I was back in Canberra, home from Jakarta after three months in my first overseas posting, rushing around frantically packing up our family home while my wife and I grappled with how to move five-week-old twin boys and a two-year-old girl to a foreign city.

A short report on an ABC radio news bulletin, something about the search for a missing Thai soccer team entering its third or fourth day.

That was all. That's how it started.

"Those poor boys," I thought, not holding out much hope - like most people, I suspect - that they might ever be found alive.

Little did I know, from that short bulletin, what lay ahead.

Over 18 days, thousands of people - Thai government police, military and civilians, and a team of international divers and rescue workers - scrambled to save 12 young Thai soccer players and their assistant coach.

As each day passed, more and more people tuned in to the saga of the missing boys.

Surely the team, who had ventured into Tham Luang cave on a quiet Saturday afternoon before disappearing, were lost?

How could they possibly survive without food, without medical aid, with flood waters rising in a treacherous and tricky cave complex?

But nine days into the extraordinary saga two British divers, Rick Stanton and John Volanthen, had (somehow) managed to dive their way into the flooded cave system and find the team who were (somehow) still, all, alive.

And a few days later - my second day back at work in Jakarta after paternity leave - I kissed my wife and kids goodbye soon after 7am and flew to Thailand to cover what was without a doubt one of the most remarkable, uplifting global stories of the last decade.

Nine days after they were found, the entire team and their coach were out. It was scarcely believable that all of them were alive.

Through 2.25 kilometres of treacherous waters, caverns and caves, sumps and sinks, the divers swam and dived those boys out.

Nothing underscored the dangers the Boars and their rescuers faced better than the fact that Saman Gunan, a retired Thai Navy SEAL who was just 38, super-fit and had volunteered to assist in the rescue operation, died in the cave system just a couple of days before the operation began.

If conditions could prove fatal for Gunan, an experienced diver, what chance did the boys - trapped in the dark for more than two weeks, losing weight, strength and hope - have?

Few of the rescuers, if any, believed they would get all of the boys out alive.

The odds against 100 per cent success - with oxygen levels falling, the cold and hunger setting in, and treacherous passages to be negotiated - were extraordinary.

But save them they did.

A team of 13 international divers led by Stanton and Volanthen, with Aussies Richard Harris and Craig Challen playing a crucial role and a huge multinational support team, swam and dived the team out one by one over three long days.

Fourth months later, it still scarcely seems credible.

The Great Cave Rescue, my book on those incredible 18 days in the cave which will be released on Wednesday, draws on dozens of interviews with key players inside and outside the cave to paint the most detailed picture to date of how, and by whom, the Wild Boars came to be rescued.

The book - one of many that will appear in the next few months, alongside several films - owes its genesis to Elizabeth Weiss, publisher at Allen & Unwin.

"Are you interested in writing a book on the Thai cave rescue story?" was the subject line of the email she sent me on the third and final day of the rescue, perhaps two hours before the first of the final Boars emerged, safe, sedated but healthy.

Gee, let me think about that.

"I'll get back to you, let me talk to my bosses about whether I can get the time off," I hedged.

Who, as a writer, wouldn't want to go deeper on a story like this?

After a series of hurried phone calls and texts to senior Fairfax types like James Chessell, Tory Maguire, Lisa Davies, Alex Lavelle and Michael Bachelard about whether I could take time off to get back on the road and interview the key players, I had the OK.

"Write the hell out of it mate," Chessell concluded on a phone call placed from a muddy field on the Thai-Myanmar border, "and good luck."

No pressure, then, and a blessing to boot.

From new and unpublished details about who was rescued by whom, on what day and when, through contemporaneously-published material to fresh interviews with key players including Dr Pak Loharnshoon, the Thai doctor who stayed inside the cave with the boys once they were found, rescue mission chief Narongsak Osottanakorn, to some of the divers who participated in the final rescues, the book sheds new light on how the mission unfolded.

But of course the story doesn't end there.

Harris and Challen, a pair of unlikely heroes who have done their best to steer clear of the press, have signed up to a huge $6 million book and movie deal - brokered by a Hollywood agent - that will net them personal paydays of more than a million each.

They've also hit the (well-paid) speaking circuit, with addresses to conferences put together by Telstra, other big corporates and cave diving groups around the world.

More power to their arms, of course.

Challen, a WA vet who took early retirement and Harris, an anaesthetist from Adelaide, are heroes -  as their newly-earned titles of Western Australian and South Australian of the year respectively testify.

The Boars and their coach spent a week or so in hospital, shielded from the press by a Thai military junta that warned all local and international media off any attempt to contact and interview them.

Indeed, the team became novice Buddhist monks for a short time, a common practice in Thailand.

But the media blackout could last only so long and the Thai government, desperate for a public relations boost and buoyed by the best news story to come out of Thailand in the last decade-and-a-half, has allowed a couple of carefully stage-managed press conferences and a soft-ball interview with a major US TV network.

More government-endorsed public exposure has followed for these unofficial ambassadors, with the team's travels to South America, the United States - complete with an appearance on Ellen de Generes' talk show - and to Britain to visit the home of soccer giants Manchester United carefully documented on Instagram by a selfie-obsessed Thai government official.

The miracle of Tham Luang cave transformed 13 young lives almost in an instant and the Hollywood movie deal - which will deliver huge paydays to each of the young boys - is sure to finish the job and transform their lives, hopefully for the better.

I didn't see it coming at the time (did any of us?) when I flew from Jakarta to Chiang Rai airport on July 3 and jumped into a car to drive to the tiny town of Mae Sai, on the remote northern border of Thailand and Myanmar, but the miracle of Tham Luang has transformed dozens of lives.

It's a story that belongs to no one, and to all of us.

And it's one, I suspect, that will be told and retold for years to come - with each version adding to the already-rich tapestry of one of the yarns of the 21st century.

The Great Cave Rescue, by James Massola, will be published by Allen & Unwin on November 14. An extract appeared in Saturday's Good Weekend in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

The book will be launched by Massola and the Sydney Morning Herald's International Editor Peter Hartcher at Glee Books at 6.30pm on November 14. A second event will be held at the Stanton Library in North Sydney at 1pm on Thursday, November 15.

Age readers can attend the Melbourne launch - hosted by Fairfax Media Foreign Editor Michael Bachelard and Massola - at Readings bookshop in Carlton on Thursday, November 15, at 6.30pm.