The Boys in the Cave Read online

  “Hi sir, if possible can you assist in any way to get the 12 Thailand boys and their coach out of the cave. @ElonMusk.”

  The Twitter user, going by the handle @Mabz, wasn’t particularly active on the social network and had about five hundred Twitter followers at the time; Musk had something on the order of 22 million. Luckily for Mabz, whose real name is Mabuya Magagula, a software developer for the Swaziland Revenue Service, Musk resides in California but seems to live on Twitter. That among the meteor shower of tweets bursting onto his page every day he spotted this one, from a complete unknown, and decided to respond to it, is astounding. Magagula wasn’t so surprised that he had responded, but “I was really surprised that Musk put himself on the line like that. Others would have decided to avoid [involvement in the rescue] because it could have ended badly.”

  Magagula also knew that the polymath tech titan has a reputation for grand gestures of largesse. A day later, on July 4, Musk replied, “I suspect the Thai govt has this under control, but I’m happy to help if there is a way to do so.” That response generated more than twenty thousand likes. Magagula is the father of a one-year-old, and at night in his comfortable bed he couldn’t shake the image of the boys in the cave: hungry, tired, yearning for sunlight and their parents. He was glad Musk felt the same way he did: “I was really impressed with his humanity.”

  The tech maestro then ruminated on it for a day or two, and on July 6 retweeted an idea floated by the CEO of a satellite communications provider to create an air-inflated nylon tube through parts of the cave that would work like the guts of a bounce house, allowing the boys to scramble out without getting wet.

  Musk’s chief of staff reached out to Rick Stanton, and that generated calls and an e-mail exchange between Stanton and Musk himself early on July 7—all this while the team was in the midst of those practice dives with the local boys and the ROC drill.

  From: Elon Musk

  To: Rick Stanton

  Are you one of the divers who understands the cave geometry? Trying to help out, but need to know the details of the most problematic areas.

  Stanton explained to him the tortured contours of the cave—the daggerlike rocks, the spaces smaller than the crawl area beneath a kitchen table, and the appalling visibility. One of the world’s most innovative engineers was on the case, and he was indeed talking to cave-diving experts involved in the rescue itself. Musk now appeared intrigued, and later that morning of Saturday, July 7, rifled off an excited tweet about his brainstorming session—he called it “iterating” with “cave-diving experts in Thailand”—about creating “an escape pod” that would be alternately pushed and pulled out of the cave by divers. In that same tweet he also floated the idea of the inflatable tube, but noted it was “less likely to work given tricky contours of the cave.” That tweet was “liked” over 150,000 times, or by nearly twice the number of people who live in Swaziland’s capital of Mbabane.

  Musk assigned SpaceX rocket scientists and space-suit engineers to the case and threw his tremendous energy into the project, exchanging multiple e-mails over the course of that Saturday with the terse Stanton, who at one point wrote back: “With respect all I see is a tube, albeit made of fancy materials.” Stanton noted that they had been ferrying food using something similar to those dry tubes (which is like comparing a pushcart to a Tesla), and asked for specifics about breathing systems, venting systems, and buoyancy control.

  Early on Sunday, July 8, Musk, who was starting from scratch and investing tremendous resources in the project and who had been remarkably cordial, was offended: “With respect, I am trying to be helpful. Please do not be rude.”

  Musk was right, and Stanton apologized, encouraging the inventor to push on. At that point, even though the Thai prime minister had approved the divers’ rescue plan and it was scheduled to start in hours, the rescue team had no plan B. If they couldn’t dive the boys out they would die, so Stanton was eager for any mechanism that might protect them; so far, Musk’s idea had been the only viable alternative. “We’re worried about the smallest lad please keep working on the capsule [escape pod] details,” Stanton wrote in one of several e-mails that Musk later posted on Twitter.

  Musk asked for more feedback, adding that he didn’t want to ship the cigar-shaped tube to Thailand if it was not going to be useful. His SpaceX engineers had swiped a nearly six-foot-long component that funnels liquid oxygen into the Falcon 9 rocket’s engine. The tubes were extraordinarily robust and made out of aluminum lithium alloy. As Musk assigned some of his rocket people to shape that pipe into a cigar-shaped escape pod, he also sent engineers from The Boring Company to the Tham Luang cave to assess whether their technology might help drill a shaft to the boys.

  Musk’s next series of excited tweets, late on July 8, announced the rough specs: “primary path is basically a tiny, kid-size submarine using the liquid oxygen transfer tube of Falcon rocket as hull. Light enough to be carried by 2 divers, small enough to get through narrow gaps. Extremely robust.” The principle was basically this: instead of maneuvering the boys out of the cave with an air tank strapped to them, they would be maneuvered inside an air tank, cocooned from the harsh elements of the cave.

  Later that day he tweeted videos of his pod, noting that it would likely be ready to ship to Thailand in eight hours, and that seventeen hours later—late on Monday, July 9—it would be in Chiang Rai. The prototype that the SpaceX engineers built and tested in Los Angeles pools, and which Musk proudly displayed on Twitter and Instagram, looked like a gleaming six-foot-long silver torpedo with a hatch on its flat bottom. That’s where the “casualty” would be placed, whereupon a team of two divers, pulling and pushing, would theoretically guide the space-proof capsule through the midnight murk of the cave’s tunnels. That bottom hatch featured a mechanism which pumped air into the pod from what appeared to be air tanks strapped to the torpedo’s belly. It was just wide enough for a skinny adult to squeeze in, but big enough for the Thai youth soccer players.

  In the last video Musk posted of the pod, a group of divers navigate it to the edge of a pool where a team is waiting with monkey wrenches. The video shows at least five people on the pool deck pulling it out of the water, with two others pushing from the pool, and within forty seconds or so the “casualty” wiggles out. Though bulky and heavy, it had a lovely design—truly a Musk-esque craft, created by some of the most brilliant engineers in the world at breakneck speed. And Musk promised that it would also be safe, writing that the “operating principle is same as spacecraft design—no loss of life even with two failures.”

  For Stanton, some of the specifics were left wanting; for instance, what would happen to the carbon dioxide building up inside the tube as the boys exhaled over a two-hour period? The man in the pod had a pony tank with him, a small scuba tank fitted directly to a mouthpiece—would a rescuee need that as well? The difference between Musk’s plan and the one devised by British divers and the international team could not have been greater. Ex nihilo, Musk’s paean to engineering was a sleek silver pod made from futuristic rocket parts. The British plan could have been distilled into “drug ’em ’n’ drag ’em.”

  Musk’s tube appeared to be too big and too late. By the time Musk landed in Thailand on Sunday night, July 9, the divers had already rescued eight of the boys. Musk wrote courteously to Stanton: “Have to leave for Shanghai tomorrow morning, so don’t know if we will have the opportunity to meet. If not, please allow me to express my admiration for the incredible job that you and the rest of the dive team have done.”

  By then, Governor Narongsak had publicly thanked Musk, but called the device “impractical.” It was a bit of a head-scratcher for the media, because at this point the rescue of the remaining four boys and their coach seemed a mere formality. “It was a very well-meaning effort” is how a U.S. official diplomatically described Musk’s team’s initiative, “but for the conditions in the cave it wasn’t going to work. The [British] divers were pretty clear with him that it was
not viable for this one, but could be used for other situations,” the official added.

  On the night of July 9, Musk met the prime minister. According to diplomatic sources, during this meeting Musk somehow understood that the prime minister had granted him permission to enter the cave. So, in the middle of the night, with operations for the third day due to begin within hours, Musk managed to breach the careful order that the American team had implemented and, according to the sources, bluster his way in.*

  In his time there he managed to snap a couple of stunning nighttime shots and some of the clearest video yet of what appears to be the swampy canal leading out of Chamber One toward Chamber Two, which he mistakenly called “Cave 3,” and posted them to social media. He was at the nerve center of the rescue hours before it was to resume. Thoroughly unimpressed with Musk’s presence were the Thai leadership at the site, including Governor Narongsak, the King’s Guard, and other honchos.

  “They were pretty upset,” said the diplomatic source, and the U.S. State Department began to brace for blowback. Aside from the dismay on the Thai side, there was no fallout, and Musk graciously left his escape pod with the Thai Royal Navy.

  The last e-mail in the Stanton-Musk chain consisted of a query by Stanton about why Musk’s engineers hadn’t brought the tube up to the camp to present it to the actual rescue divers—after all, it might be used in future rescues. Stanton says he never got a response. The rescue divers suspected the engineers might not have wanted them to inspect it too closely. However, others at the camp got to see it up close, including Thanet (see picture).

  Chapter Twenty

  Lost

  It had rained overnight—hard. When Thanet Natisri, the water-management consultant, woke up on the morning of Tuesday, July 10, it was still pissing down.

  The rescuers had originally hoped that this would be a down day. Stanton and Vollanthen had been going nonstop for fifteen consecutive days. The rescues were brutal on the body and the mind. Television networks were going with wall-to-wall coverage of the rescues—so many millions watched that it was sapping viewership of the World Cup, and Elon Musk’s arrival only magnified the attention.

  But the rain forced their hand. Looking at the forecast, the rescuers determined that the weather would likely only get worse, so there would be no day off on Tuesday. In fact, the rescuers were so concerned about the weather that they decided to extract the last four boys and the coach all in one day, before conditions deteriorated further. This decision to remove all five in one day had its own complications, because they only had four positive-pressure masks that they knew would fit the boys. There was a fifth, but it was an older model designed for a slightly wider face. Well over one hundred full face masks had been flown in from around the world, including some designed for women and children, but none had the special gauge that would turn them into positive-pressure masks. And by the time they got the go-ahead for the mission, planners deemed it too late to scrounge up another, which would likely have to be flown in from the United States.

  In addition to the problem of the masks, there was also the issue of divers. Mallinson, Vollathen, Jewell, and Stanton were the divers best qualified to bring the boys out, and they had taken one kid apiece on each of the first two days of the rescue. Now, with five people to take out on this final day, something had to change. Mallinson, arguably the strongest swimmer and as experienced as Stanton and Vollanthen, volunteered for double duty. He would take the first boy to Chamber Seven, where support diver Jim Warny would take over and haul the boy to Chamber Three. Mallinson would then swim back to Chamber Nine and take the last person—they assumed it would be the coach—to freedom.

  With the day’s rescue of five people now hanging in the balance, Thanet scrambled to figure out how much rain had accumulated so far. A decision had been made that if it rained fifteen millimeters—a little over half an inch—an hour, that day’s operation would be canceled. Thanet called his weather team at Thailand’s Geospacial Engineering and Innovation Center, then dialed the workers maintaining the dam above the Monk’s Series, which likely had a hand in diverting some of the water flow inundating the cave. For nearly a week, the weather, along with Thanet’s water diversions atop the Monk’s Series and the pumps the Thai government had set up inside the cave, had allowed for more favorable diving conditions. Those factors had been partially responsible for the success they’d had on the first two days; after all, had the water level in the cave not been reduced, the divers would never have been able to reach the boys in the first place.

  And now all that appeared to be shifting. The element Governor Narongsak had declared “the enemy of the rescue”—water—was again at the gates. Inside the cave, conditions were worsening—thirteen divers flapping around over two days was more activity in the deeper recesses of the tunnel than it had experienced at any point by an order of magnitude. The divers now faced silt that threatened to clog rebreathers and mouthpieces, and now a deluge of rain foreboded a stiffer current. That they foresaw this didn’t make it easier. This is why the Americans had pressed for extraction as soon as possible—and why they scrambled to start that day’s rescues more than an hour ahead of schedule.

  When Thanet spoke to his team working the dam above the Monk’s Series, he was told it had rained fourteen millimeters in an hour. He called Anderson with the news just before the dive teams were about to set off. With rainfall just one millimeter—the width of a dime—short of the predetermined cutoff it was a tough call; of course, once the divers dipped into the chilly waters of Chamber Three, it would be impossible to pull them back. Anderson was standing by on his WhatsApp ready to tap out an “abort!” message to Chamber Three if the rain increased.

  For their part, the divers had their own barometer, and it wasn’t Thanet’s rain gauges. “I was ready to abort at any minute,” said Stanton. He could plainly see it was the most significant precipitation since he had watched the cave flood ten days earlier. Around Mae Sai that morning, the grass got soggy, then disappeared into bog. The streets were slicked at first, then little canals started forming at the sides. It rained for hours.

  And much more rain was coming—it was perhaps now or never. A delay today could leave the last five members of the soccer team and those four Thai SEALs marooned for months, possibly until death. Hodges and Anderson decided to proceed. The mission was still a go.

  The one reason for optimism was that the day’s actual forecast, if it could be believed, was for a break in the rain from late morning into afternoon, before another system was predicted to blow in. That small break in the precipitation might give them the time they needed for a successful mission.

  Stanton was prepared to make the call once they got to the T-junction. If the team noticed clearer, warmer water rushing in from the Monk’s Series on the right, they would turn back. It would also be the ultimate test of the dam and diversion of that unnamed stream that Thanet and his team had engineered about six days earlier.

  Once the mission was under way, as each diver came to the opening at the T-junction, he looked right toward the Monk’s Series. For once the lack of visibility in the water was reassuring. No clear water from the Monk’s Series equaled no new water. For Stanton this was proof that Thanet’s diversion scheme had worked. Five or ten minutes apart, each man turned left, heading for the last boys and Coach Ek.

  When they reached the chamber, they found two of the SEALs and Dr. Bhak at the waterline. They had observed what the rescuers had been doing in previous days and had readied the boys for departure. Mallinson was first up again. He had expected to take one of the smaller boys, but waiting for him was Coach Ek. No one asked questions, since it was the team’s decision, but he and the others found it odd. Everyone had assumed the coach would be last. Harris had given him the option of diving out without sedation, and the coach, through Dr. Bhak’s translation, answered that he wanted to go out exactly as the rest of the boys had. Jab right, jab left, and within minutes he was comatose.

>   Though the coach was a decade older than the boys, several of them were taller than him; once in the water, Mallinson didn’t have to strain. He guided him through that longest sump to Chamber Eight, then helped haul him over the rocks with Challen and Rasmussen to Chamber Seven. There, as planned, Jim Warny picked up. Warny, who had been promoted to rescuer, made it back to Chamber Three in record time—the fastest extraction yet.

  After handing Coach Ek off to Warny, Mallinson turned back to Chamber Nine. His final assignment would be to ferry home the very last child, the one they thought might be the smallest. Fitting the boy with dive gear, binding him, and sedating him was a two-person job, and since Mallinson knew the cave far better than Harris, it was decided that he should do the rescue and have Harris as backup.

  That morning, Vollanthen had a straightforward dive with the tenth boy, Tee. But just before the home stretch, he was stopped dead in his tracks at the squeeze between Chambers Four and Three. This was the stretch that had given everyone trouble on the first day, and now it was proving problematic all over again. It took him a few minutes to blindly feel his way past the relics of the first rescue attempts—those pumps, hoses, and electrical wires. When he found the narrow opening, he knew there was a wider way through, but it took him a couple of minutes longer to find the part wide enough to fit both his six-foot-two frame and the boy. Wedging himself and Tee through, he swam the boy to Chamber Three. Vollanthen popped out and waited for his mate Stanton.

  As is his wont, Stanton methodically picked his way through the passages. There was no hurry, and anyway, hurried divers make mistakes. His abused fifty-seven-year-old body was creaking along. He had Titan in tow, all sixty-six pounds of him. The diver was grateful for the lighter load. Before setting out from Chamber Nine, he had managed to streamline the boy even more by sticking an empty water bottle in the elastic band binding his legs. Now the boy’s feet would not scrape the bottom; instead Titan’s legs would float—he would be as streamlined as a seal.