some were now tormented by the midlevel monk’s prophecy a day earlier, predicting the cave would claim “two men” in exchange for the soccer team. They feared that another
rescuer would die.

  The next afternoon, Saturday, July 7, I watched a pair of white Toyota minivans start weaving around the workers and journalists walking up the hill from the checkpoint on the main road below to the campsite outside the cave. When the two vans stopped, a crowd of Thai military and police officials began excitedly crowding around them. The doors slid open and out stepped a few monks with shaved heads, their bright-saffron robes covering one shoulder. Men in reflective vests and a few more monks then crowded the door of the main van as a fleshier, older monk with big sprouts of white eyebrows was eased out. It was Kruba Sangla, a monk elder who was much revered.

  The Thai press sprinted toward him, snapping pictures. Some immediately began live-streaming the event. Sangla was there to right the earlier prophecy by the upstart monk predicting two deaths.

  He was helped up the stairs, past the security barrier leading to the main operations center, and up the hill toward the mouth of the cave. He had some business to attend to—a negotiation with the cave spirits. According to the Thai communications manager, who showed me pictures of the ceremony, the senior monk began bargaining with the cave spirits. Instead of the buffalo, the cow, and the two men, he would offer a wild boar, a white rabbit, and thirteen chickens—symbolizing the twelve members of the soccer team and their coach. The menagerie offering was placed in the jungle near the cave; the animals were tethered to a bench and left alive.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Wet Mules

  They started tearing into the MREs. Apparently without consulting the rescue divers, Dr. Bhak and the three SEALs with him decided that instead of the allotted one meal a day, everyone would get three. It was, after all, his mission to dose the boys with as much care and with as many calories as they could consume. Whatever lay ahead, they needed to regain their strength after twelve days of hunger and muscle atrophy. Besides, the boys didn’t give him much choice. As soon as they finished one meal pack they demanded another. The boys actually liked them. Typically they would get one main course, then a starch—like a muffin top or rice—and then a dessert. And yet nothing could fill them up; they craved more.

  So for the first two days, as they crouched in the dark, Dr. Bhak put the boys on the spelunking equivalent of bed rest. They didn’t talk much because their main activity was sleeping, which was a good thing for Dr. Bhak. Because of what the British divers had innocently said when they found them a few days earlier, the boys and their coach originally expected the SEALs to promptly deliver them from the cave. After all, the Brits had told Adul, “Tomorrow, we’ll come with an ambulance.” The Thai SEALs had to explain that rescue might take some time and they should trust that the authorities were doing everything possible to get them out. Dr. Bhak was likely unaware of the monsoon systems grinding toward them. Should those rains arrive before the rescue mission, he might have unknowingly complicated the group’s survivability by doling out multiple MREs instead of one—however well-intentioned his actions and however hungry the kids were.

  By Dr. Bhak’s third day there, Friday, July 6, the boys started perking up. There was a lot of talk about where they would travel when they got out and what they would eat. They desperately wanted to be out before the soccer World Cup finals in the middle of the month. Dr. Bhak remembers this period as rather monotonous: “Our usual routines were waking up, eating our meals together, talking to each other for a bit, and then sleeping.”

  All that eating jump-started their digestive tracts. With seventeen people now consuming about twenty-five hundred calories per day, defecation became an issue. They had dug a latrine where their little mound dipped down toward the cave wall. When it filled up with urine or stank too much, they’d cover it. But defecation required some more creativity. So the boys, always with a SEAL escort, would paddle about ten feet out into the canal and float until the deed was done. The current would carry their waste back toward the T-junction—in the direction of incoming divers. It was through these bowel-movement excursions that the Thai SEALs learned that all the boys could swim, more or less. MREs are surprisingly tasty (possibly due to their high sodium content), and with their energy up the boys’ internal thermostats had stabilized. They were no longer as cold and didn’t mind going into the water.

  But there is an ocean of difference between being able to paddle out ten feet and being ready to embark upon a mile-long underwater odyssey, in a full face mask, in molasses-colored water . . . as your first scuba dive ever.

  At press conferences outside the cave, government officials made it sound like the boys were in a professional diving course. Even before Mallinson and Jewell had returned from their delivery run of food and wet suits to the boys, Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwan told reporters in Thailand, “The [current] is very strong and space is narrow. Extracting the children [will require] a lot of people. . . . Now we are teaching the children to swim and dive.” This is the same deputy prime minister who told reporters that the U.S. Special Tactics team possessed special mountain-penetrating radar.

  In reality, there was no way that the boys would be swimming out, diving out, or in any way actively participating in a possible rescue. Everyone who had any involvement with the planning of the emerging rescue operation—which at this point the Thais considered the least desirable option—considered it a nonstarter. Between the oxygen levels, the weather forecast, and the inability to adequately resupply food to Chamber Nine, the situation had undoubtedly become more dire. Almost everyone on the international teams understood the new stakes involved in this operation, but somehow—possibly owing to a messenger’s reluctance to deliver bad news—this reality had apparently not yet made its way up to the Thai decision makers. Which is surprising given that Vern Unsworth, who knew the cave better than anyone, had been trying to tell the Thai leadership since June 25 that “this was a rescue mission of very high risk. Very high. But I told them if you wait until December or January you’ll be bringing out thirteen bodies.” “High risk” had become a euphemism among the divers for “we expect many of the boys to die.” Vern says his calls for action caused him to fall out of favor with the leadership. They didn’t want to hear it, he said.

  The apparent disconnect persisted despite the fact that the main war room and the moldy British diving office were next door to each other. Yet somehow the Brits’ calls to launch an urgent rescue operation had not gotten through. The Thai government seemed unaware of the worsening conditions in the cave and the necessity of prompt action, opting instead to keep pushing for unworkable solutions like the oxygen tube, drilling, the boys swimming out themselves, and—arguably the most dangerous of all—extreme patience.

  Such was the state of things when Richard Harris and Craig Challen arrived at the cave complex on July 6. The two middle-aged Aussies belong to a cave-diving group calling itself the Wet Mules. One of its members, who traveled frequently to the United States, had come across the expression that a wealthy man “has enough money to burn a wet mule.” The colorful phrase stuck. As their tongue-in-cheek Web site says, “it began to enter our conversations frequently . . . hungry enough to eat a wet mule, as tired as a wet mule, as wet as a wet mule, etc. Then it occurred to us! As a large part of our chosen pursuit of cave diving seems to revolve around ferrying heavy objects in and out of caves, submersing ourselves in frigid waters for many hours and generally abusing our bodies in a multitude of ways, we were beginning to take on the persona of the wet mule itself!”

  The Wet Mules would stalk the Nullarbor Plain, off Eyre Highway, which boasts arguably the world’s longest straightaway—ninety-one miles of dizzyingly unvarying two-lane blacktop. It’s so flat today because about 100 million years ago the Australian landmass was split and its central belly was covered by a blanket of ocean. It’s now the world’s largest single exposure of limestone bedrock. When the ocean receded, rainwater honeycombed the porous limestone, creating one of the earth’s greatest (still largely unexplored) cave systems.

  It beckoned to cavers
who were, as the Mules called themselves, “Stubborn, strong of back and oblivious to pain.”

  “We love,” their amusing Web site continues, “unexplored caves; making it up as we go along; combining diving with helicopters; unique solutions to unique problems; rebreathers, SCUBA cylinders, snorkels or whatever will get the job done safely and efficiently; individualism; contributing to the science, conservation and understanding of what we enjoy . . . caves!”*

  Over the years they spent most of their free time exploring them. Among their great stalwarts were Challen and Harris. Challen, the veterinarian, had recently been named Australasian Technical Diver of the Year by his country’s biggest diving trade show organizer, Oztek. He had set an Australian depth record of 722 feet (nearly as deep as the Eiffel Tower is tall—at that depth your lungs are squeezed to about one-twentieth of their size at the surface) in a place called the Pearse Resurgence in New Zealand. The resurgence is the artesian-spring headwaters of the Pearse River; it plunges to a still-unknown depth below the Kahurangi National Park. With its wind-scrubbed cliffs, alpine pastures, and temperate rain forest near the river, the park is a place where divers from around the world congregate—including Stanton and Vollanthen. In fact, Stanton teamed up with Harris in 2007 on one of his expeditions there. In a magazine article he later wrote about the experience, Harris describes nearly dying when he became dizzy and disoriented and found himself trapped in a subterranean cavern; he only managed to escape when fellow divers came for him.

  If Challen had scraped below the radar, Harris seemed an ever-present blip. He has published widely—magazine articles about the serenity of the deep and its dangers. He has described descending into the crystalline waters of one of the caves of the Nullarbor Plain as “being in space,” where the walls are so white that lights reflecting off them magnify the beauty of the water and the visibility is hundreds of yards. It was a nearby cave that claimed scientist and fellow cave diver Agnes Milowka. She became disoriented in one of the passages, ran out of air, and died. Harris was the diver who found and helped recover her body.