What an exhausting five-year run it has been for backwater insurance agent turned blockbuster novelist Tom Clancy. Forget the four straight best sellers published since 1984 and the 20 million copies sold. Forget the movie version of his first novel, now in production. Forget the $4 million advance for his latest thriller, Clear and Present Danger. Forget such crass calculus of cash- register commerce.
Dwell instead on what this chain-smoking, nearsighted, 42-year-old family man with a hyperactive imagination has boldly orchestrated on the global stage. It would have been enough that he engineered the defection of a Soviet nuclear submarine in The Hunt for Red October. But no, Clancy had to go fight World War III without firing a single nuclear weapon in Red Storm Rising -- and make sure that the good guys narrowly won.
Then there was Patriot Games, where Clancy's plucky hero Jack Ryan just happened to be in London in time to rescue two royals, seemingly Prince Charles and Lady Di, from a terrorist attack, and, of course, was rewarded with a knighthood from a grateful Queen. Call that just vacation fun compared with what Clancy pulled off in The Cardinal of the Kremlin. Not only did he virtually save the job of a reform-minded Soviet leader but he also spirited a defecting KGB chief onto Air Force One to fly to the land of freedom, opportunity and new Tom Clancy novels.
This time around, in writing Clear and Present Danger (Putnam; $21.95), which is being published this week, Clancy got mad. Not at his usual villains, like the Soviets or international terrorists. Instead, what aroused his ire was what the Iran-contra affair revealed about "how the Government makes decisions, what kind of people make those decisions, and what happens when things go wrong." That is what settling insurance claims teaches: how often in real life things go wrong. And when that happens to soldiers and spooks, Clancy says, "very often you get hung out to dry. All those Marines who got blown up in Lebanon got hung out to dry. William Buckley, the CIA officer who got captured by the bad guys in Beirut, was hung out to dry. We do that a lot; it's probably the most despicable thing our Government can do. But it happens, and that's what I decided to write about."
The book that arose out of these emotions is Clancy's most politically sophisticated and philosophically complex. (Beach readers, have no fear; this is not Sartre.) There are no direct references to Iran-contra, no arms-for- hostages deals and no Ollie Norths; Clancy is too accomplished a craftsman for such overt gambits. The closest parallel comes in the fictional National Security Adviser, Vice Admiral James Cutter, who is reminiscent of John Poindexter. Almost from the moment the admiral is introduced, readers can sense Clancy's scorn: "Cutter was the sort of sailor for whom the sea was a means to an end. More than half of his career had been spent in the Pentagon, and that . . . was no place for a proper sailor."