In this next book by Tom Clancy, he departs on a tangent from the Jack Ryan saga to follow John Clark, as he did earlier in his book Without Remorse. As part of the new post–Cold War world, terrorism is rising to be a major area of threat, as evidenced from Clancy's two earlier books, and also from our world situation today. In response to this threat, Clark, with the endorsement of President Ryan (who basically doesn't figure in the book), starts a special international squad, Rainbow, of highly trained special-operations troops to be a terrorism response squad. Joining him are Chavez, another of Clancy's favorite characters, and a broad cast of troops from the US, Britain, and other NATO countries.
They are quickly put to the test. Terrorist activity first at a bank in Zurich, and then at the home of a prominent businessman in Austria give the team a chance to show what they are worth. They carefully coreograph a response and decisively put down both incidents. Their third response is to a terrorist takeover of WorldPark (a EuroDisney immitation), and again their action is impressive and decisive. Each episode is full of Clancy's vivid descriptions of tactical maneauvers, technological advances, and personal stories. Vintage Clancy.
Part of the impetus behind these terrorist attacks is coming from John Brightling, head of Horizon Corporation. Brightling and a group he calls the Project are out change the world. They want to eliminate all but a chosen few humans from the planet, in what they see as the only way to save the Earth from human destruction. To do this, they want to raise global awareness of terrorism, in order to get their guy a consulting contract for the upcoming Olympic Games in Australia. That will be their delivery point of Shiva, an engineered form of Ebola that will spread from there throughout the world. Once the outbreak is known, Horizion plans to step in with a "vaccine" that is actually a virulent form of Shiva, thereby infecting most of those who haven't yet been reached with the epidemic. Only their own people and those they deem worthy get the real vaccine.
The last terrorist attack they plan before the Olympics is a direct attack at Rainbow, which they see as a threat to the success of their plan. So they carefully set up an ambush of Clark's wife and daughter (Chavez's wife) at their place of employment, the hospital near the base. They plan to ambush the Rainbow troops as they respond. But the plans fall apart when Noonan, the Rainbow tech-guy, disables all cell-phone communications and disables their ability to act in a coordinated fashion. Wife and daughter escape unharmed as Rainbow is again able to act decisively to counter the terrorist plot, but this time taking two losses and a few injuries in the process.
Their plan is working, until Dmitry Popov, the ex-KGB agent they have enlisted to set up the terrorist attacks, gets wind of the big picture for the Project. He is horrified by Brightling's intentions, and finds his way off of the Project facility in Kansas and heads to New York. He contacts Clark, and asks for a meet, and even though he set up the hit on Clark's wife and daughter, Clark accepts. As soon as he learns of the plot, Clark informs Chavez, who is consulting at the Olympics with a few other Rainbow troopers. They stake out the fogging system room (the planned point of deliver for the virus) and nab the Project member who is going to plant the virus.
As soon as Brightling realizes that he can't reach his man, and that things are falling apart, he orders all physical and electronic evidence destroyed, and gathers up the members who know the whole story of the Project's plans and flies them off to the Project Alternate facility in Brazil. But the FBI and Air Force are able to track the plane, and Clark decides that Rainbow will follow the planes down. Because they are sure most of the evidence has been destroyed and because they fear making the details of the plot public, FBI agents aren't sure about if the group can be successfully prosecuted, and if it should be. In face of this, Clark faces them head on, sending in his troops. He gives them an opportunity to surrender, but Brightling sends out armend men to counter the force. Using an advanced people-finding gadget that Noonan has been plaing with, Clark is able to vector in the Rainbow troops to neutralize the threat from the Project defenders. Once it becomes clear that the battle is won, Brightling and his group surrender. Instead of taking them back to the States, Clark destroys all of the facilities at the Project compound and releases the members into the jungle to try fend for themselves (to commune with nature, as he puts it).
With Rainbow Six, Clancy again demonstrates his narrative sense, as well as his ability to tell a great military story with a moderately complicated plot. He also builds some interesting and clearly flawed characters who just try to do the right thing. And the reader clearly wants to empathize with them. But there are some clear weaknesses in the book. One, a weakness that has cropped up in a few of his other novels, is torture. Clark is a character with a dark side, and torture, or the threat of it, is a necessary instrument to elicit information and serve a greater good. And at first blush, in Clancy's narrative world, that may seem true. But who should be allowed to weild this terrible sword, and decide when it's really serving a greater good. The fear that evil will win out makes it seem easy to do whatever we can, and at whatever cost, to make the good triumph. But we should never allow torture to be justified. It violates the basic humanity, of both the tortured and the torturer. And it most certainly flies in the face of our most basic Christian convictions about right and wrong, and about sin and reconciliation. Which brings up the other major flaw in Clancy's story: retribution. The one unasailable fact that seems to drive his logic as the story concludes is that the perpetrators of this ghastly plan deserve full and complete punishment for their intentions. They must be delt with, decisively. And if the law might have trouble doing that, or if we don't like all of the consequences, it's justifiable to bend the rules a bit to exact "justice" in a slightly different way. Again, the line of thinking is tempting, but it again sees retribution as good, and sees all actions toward that end as justifiable. The victims become the perpetrators in a new act of violence. Where does it end?
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