Two Divers Were Trapped 300 Feet Inside a Flooded Cave in Florida With 40 Minutes of Air Left. I’m the Man They Call When the Rescue Is Probably Already Too Late

There are two rules in cave rescue.

One. Get the living person out first.

Two. Don’t die looking for the one who might already be gone.

Marcus was alive, in front of me, and he couldn’t swim out without my help. He was hypothermic, exhausted, terrified and breathing air that had almost no oxygen left in it.

Owen was somewhere in the dark, with no line, with maybe ten minutes of air, or none.

I had enough gas to get one person out with me.

Maybe.

I gave Marcus the third tank. I showed him how to breathe from it slowly. I clipped him to my harness with a short line.

“Look at my fins,” I said. “Only my fins. Don’t look anywhere else. If you panic, squeeze my ankle twice.”

He nodded.

We went down.

I knew the way out now. I’d laid my own line on the way in. Hand over hand, I followed it back through the narrow places, pushing my tank ahead, pulling Marcus behind me.

Two hundred feet.

One-eighty.

At one hundred and fifty feet, in a side passage I’d passed on the way in without seeing it, my light caught a glint of yellow.

A fin.

I stopped.

Marcus squeezed my ankle twice. Hard.

I turned my light into the side passage.

Owen was there. Wedged in a crack in the rock, his tank empty, his regulator out of his mouth, completely still.

I looked at my gauge.

I had enough gas for two people to reach the entrance.

Not three.