Buchanan

Buchanan is the officer directing the response aboard the USS Independence as a sudden attack becomes an uncontrollable sinking. His role is defined by the narrowing gap between what command can still accomplish and what the failing ship will permit: he assesses the damage, organizes around evacuation, and ultimately orders the bridge cleared when even the aircraft escape route is in danger.

Command under attack

When an unknown object races toward the ship from below, the crew receives warning first from the dolphins and then from sonar. The object rises silently and vertically, growing on the monitors into a rippling blue sphere at least ten metres across. Buchanan gives the order to shoot it down, but the opportunity has already passed. The sphere bursts beneath the hull, and the lost Deepflight submersible, carried upward by expanding gas, spins into the ship bow-first, driving its torpedoes through the hull. The sequence makes the limit of Buchanan’s authority stark: he can issue the correct order, but the attack has unfolded too quickly for it to prevent impact.

After the explosion, Buchanan remains on the bridge with the second officer and the helmsman, following developments and giving orders. He stays calm while working out what the damage means. The blast has destroyed some ammunition magazines and the engine room; the loss of ammunition is survivable, but the engine-room damage sets off further explosions through the hydraulic system and fuel-pumping stations. The ship’s electrical supply fails in succession as its power plants break down: two gas turbines and six diesel generators. The emergency is not one isolated wound that can be contained. Each failure makes the next harder to manage.

Reading the ship’s failure

Buchanan understands that the USS Independence will sink. The question is not whether the ship can be saved, but when it will go down and how many people can get off beforehand. Flooding has begun in forward cargo compartments, forcing the ship down by the bow. He anticipates that water will enter the vehicle stowage compartments beneath the laboratory and probably flood some of the troop berthing as well.

He also thinks through how the flooding could spread. Water under pressure will push toward the far end of the bow, rupture bulkheads, and rise to the next level; if the stern bulkheads fail too, the whole ship will fill. These are not abstract engineering concerns: they shape the dwindling time available to evacuate. His work in this passage is a form of triage, joining what the damage has already done to what the ship’s structure is likely to do next.

The scale of the evacuation is smaller than it would be on a normal operation, but still urgent. No marines are aboard. Instead of having to evacuate three thousand men, Buchanan has about a hundred and eighty people, most of them on the upper levels. The reduced number offers some relief, not a way out of the crisis. He must make decisions with incomplete information as monitors fail and the ship continues to take on water.

The evacuation narrows

Some of the monitors that normally display the integrated main screen in the CIC have gone dark. Above Buchanan is the sealed case containing the red phone, his direct line to the Pentagon; nearby are the chart tables, communications equipment, and navigational aids, arranged in their usual order. Yet the instruments and channels that ordinarily support command cannot stop the sinking. The ship’s neat apparatus of control remains physically present even as its practical usefulness collapses.

On the roof, the landing crew keep people moving across the island toward the waiting helicopters. Buchanan speaks briefly to Flight Control and watches through the bridge’s green-tinted windows as one helicopter lifts away. The bow is dropping, and he recognizes that the flight deck may soon become a chute. The helicopters are tethered, but that precaution has a limit: if the vessel’s angle worsens, the situation will become critical. Evacuation is now a race against the changing shape of the deck itself.

The last bridge order

The ship’s movement throws Buchanan against his captain’s chair, a conspicuously comfortable seat compared with the violence around it. Equipment flies across the bridge. He pulls himself up and looks through the side window in time to see a Super Stallion tipping slowly to one side, stuck. The aircraft that had represented escape is now part of the emergency, unable to take off while the ship shifts beneath it.

Buchanan’s response is to order everyone out. People flee the bridge, but he watches as the trapped helicopter continues to tip. The moment compresses his command role into its simplest remaining form: he cannot restore power, arrest the flooding, or make the aircraft free; he can still recognize the danger and direct people away from it. The account does not establish Buchanan’s later fate. It leaves him in the immediate crisis, facing the loss of the ship and the failure of the systems that once made it governable.

Narrative significance

Buchanan’s scenes turn the sinking into a problem of decisions made under rapidly diminishing control. His calm does not make him omnipotent: he orders the unknown object shot down too late, understands that the ship is doomed, and watches the evacuation window close as the bow sinks. What distinguishes his command is not a last-minute reversal of disaster but his capacity to read its progression and keep attention on the people still aboard.

The contrast between the red phone, failed monitors, and orderly instruments on one hand, and the flooding compartments and tipping helicopter on the other, gives the crisis its material force. Command depends on systems, but the ship’s breakdown strips those systems of their power one by one. Buchanan’s final recorded action is therefore both an order and an acknowledgment of the limits around it: clear the bridge, while the remaining routes to safety are still changing.