FOUND! ...but how COULD they get them out alive?
After ten days trapped, the boys in the Thai cave disaster were desperate, hallucinating and slowly starving — then two divers made contact. But as the second part of a riveting new book reveals, the joy was short-lived...
WHEN the boys of a Thai football team went missing in a flooded cave last June, an anxious world watched and waited. In this second extract from his gripping account of the rescue, investigative reporter LIAM COCHRANE describes how the race against time seemed lost. But then a miracle happened...
THE mums and dads were losing faith. When the boys and their football coach went missing in the Tham Luang cave on Saturday afternoon, 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 now it was Wednesday, Day Five. Doubts were growing. Were their boys still alive? For 16-year-old Night’s dad, this 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?
The father of Biw had already felt despair after going into the flooded cave to help with the rescue, feeling the chill of the thin underground air and seeing the water rushing relentlessly in. But he was determined to at least bring his son’s body home for a funeral.
For the rescuers, conditions were not improving. The SEALs of the Thai Navy’s Special Forces heading the operation set their sights on at least getting to the T-junction — a crucial landmark a mile or so inside the complex cave system that snaked through the mountain.
But they barely made 100 yards. The strong current, somewhere between a fast-moving river and white-water rapids, drove them back. With all the mud and debris in the churning water, one diver likened it to swimming in ‘a whirlpool of cafe latte’.
Ben Reymenants, a Belgian who ran a diving school in the town of Phuket, went in with a guide line of thick rope to attach to the walls and haul himself along. He inched forward, buffeted this way and that, trying not to bump too hard into the jagged walls and overhangs.
In narrow parts of the flooded space, he got stuck. The dive computer on his wrist broke. His helmet was battered against the wall. He managed to lay about 100 metres of line, but eventually conditions became too much.
‘It was beyond my personal limits,’ he said. ‘Just too many red flags — can’t see, got entangled in a restriction, down currents, broken computer.
‘And there’s no guarantee the kids are alive, there’s no guarantee they are where we think they are, so it’s a double speculation. You’re risking your life for an if . . .’ There was also a gloomy feeling among the British specialist cave divers, who’d arrived to take part. Having seen how quickly the cave had flooded, they seriously doubted that the 12 boys of the Wild Boars soccer team and their coach could still be alive. Yet no one was prepared to give up. The urge everyone felt to rescue them was too strong. Thousands of people were now involved in the international operation, backed by volunteers.
Food trucks, including mobile kitchens sent by the King of Thailand from his palace, served 20,000 hot meals a day. Giant vats of curry were stirred with cricket stump-sized ladles.
Rescuers had their pick of batteries, socks, underwear, painkillers, balms, soap, sweets. Next to the medical tent, masseuses gave free neck rubs to relieve stress. Hairdressers offered to cut hair.
Off site, more generosity went largely unseen. Hotels, resorts and village homes opened their doors for the rescue teams, providing accommodation, meals and washing clothes, also for free.
Flagging morale among the Thais was revived when a revered Buddhist monk came, meditated at the cave entrance and appealed to the spirits of the Mountain of the Sleeping Lady to let the boys out.
He declared: ‘Don’t worry — in a day or two the children will come out’. When the parents heard the prediction, their hopes rose again.
But the best omen of all was that the monsoon that caused the flooding had stopped and the divers could get back in the cave. Meanwhile, on the mountain, drilling teams set up machinery to bore holes, down which a microphone could be dropped to listen for life.
They could only make an educated guess as to where in the cave complex the boys might be.
But at the very least, they argued, they would make a racket with their drills, and the sound would vibrate and echo through the porous limestone. This would send a message to the Wild Boars that help was coming. ‘If I was in the dark for six days,’ an engineer explained, ‘I imagine I might lose hope, so we drilled to make noise and keep the kids hopeful.’ AND indeed, inside the cave, amid the constant dripping of water and the thuds and scrapes of their digging, sometimes the boys did hear sounds. One day, Titan thought he heard a helicopter. Biw heard a rooster crow. Another time, a dog barked — they all heard that one.
Where were the sounds coming from? Were their minds playing tricks on them? Some of the noises gave them hope, but others scared them. On the ledge deep inside the mountain, ‘sometimes we heard people’s voices talking at the bottom of the mound but we didn’t see anyone there,’ said Biw.
Even more frightening was the unnerving sound of someone calling their names. It summoned up Thai horror stories of ghosts. ‘Coach Ek told us that if we hear somebody call our names at night, don’t answer,’ said Biw.
There, inside the cave, time was running out, literally. Of the three watches the boys went in with, only one was still working but it at least enabled them to have some kind of routine in the darkness.
In the morning, they would fill their stomachs with the water running off the stalactites and then head to the top of the slope to dig at the back, in the hope of finding a route out. When 16-year-old Tee’s watch told them it was night, they lay down on the hard dirt to sleep.
It wasn’t comfortable, and they found themselves constantly slipping down the slope.
When they slept it was usually in short snatches.
But there was something else that kept them awake at night. Even at home, Titan, at 11 the youngest, was a restless sleeper who would sometimes sleepwalk to the toilet. In the cave it was worse. He talked and shouted in his sleep, keeping the others awake.
Sometimes he would even jump up, still fast asleep, which was annoying but also potentially deadly. If he wandered off, he might hit his head or fall into the water. So every night, Coach Ek would hold on to him, sleeping lightly, wary his youngest player might dream himself to death.
They still had working torches, but they rationed the light, knowing it could be many more days until they were found. Most of the time they were in a darkness so profound it felt like a physical substance, oozing around their bodies. It started to get into the boys’ subconscious minds. One night, Dom dreamed he was being chased by a black tiger. Another time
Titan thought Coach Ek was a warrior chasing him with a sword.
The line between sleep and wakefulness was often unclear in that darkness and all the more terrifying.
As the days dragged on, all of the boys had moments of despair and shed some tears. But Note wept more than the others. He simply didn’t think they were going to get out alive. On July 1 it was his 15th birthday but there wasn’t much to celebrate. They were alive, but for how much longer?
After nine days, they were inching closer towards death, their bodies wasting away, their cheeks hollow, their skin grey. With no food to turn into energy, their bodies’ normal chemical processes slowed and then shifted, seeking sustenance elsewhere. The protein in their muscles was broken down into glucose, their fat turned into fatty acids and ketone. To fuel the life-giving fundamentals, their bodies were consuming them from the inside.
The heart must keep pumping blood. The brain must keep thinking. They must stay calm, conserve their energy. They must survive. FOR the rescuers outside, Sunday, July 1, brought a lucky break. The weather was easing. There had been no substantial rain for the past 36 hours. That afternoon, yellow measuring sticks at various points within the cave showed the water level dropping.
With the cave still flooded, but the flow becoming more manageable, foreign dive instructors based in Thailand volunteered to go back in to lay down hundreds of yards of guide ropes through the flooded passages, tying them to stalactites and rocks as they edged once again towards the T-junction.
Experienced British divers John Volanthen and Rick Stanton joined them. Visibility was still poor and diving blind put them on edge. When they bumped into any object in the water they half expected it to be a body. They were constantly bracing themselves for the worst.
But they were making progress and eventually battled their way through the cave to the T-junction. There was real hope at last.
For the parents outside, though, the mood had turned grim again. Ten days had now gone by. It was too long. They were all miserable and exhausted, stuck in a gutwrenching place somewhere between doubt and grief.
A doctor reckoned that, after ten days without food, the chance of a child surviving was down to 10 per cent. Even those optimists in charge of the operation were wondering if it was time to switch from a rescue strategy to a recovery one. That would be a different dynamic. A rescue operation involved pushing the limits of safety and putting lives on the line for someone else’s. The retrieval of bodies would be a slower effort, performed with care so as not to lose any more lives.
On the other hand, the boys and the coach might still be alive. They’d give it another day. This was still a rescue effort. Just. THAT night, it rained again, but the pumps installed in the cave did their job. The water didn’t rise. The levels were finally under control. The divers pushed further on into the cave. The precise location of the Wild Boars was still a guess.
Along the way though there were scattered clues such as muddy handprints on the cave wall that seemed to indicate they had turned left at the T-junction and were probably somewhere near a cavern known as Pattaya Beach.
But what state would they be in? Would they even be alive?
John Volanthen and Rick Stanton now started from the T-junction, laying guide ropes as they went, until they came to a diamondshaped pinch-point. They swam through it, jamming their fingers into the silt to crawl forward against the current.
They reached a big sandy slope and came up for air. They had reached Pattaya Beach — the chamber where everyone expected the boys to have holed up.
But the ledge was empty. No one was there.
Having used a third of their air supply already, they should by rights have turned back, but they made a calculated decision to dig into their reserves of air and keep going. With time running out, they were determined to go as far as humanly possible that day.
The boys had been trapped for ten days without food. The idea of stopping just short of them was preposterous, thought John. The two divers pushed on with a sense of determination, but also with dread. ‘I was absolutely expecting to find bodies in the water floating towards me,’ said John.
As they entered each new sump, they had little idea what was in store. Would it be a mere puddle or a long, flooded chamber? Would it be blocked with rocks, stalactites, debris or corpses?
Navigation was difficult in the murky passages and they made slow progress for 350 yards until they came to a room-sized chamber and surfaced. There was nothing on the steep muddy bank so they dived again and went on. ON THE next ledge along, 11-yearold Titan, the youngest of the Wild Boars, was fading, his tiny body wasting away. ‘I felt faint, I lacked energy and I was hungry,’ he recalled. He was thinking about home-cooked food.
Food fantasies played on the boys’ minds constantly. It had been about 245 hours since any of them had eaten. Their faces were gaunt, their cheekbones protruding.
Their decline was not just physical. As another day passed, their spirits were fading, too.
‘We were losing patience, hope, physical energy and courage. We could not do anything to help. The only thing that I could do was pray,’ said Adul, the only Christian of the group.
For the team’s captain Dom, tomorrow would be his 14th birthday. He rallied the boys and urged them to keep digging to break through the back wall and find a way out of the cave. He didn’t know it, but his birthday present was about to come early.
At around 8pm, the boys and Coach Ek were up on the ledge, some digging, others resting. ‘At that moment, I heard people talking,’ said Adul.
They all froze in the darkness, straining to hear and fearing their minds were playing tricks on them. Adul grabbed a torch and took off down the slope as fast as his weak body would carry him.
As he got to the edge, his legs went from under him and he slid into the water. He clambered back on the ledge, looked behind him at the water and saw, to his amazement, two men in diving gear.
‘It was a miracle moment,’ he remembered. ‘I realised they were British and so I just said hello.’
By this stage, the rest of the team had scrambled to the edge.
From the water, Rick Stanton counted them as they came down. As he scanned his torch across
their faces, he saw they were all there. ‘Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,’ the boys chorused at him. Adul and Biw, the only two English speakers, translated for the others. Adul asked, ‘When will we go outside?’ and John had to explain that it would not be today. But many people would come to rescue them, he promised. ‘We are just the first.’
The British divers hauled themselves onto the opposite bank, but to begin with stayed separated from the boys by a channel of water. It was a deliberate precaution. They had no idea what state of mind the boys and Coach Ek would be in. They feared that, starving and desperate, they might to try to rush them and grab their diving gear to escape. But after a few minutes, they quickly realised the 13 were calm and posed no threat.
For the next 40 minutes, John and Rick sat with the Wild Boars on their ledge. To raise the kids’ spirits, they asked them to cheer for the camera — a cheer for Thailand, a cheer for America, another for the UK, and on it went. The boys’ physical condition was remarkably good. They were gaunt but uninjured and didn’t appear sick. They even managed to smile, though when they did their teeth looked oversized in their pinched faces,
‘We’re hungry,’ a boy pleaded. ‘We have to eat, eat, eat!’ The divers hadn’t brought any food with them but promised they would send the SEALs in with supplies as soon as possible.
Lowering themselves back into the water, they said farewell, and started back through the sump.
Carried by the current, their journey back was quicker and slightly less arduous than it had been going. News of the boys being found alive had been messaged ahead of them and reached the world before they even got to the cave entrance. All around there were cheers and tears of joy. It seemed the impossible had come true. The priority now was to get back to them with food and medical supplies as soon as possible. The Thais took control and an army doctor, Dr Pak, and three SEALs headed into the cave.
It was a difficult journey for them, still having to battle against the current. They were not trained cave divers, the water was cold and the dive long. They suffered from cramps and were forced to rest before eventually making it to the ledge. There they reassured the boys they would remain with them as long as needed — even if that meant waiting half a year, until the cave drained.
Dr Pak got to work, getting some energy and nutrients into the boys’ systems without overloading them. Their small bodies were in life-support mode, slowly breaking down the fat and muscle to supply a trickle of energy, enough to keep the heart pumping and the lungs expanding.
Many of the body’s chemical processes had stopped, changed or reversed.
They were at risk of what doctors call re-feeding syndrome — the point of starvation at which too much food too soon could kill them.
A sudden rush of glucose would overload the system, sending their phosphate, potassium and magnesium levels into chaos. The result could be delirium, seizures, respiratory failure, heart failure, coma or even death. Although the boys were hungry and longed for rich pork and fast food, they had to be patient. The rescuers had brought little squeezy packets of high-energy gels. These tiny shots of life would have to suffice for now, gradually bringing their bodies back from the brink.
Generally their condition was surprisingly good. The doctor examined them and found no serious injuries. They needed medical care, but not urgently.
He applied antiseptic solution to the boys’ scratches. ‘This will kill the infection,’ he told one boy, as he swabbed his foot. ‘Then once you are out, we will find you a beautiful nurse.’
In the outside world, the joy of finding the team alive was the biggest news story on the planet. Millions of people joined in the relief and celebrated their survival. But for those responsible for getting the boys and their soccer coach out, the unalloyed pleasure didn’t last long. After the news had sunk in, it was replaced by the realisation of how deep inside the mountain the boys were, and how hard it was going to be to bring them back to the surface.
People had been rescued from caves, but never had such a difficult set of problems faced a rescue party — the children’s ages; their malnourished state; the long, flooded route out; the uncertainty of the weather. In an ideal world, the teams would be able to suck enough water out of the sumps for the Wild Boars to wade out the way they walked in.
But this wasn’t viable — some of the passages were 15ft deep, and more rain was coming.
The cautious solution was to wait. The boys and Coach Ek had energy gels, medicine and company. Perhaps they should camp on that muddy bank for the next four to six months, until the rains stopped and the passages drained. The riskiest option was to try to dive them out. The Wild Boars could all swim, but none had ever scuba dived. Even for a competent recreational diver, the way out was treacherous. For a non-diver, it would be almost impossible.
All options were on the table, and all were bad.