NORFOLK, Va. - On a sultry day in midsummer, John D. Broadwater dons a headset in a small control shack as Navy divers lower themselves into the turret of the Monitor.
Just days before, a huge crane had lifted a 32-ton piece of the famous ship's deck and armor plating off the turret, exposing it for the first time in 140 years.
The rasping, metallic sound of the divers' breaths fills the shack.
"If you can get in closer and get a little more detail, it would be helpful," he tells one of the divers carrying a video camera.
"Wow!" Broadwater exclaims as the camera reveals the underside of the powerful cannons that landed on the roof of the turret as the ironclad Monitor flipped upside down and crashed to the ocean floor in 1862.
"Oh yeah, Green," he says to the diver in the secondary - or "green" - position. "That's a good shot of the wheel and carriage.
"Neat!"
The closing days
These are the closing days of the most important treasure hunt in Broadwater's career. If all goes well, the signature piece of the "cheese box on a raft" will rise to the surface of the Atlantic off the coast of Cape Hatteras in the next few days.
The soft-spoken Kentuckian is manager of the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary and head of the recovery project. Every decision that relates to the care of the artifacts - and especially the big prize, the turret - is his to make.
Broadwater came to the profession by way of engineering and a job that allowed him to scuba-dive on wrecks at Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands. It led to a book, Shipwrecks of Kwajalein, and eventually to a doctorate in maritime studies.
Broadwater spent 10 years helping excavate a British Revolutionary War-era ship, the Betsy, near Yorktown, Va., served as the state's official underwater archaeologist, then head of the sanctuary.
If there were any justice, he'd be down there now with the divers, salvaging pieces of history. Diving that deep, to 240 feet, is rare, requiring superb training and support - one of the reasons the Monitor was relatively intact when it was discovered in 1973.
But Broadwater has done it many times, beginning with a survey team in 1979.
That, he says, was an amazing experience, seeing the Monitor at eye level and wondering if parts of it could one day be saved.
He continued to dive through the early efforts to stabilize the wreck. But in 1998, while assisting on the work that brought up the ship's propeller, he suffered inner-ear damage from expanding nitrogen bubbles and was benched by doctors from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
He'll still be at the grand finale, but on deck.
"To see that come up, all intact, and set down on the deck of the barge - I think a lot of us are going to consider that a major day in our lives," he said recently.
'A real good feeling'
"The icing on the cake is we're saving parts of the wreck so millions of people, instead of a handful of divers, will get to see them. It's a real good feeling. A real good feeling."
Broadwater's archaeological juices are flowing. The Monitor's guns will be seen for the first time since the ship went down. The turret, accounts suggest, is where crew members gathered when all seemed lost on the last voyage. They brought along their sea bags, thinking at first they would them save them - sea bags loaded with clothes, pictures of their families and other precious items - then realizing they couldn't save all of that and themselves, too.
"All of that may still be in there," says Broadwater, standing at the rail of the barge, so close to where the sailors of the Monitor once stood.
Another Navy, another century, a time of divers breathing compressed gas, dropping down into the deep ocean, of archaeologists yearning to see and touch what is now a hallowed piece of American history.
This deck is a 300-foot barge that a global positioning system has placed almost directly above where the Monitor's hulk lies.
There's no signal from below, just hard silence.
"Red, are you OK?" an anxious chief warrant officer, Rick Cavey, asks into his headset.
The two divers were moving a large timber and one of them gasped in pain. Now there's no sound, only the sight of bubbles on the monitor.
The standby diver tenses. He might have to get down there fast.
Again, Cavey asks for Red's condition.
Finally, Red responds: "OK."
'Both divers OK'
"Both divers OK," Cavey reports.
There's a palpable sense of relief in the control shack.
Two divers have crawled through the portal of a chamber that will put them under deep-ocean pressure so they can spend several days working on the bottom.
Broadwater pokes his head into the opening before the portal shuts. "Have a good one," he says with a puckish grin, "but just remember: Jeff and I will be watching you every moment."
By now, after five years of working on the wreck, the divers don't have to be told to treat the Monitor artifacts like treasured gems. But it's a standing joke how Broadwater and historian Jeff Johnston will fuss at the divers if they don't.
On the next dive, this one close to 40 minutes - the maximum for anyone at that depth - one of the divers has blood flowing from his ear when his helmet is stripped off. The master diver stops him on the way into the decompression chamber, then sends a medical corpsman in with him.
The crew peers anxiously through the round window in the chamber, then relaxes as word comes back that the diver will be fine. He had failed to properly equalize his ear pressure on the way down and, rather than stop the descent, toughed it out. The result was a perforated eardrum. Painful but usually quick healing. At that depth - because atmospheric pressure doubles every 33 feet - the pressure he felt on his eardrums was seven times greater than normal.
When the dive team asked him to stay a little longer to finish looping a cable around the armor belt, he didn't hesitate.
"Typical diver," one of his teammates snorts, but not without a touch of pride.
For the archaeologists, the Monitor project is about retrieving a long-missing piece of history. For the Navy divers, it's retrieving a piece of their history, and pride is part of every descent.
'Got to feel lucky'
"Everybody here, they got to feel lucky," Master Diver Jim Mariano says. "If they don't, something's wrong with them. Because they're stepping into history - and they're making history at the same time."
While one group of divers is constantly dropping down to the Monitor, sprinting around for half an hour and departing, the saturation divers work continuously on the bottom.
The unblinking eye of a camera on a remote underwater vehicle watches as Senior Chief Vernon Geyman approaches the tough armor shield that lies on the turret, exothermic torch in hand.
"Hot, hot!" a chief corpsman calls into his hand-held radio as Geyman pulls the trigger. An electric charge of 240 volts surges through the torch, igniting oxygen and magnesium. The white-hot flare looks like a supernova as the torch burns deeper into the iron. The armor hangs precariously like a bridge without support, but refuses to budge. The engineers hadn't realized the wood underneath the iron, mostly oak and pine, would still be strong. Geyman calls for the hydro-blaster, a pump that shoots water so powerfully it can cut through wood - or an arm or leg if you aren't careful.
Still, the armor hangs on. In the bell, a camera shows Geyman's teammate, Jeremy Mullis, sitting and reading, waiting his turn.
"It's time for you to head on back and let Jeremy play," Master diver Chuck Young tells him.
Now the camera shows Geyman opening the lower hatch in the bell. Because of the pressure inside, the water doesn't come in. But Geyman does, struggling up through the hatch as Mullis helps him off with helmet and air tank. As the diver climbs aboard, Mullis plants a welcome-back kiss on his bald spot.
"Diver love," Young says.
A few days before, divers had come across dozens of artifacts, including some beautifully intact lantern chimneys and parts of hydrometers - instruments that measured water salinity. The items had apparently been in a supply cabinet that flew open when the ship slammed into the bottom, stern first.
Earlier this day, at a meeting among the major players of the expedition, Capt. Chris Murray, head of the Navy's dive program and longtime Monitor salvager, suggested a new tactic.
The turret of the sunken ship was loaded with large chunks of coal that seem glued together by clay. Instead of chopping at them with hammers, why not use a more gentle - but maybe more efficient - method: a high-power water jet?
Broadwater agreed, and for the next couple of hours the turret looked like an above-ground pool loaded with dry ice as a cloud of silt billowed from it. The saturation diver's head poked up from the cloud, then disappeared.
As the dust cleared, the cameras showed that the coal had separated, and the divers began to remove football-size chunks.
Murray, a former commander of Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit Two at Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base who made the last cut on the propeller before it came to the surface four years ago - is everywhere -diving, directing saturation divers, working on solutions. As the saturation bell surfaces, one of the divers inside gives him a "V" for victory salute.
This is the last of the big Monitor expeditions. There will be smaller operations in the years ahead as both Navy and NOAA divers retrieve many of the hundreds of personal artifacts that wait in the crew quarters.
But raising the turret has been a challenge few will forget.
"There won't be anything like this again," says Capt.-select Bobbie Scholley.
Just behind the dive station where Scholley stands rests a formidable structure, an eight-clawed "spider" built by Phoenix International of Williamsburg, Va.
The next day, the apparatus would be lowered to the wreck and divers would guide its claws into place under the rim of the turret.
In a few days, the spider, with the help of a giant crane, will do some heavy lifting.