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Clancy's intricate plot begins with Cutter's winning presidential approval for a covert operation against the Colombian drug cartel. The ill-conceived plan: insert four platoons of elite U.S. Army light infantrymen into the Colombian jungle to identify drug-running planes and disrupt cocaine production. With his trademarked obsession for military detail and shrewd insights into the psyches of fighting men, Clancy recounts the training of Sergeant "Ding" Chavez and the other "light-fighters" (fast-moving small units unencumbered by heavy equipment) for their quasi-legal mission.
Almost as soon as Chavez and his fellow grunts hit the ground, things begin to go awry. Big things, like the assassination of the FBI director on a secret visit to Bogota. Before long, U.S. pilots are dropping untraceable bombs (dubbed "Hush-A-Bombs") on the fortified castles of the Colombian drug lords, while Chavez and his compatriots are hung out to dry -- abandoned in the jungle on Cutter's orders.
It should come as scant surprise to connoisseurs of Clancy's earlier novels that along about now the sometimes cloyingly straight-arrow CIA man Jack Ryan mounts a daring maneuver to rescue the light-fighters. There are other familiar Clancy touches. While the author has moved beyond the narrow genre of techno-thrillers, the novel still explains ordnance with the avidity that Judith Krantz devotes to designer labels. There are also a few mawkish passages: "Clark embraced Ryan in the way that men do only with their wives, their children and those with whom they have faced death."
Best-selling novelists are often bedeviled by potboiler reputations, and Clancy echoes a familiar lament when he says, "It is disconcerting that the critics don't think of thriller writers as serious writers." In fairness, he should not be dismissed as merely another book-biz commodity, the action- adventure counterpart to Danielle Steel or Sidney Sheldon. For one thing, Clancy's narrative prose rarely descends to the all too familiar level of "I'm dictating as fast as I can." More important, to measure Clancy's output solely in terms of bookstore Q-Ratings and royalty statements would be to distort the moral seriousness that undergirds his fiction. Clancy believes passionately in professionalism, preserving order, patriotism and playing by the rules. As Ryan says to the President near the end of the novel, "Sir, the oath our people take when they put the uniform on requires them to bear 'true faith and allegiance' to their country. Isn't it written down somewhere that the country owes them the same thing?"
Little more than six years ago, Tom Clancy was spending every spare moment at the dining-room table composing his first novel on an IBM Selectric that he lugged home from the office. His wife Wanda, who had just given birth to a son, brooded over his neglect of his insurance business, and his two daughters balked at having to eat all their meals off TV trays. But Clancy saw his writing as a way to climb out of "the middle-class trap."