The Boys in the Cave Read online

  Note’s head, facing down, inevitably clanged against the unseen rocks. If you float in a pool facedown, you’ll notice that while it’s easy to keep your abdomen floating just by breathing, your legs are not buoyant—they sink. Which is why the boy’s bare feet dangled low and scraped the sharp rocks and gravel on the tunnel floor. But Mallinson wasn’t worried about that. He also wasn’t worried about the burst eardrums the kids might suffer in some of the deeper dives.* His mission, brutal as it sounds, wasn’t necessarily to bring the boy out in one undamaged piece. It was just to bring him out alive. And for that, his sole focus became the seal on the mask.

  “It felt as though it was quite firm on the face. But until you’d knock them about a bit—and I don’t mean on purpose, it was just that you know you’re in there with no visibility; you’re going to hit a rock. Sometimes they got a bit of a bash. So I knew after the first five minutes that the mask had a good seal.” His focus turned to those bubbles. When he couldn’t see them he would pull the boy in, a finger’s distance away from his face, hold his own breath and listen for the reassuring rattle of the boy’s uneven breathing like a nervous mother peeking in on her sleeping newborn.

  In Chamber Eight, Stanton felt the line vibrate. He watched the phantasmal couple emerge in a blast of headlights.

  Stanton could not tell whether Note was breathing or not. Mallinson handed him the boy, whom he and Challen put into recovery position on his side and began to examine. Mallinson waited a beat as he dragged himself out of the water—and said, “Oh, yeah, he’s still breathing.”

  Challen tapped on the corners of the boy’s open eyes—open eyes are part of the dissociative state under ketamine. Mallinson began to gather his cylinders to head for Chamber Seven, but he was irritated. He had just completed the arguably single most perilous leg of a rescue dive in history. Why the hell were Challen and Stanton alone? Where were the Euro-divers with the Skedco? After removing the boy’s mask and checking on his breathing, pulse, and body temperature, Challen informed him there’d be no more help, no stretcher. So Mallinson and Stanton grabbed Mallinson’s and Note’s tanks and humped them to Chamber Seven. They returned for the boy. Challen took his arms as Stanton grabbed his legs, and they hoisted the limp body. They had about two hundred yards to cover. They kept tripping on the shark’s-tooth rocks and strained to lift Note over and through a boulder field. The tunnel there meanders, and each section seems to have its own ecosystem of mud—ranging from crunchy and gravelly, to ankle-deep pudding, to beachy sand. It was tough going for the forty-nine-year-old Mallinson and the fifty-seven-year-old Stanton. When they reached the water on the other end they were heaving. Mallinson was exhausted.

  The semisubmerged parts of the cave required more work to plow through than the totally submerged parts. The diver had to slosh through the water, bending low and dragging the boy on the surface. His hands ached from white-knuckling the straps in the hour since he’d left Chamber Nine. When Mallinson arrived at Paasi and Rasmussen’s position, he barked, “What the hell are you doing here? You’re not needed here—we need help back at Eight, you need to get back there . . . and bring the Skedco!” The two Euro-divers weren’t quite sure what to say. They were there to assist and support—the Brits called the shots and there was little point explaining the various Talmudic interpretations of the definition of “Chamber Seven and Chamber Eight.” They thought they were in the right place—but they had not been certain because they had never before been this far into the cave. What the plan had called for, but what had not apparently been specified clearly enough, is that Paasi and Rasmussen were to help the divers cross the dry areas of Pattaya Beach. As Paasi helped Mallinson move forward, the forty-five-year-old Rasmussen bolted back for the farther reaches of Pattaya Beach, alternately power-swimming and running, his Skedco bouncing over the rocks behind him.

  He arrived to see Challen kneeling over the second boy, Tern, and Vollanthen unhooking his gear. Vollanthen glanced up, and for the second time in half an hour a Brit would bark at Rasmussen for being late or in the wrong place. These were tense moments, and any wrinkle in the plan might have had fatal consequences. Rasmussen and Challen pulled off the second boy’s kit, laid him on the Skedco, and wrapped the firm plastic sides around him. They hustled him to Chamber Seven as Vollanthen carried the gear, jabbed him with a farewell dose of ketamine, and handed him to Vollanthen—who was already stationed in the water—and headed back. After an hour of continuous hustle it was a bit of a break. Rasmussen and Challen, who’d worked together on various cave-diving expeditions, chitchatted.

  About twenty minutes later Chris Jewell arrived with the third boy, Nick, who had just had his fifteenth birthday in that rocky tomb. He wasn’t the oldest boy, but he was one of the biggest, standing about five foot eight. Jewell was about fifteen years younger than the next-youngest Brit rescuer; as the Aussie and the Dane labored with Nick and the Skedco, they noticed Jewell had marched through the boggy mud without taking off his diving gear and carrying the boy’s extra tank. It was well over a hundred pounds of gear and he wasn’t out of breath. On their way back, as they meandered through the snaking tunnels to Chamber Eight, Rasmussen and Challen marveled at the younger man’s strength. They were expecting another twenty-minute breather before the last diver of the day. While they had no idea whether the boys had survived the entirety of the journey, the Dane and the Aussie felt a flutter of optimism that this insane scheme might work.

  About forty minutes earlier, swimming from Chamber Eight to Chamber Nine, Stanton thought the same. In that long underwater stretch he had just passed Vollanthen with Tern and seen those blessed little bubbles rise from the sides of the second boy’s mask. When he swam up to Chamber Nine, Jewell was dressing his ward for the journey. Stanton informed Dr. Harris that two of the boys had survived the journey as far as the edge of Chamber Eight. He then helped Jewell and Harris pack the third boy off and prepared the fourth boy to be moved that day. It was Night. He was fourth because his cousin Nick lives about half a block farther from the cave site. Like his cousin, Night was one of the larger boys and seemed perfectly healthy coming down the slope.

  Geography played a role in the boy’s order of exit, but it so happened that the first four boys out were also the group’s biggest—just as the American planners had hoped. It was no accident, but was a clever bit of decision-making by Coach Ek and Dr. Bhak, which they kept from the boys.

  Night was one of the tallest boys, and while the foreign divers didn’t know it yet, he’d also been one of the boys with the most severe symptoms of pneumonia. So as soon as Harris dosed him with ketamine, he stopped breathing. Temporary apnea under sedation is not abnormal and had happened with Note, as well. Once they fitted his mask and dunked his head in the water to ensure a seal, Night stopped breathing again. Then came a slow breath. Tentatively, Stanton grabbed hold of the boy, floating him above the water as he nosed into the canal. Ten yards, no breath; twenty yards, nothing; thirty yards, he couldn’t tell. Fifty yards out, Stanton shouted back to Harris: “He doesn’t seem to be breathing much!”

  Dr. Harris shouted back, “There’s nothing we can do about it, keep going!”

  Over one thousand feet of rock and coffee-ground water separated him from help. Stanton estimated Night was breathing about three times a minute. As he multitasked, he’d sometimes realize that a minute had gone by without his registering a breath from his charge.

  Behind Stanton, Dr. Harris quickly packed up and set off. While the divers carrying the boys were still threading their way to freedom, Harris’s work at Chamber Nine was done for the day—his end-of-day duty would be to serve as a rear guard, making sure that everyone got through okay. When Stanton pulled up to Chamber Eight, no one was there; he dragged the boy up the bank and waited. Within minutes Harris arrived, noticed the boy was starting to come to, and dispatched the boy back to narcosis land with another jab of ketamine. But again Night stopped breathing, this time for longer.

  As Rasm
ussen and Challen rounded the last bend of the tunnel before it opened into Chamber Eight, they saw lights glancing off the walls. They heard men talking. At the straightaway thirty yards out, they saw Dr. Harris lying on the sand spooning Night, cradling his head, and trying to keep his airway open. They had no doubt that some of the boys would die, which explains why Rasmussen and Challen were not particularly surprised to encounter this tableau.

  “He behaved like a kid with a bad chest infection under anesthesia, a lot of breath holding; he was oversedated,” said Harris of Night, who had received two shots of ketamine less than an hour into his journey.* Harris lay there, cheek to sand, fearing the boy was slipping away and thinking, Well, this is what I predicted would happen, this is going really badly.

  Ramussen went to see if he could help Harris, and Challen went to help Stanton gather his and the boy’s gear for the hike to Chamber Seven. Dead or alive, Stanton would have to take this teenager out, so he thought there was little point in holding up the operation by waiting around here to watch this boy die. For a while no one could tell if Night was breathing. There was no death rattle, just sporadic sips of breath. He had been one of the thinner boys to begin with and was now even thinner. The neoprene suit was bulky and the boy’s body seemed hummingbird frail—they had to bend low, in silence, to detect a sign of life. On his knees, Rasmussen—who speaks rudimentary Thai—leaned in close, held the boy’s face in his hands, and began cooing softly to him with the patchwork phrases he used when talking to his four-year-old Thai-speaking daughter: “Don’t worry, son—you’re on your way home—you’re going to your mom. . . . Don’t worry, son—you’re on your way home—you’re going to your mom.” It became a mantra Rasmussen would repeat over and over for the next thirty minutes, partly to soothe the boy and partly to calm his own nerves. From then on, he would repeat those words to each of the boys who came through Chamber Eight.*

  After half an hour “the boy sort of fired up, and we ended up needing another dose as we put him in the water down the track (to the sump at the next chamber),” said Harris. Stanton was the last rescue diver, and the previous divers had kicked up so much silt that he was blinded. Visibility was now barely a foot, and at times he could not make out the dainty little bubbles floating up from the boy’s mask. So, as he inched along the tunnels, instead of holding Night by the straps on his inflatable vest Stanton wrapped his arm around the boy, holding him tight to his body and tucking the boy’s head right under his chin.

  By now Mallinson, with Note in tow, had transited out of Chamber Seven when he felt a disquieting twitch. His package was moving. The boy was coming to! Mallinson was now in neck-deep water. His mind was whirring. He had to find shallower water, but there was no time; his young ward was clearly waking up. He had to sedate him, and immediately. First he had to try to get Note, who was floating horizontally, into a vertical position. He wrestled him upward, his bobbing head now pointing to the cave ceiling. Using his left hand and knee, he pinned Note against the cave wall. He then used his right hand to grasp one of the boy’s legs, which he hoisted above the surface of the water. Mallinson was already breathing heavily.

  With one hand and knee holding the boy in position, thigh out of the water, he used his right hand to fish around in his dry bag for the syringe pack. But when he reached in and opened it, the syringes and needles popped out. There was suddenly a flotsam of syringes and needles bobbing in the water, slowly being carried away from him by the current. Still holding on to the boy, he started swiping at the wayward syringes with his free hand. Finally he was able to grab a syringe, attach a needle, hoist the boy’s thigh higher out of the water, aim for the center mass of muscle, and jam it in. Then he waited, the two of them leaning against the cave wall, Mallinson panting. The twitching subsided, and Note was again comatose. It was the first time Mallinson had ever administered an injection to a human. He would give the boy three more injections before they reached Chamber Three.

  In the brown gloom, Karadzic and Brown waited silently in Chamber Five, staring in the direction of the T-junction from where the boy and his handler would be coming. It had been nearly two hours, when Karadzic saw the water stir and the lights dance on the cave ceiling. In his dry suit, the forty-five-year-old suddenly sprang to alertness from his stupor and raced the fifty yards through waist-high water to Mallinson and the boy. As he splashed over, he called out, “Do you need help?” The answer was an emphatic yes.

  As he neared Mallinson, he misread the distress on his face. Everything was fine, but after nearly one thousand yards of diving, swimming, and frantic sedating, Mallinson was exhausted. It was about three hundred yards to the next sump, where Mallinson could again dive. They inflated the boy’s vest so he would float, and Karadzic took control, guiding the inert boy to Brown and their little way station. Karadzic’s fingers were trembling, but he quickly switched out the boy’s oxygen tank for a fresh one. As he took his pulse and measured his temperature, he noted that the boy was mumbling something in Thai. “I realized the boys weren’t as sedated as they should have been.” That was not a function of the medical care, but of the drug itself, with its short duration of action.

  The last choke point in the dive was that drainage-pipe-size squeeze leading from Chamber Four to Chamber Three. Swimming out from Chamber Three to Chamber Four, a diver wouldn’t notice the difficulty at the end. But on the way back into Chamber Three, it looked like there was a rock curtain hanging from the cave roof. Unlike the tunnel beyond, this was a vertical squeeze before the dip down into that choke point. Divers could only fit through one at a time—so each rescuer would have to slide the boy or himself in first. It was another landmark that Mallinson had committed to memory. And by the time he swam up to it, he’d already mapped it out. He rearranged the position of the boy, pulling him upright—his head sagging to his chest, legs still dangling in the water. Then Mallinson stuffed him through with his right arm and slid in behind him, careful never to let go of his precious cargo.

  Because the traffic through this section had kicked up so much silt, it was one of the darkest parts of the dive, and Mallinson hoped his banged-up ward was still alive. Ahead was that home stretch of 150 yards to Chamber Three, where there were dozens of rescuers eager to help. Note was homeward bound; all that remained was the obstacle course of short swims, ropes, and a long, wet walk through chest-deep water.

  A team of Americans, including a USAF Special Tactics pararescuer, and the Thai Navy SEALs waited at the sump of Chamber Three. There is nothing grand about the place or the sump—it is simply a large pothole in the floor of an unimpressive room the height of an average American.

  It had been about six hours since the first divers slid into the hole. For the past hour or so, every eyeball in Chamber Three had been focused on the guideline in the water. There were no communications beyond that sump, no way to know whether a diver needed help or, if so, what kind. And no way to know if their precious cargo was still alive. Even if they became aware of trouble, it had already been decided that sending emergency divers to the rescue could trigger a potentially deadly collision or—nearly as dangerous—a human logjam in cramped spaces. Like a fish on a hook, they would only know they had something when the line started to bob. The more intense the vibrations, the closer the diver. Around 4 P.M. the line started to wiggle. Then it wiggled more vigorously. Finally two heads broke the mirrorlike surface nearly simultaneously. One of them was Mallinson’s.

  The U.S. Special Tactics team’s pararescuer, Tech Sergeant Ken O’Brien, pulled the boy from the exhausted diver, raised him up out of the water, and flipped his limp body onto its side. No one spoke as Sergeant O’Brien bent low to put his ear to the boy’s mask. The “package” was then strapped into a Skedco, which the Americans harnessed to the rope and pulley system and lifted gently over a series of boulders. After that the litter was carried by another team for about seventy yards around stalagmites and boulders to another rope system, and attached to another rope line. Thai
SEALs then maneuvered the stretcher down the forty-five-degree slope to an American pararescuer, who would dive it to Chamber Two.

  Mario Wild from the Chiang Mai climbing team was waiting atop the sump at Chamber Two, keeping the rope taut. A series of ancient military-style phones connected the first three chambers of the cave to the outside world.* They had to be cranked by hand in order to make a call, but the old technology was cave-proof. The phone buzzed in Chamber Two. It was a terse message informing the Thai commander there that the Skedco was on its way.

  Said Wild, “We didn’t know whether the kid was alive or dead. He had a full face mask on, couldn’t see anything. It wasn’t our job to assess whether the kid was alive or not. Our job was to get the kid out of the water and pass him on to the doctors.”

  Note was unresponsive, and it took a few seconds for the Thai doctor to assess his vitals. There was silence as the medic listened for breathing.

  “He’s alive!” came the call. Even though members of the teams were instructed to stay planted at their stations, there was a burst of cheers and a rush to take pictures of this marvel cocooned in plastic.

  “It was an amazing feeling. It was amazing,” remembered Wild, laughing. “The kid was alive! It took me a long time to process what had happened. Weeks, actually.”

  Mallinson was there and knew, of course, that the boy was still alive. The hardest part was over, but Mallinson wanted to see it through. He walked along as the boy on the stretcher was passed hand to hand and clipped in and out of various rope systems. Note was finally handed to a Thai SEAL team, which hauled him through more than four hundred yards of chest-high water and then ran him to the cave entrance, where he was exposed to his first rays of natural light in over two weeks.