Aquanaut by Rick Stanton

Author:Rick Stanton [Stanton, Rick & Dealy, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405944113
Published: 2021-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

Wookey Hole Caves, Somerset

‘Don’t let the (unsurprising) incompetence of the local authorities distract you from trying to save the kids.’

Text message sent to me in Thailand from Jonathan Sims

Wednesday, 4 July 2018, Thailand

When we returned to the site at 9 o’clock on Wednesday morning, Rear Admiral Arpakorn and his staff officer Commander Pinyo6 greeted us with surprising news of the SEALs in the cave. We’d already known that four had been sent in on Monday night; what we didn’t know was that, when they had not returned by late Tuesday morning, an additional three had gone in after them. After a day had passed with no sign from any of them, they were all assumed to be lost. Arpakorn told us that just before we’d arrived on Wednesday morning, three had returned safely, with the other four remaining in Chamber 9. (We’d learn much later that the three who’d emerged had been so exhausted, they’d been taken straight to hospital.)

We had no clue what their plan had been, and I certainly couldn’t imagine why four had stayed inside, but I was relieved to learn that one of the Thais with the boys was an Army medical doctor, Dr Pak Loharnshoon. He, at least, could prove useful.

‘Are they going to try to dive the boys out?’ I asked.

‘No,’ Arpakorn told me. ‘None of the SEALs will be bringing the boys out. And from now on, no SEALs will be diving to their location.’

OK, then, what is your plan? They had forbidden all other divers from entering the cave, and now they had limited their own diving efforts. What did that mean for the boys? Watching them walk away, John pointed out an obvious fact that didn’t appear to be bothering anybody else.

‘He didn’t mention food. It’s been thirty-six hours since we saw them, and they’ve still had no food.’ As incredible as it sounded, nobody seemed worried about feeding them. Other than the few gel packets that had been taken in with the first SEALs, nothing had been done to address the football team’s malnutrition and impending starvation. We might have been forbidden from diving, but we weren’t going to let that stop us from tackling a problem that everybody else seemed to be ignoring. There were now seventeen people in the cave, and surely the first step in saving them would be to feed them.

I wanted to take in all of the food we could carry. We didn’t know how long they’d be in there. We didn’t know when (or if) John and I would be able to get back into them again. We didn’t know anything, really, except that the boys were in there, literally starving to death. We had promised to go back with food and we were already a day late. Forming a plan, we went to find Derek.

‘How many MREs7 do you have?’ I asked him.

While Derek was gathering Army supplies for us to take to the boys, Arpakorn tracked us down. ‘We don’t know what to do,’ he admitted, then asked us if we had any recommendations for them.

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