Forget the films: this is what heroes are truly like

ONE’S a fireman, the other’s an IT consultant. Rick Stanton, the firefighter, is 56 and his friend John Volanthen, who runs his own business, is 47 – ages at which many men drift towards the golf course or the potting shed. John is a marathon runner in his spare time, but the two men share another unusual hobby: cave diving.

They get their kicks burrowing through underground tunnels and crevices in pitch darkness, like reverse mountaineers tackling unexplored peaks and for the same reason – because they’re there. And, sometimes, because there are people there – trapped in flooded caves with no hope of rescue beyond the skills and wiles of these extraordinary men.

This week, John Volanthen’s voice became the first external sound that 12 Thai schoolboys and their young coach heard after nine days huddled on a damp ledge in a underground cave.

‘How many of you? 13? Brilliant!’ was how the world discovered that the football team had been located, although John might just as easily have been taking a head-count for a post-match pizza, so calm was he.

Though the men’s hobby sounds just about as dangerous a pastime as it’s possible to pursue, friends this week described them both as ‘risk-averse’ – because risk-takers, it seems, don’t last long in the mysterious and treacherous world of underground caverns.

John and Rick are both members of a Welsh Cave Rescue team, they both work on an entirely voluntary basis and Rick Stanton got an MBE six years ago for his heroism.

Cave diving, he says, is more of a challenge than the moon landing was: ‘When people landed on the moon they had a map, they knew where they were going, but in a cave if you’re beyond the known limit of the cave, you never know what will happen around the corner.’

When they set off to probe beyond the known limits of that Thai cave, this week, when earlier searches had failed to find the boys on the only safe harbour so far discovered within it, the risk of ‘what might happen around the corner’ was a grave one. They seemed more than likely to stumble upon the drowned corpses of 12 young boys and their 25-year-old coach.

Even though signs outside the cave warned against entry during the rainy season it was, it appears, a local custom for teams to run in to the back of the first cave, write their names on the wall, and run back out again. This time, though, a flash flood trapped the group, driving them deeper and deeper into the labyrinth. They had almost been given up for lost when the two British divers pushed beyond the known limits of the treacherous caves, and found them – starved, frightened, trapped, but alive.

And, by all appearances, in good spirits too, which has to be a tribute to the coach who kept their hopes up.

They’ve still to be rescued, of course, and, as with the Chilean miners from 2010, the best international expertise is coming together to make a plan.

The drill-bit that excavated the Chileans’ escape route was an Irish innovation, after all. And, harrowing as such rescues can be, they’re also a reminder of the universality of goodness, valour and decency: for the battles that really matter, everyone wears the same colours and flies the same flag.

NONE of the options, though, are without risk. Only yesterday a diver – a former Navy Seal, no less – died in the tunnels while working on the rescue effort. If they decide to leave the boys on the ledge until the rainy season ends, there’s a danger that the heavy rain might flood their refuge.

Efforts to pump out the water along the four-kilometre route are ongoing, but it’s a race against time.

And that just leaves the prospect of teaching the young lads to dive like professionals, in conditions that would defeat the most skilled amateurs, in the space of a few days.

And the thought of the three hourlong journey they’d then face, in the deepest darkness through soupy water along miles of passageways barely wide enough for a single diver, is a claustrophobic’s worst nightmare.

The whole world will hold its breath, almost literally, when the mission to bring those boys out begins in earnest, just as the live footage of those miners’ liberation brought entire nations to a halt back in 2010.

This is one of those rare occasions when politics, borders, boundaries are forgotten and shared humanity triumphs, when even the bitterest enemies join together in willing the rescuers and their skinny little charges to safety.