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When it came to creating a pedigree for his alter ego, Jack Ryan, Clancy made certain that he came equipped with the fiscal independence that the author so painfully lacked. Near the beginning of Red October, Clancy wrote, "((Ryan)) was not afraid to speak his mind. Part of that came from having money and being married to more money . . . Ryan could not be bought, bribed or bullied."
These days, the study alone of Clancy's new eight-bedroom dream house overlooking the Chesapeake Bay in Huntingtown, Md., is larger than the Calvert County insurance agency that he escaped from. And what home boasts such self- indulgent extras as Clancy's private underground pistol range? "When I set up the background for Jack Ryan," Clancy recalls, "I gave him everything I thought one could possibly need in life." But this study can serve as an index of the author's own wish list. There are toys (a pool table), tools (a MacIntosh computer), tributes (five director's chairs from the film set of Red October) and tokens that symbolize Clancy's embrace by the U.S. military (the bookshelves are punctuated by upwards of 80 souvenir caps bearing logos like USS CASIMIR PULASKI). Looking around the room, Clancy laughs, as much to himself as anyone else: "Now I have more than Jack Ryan."
Following the up-from-nowhere success of Red October, Clancy, who was dropped from the ROTC program at Loyola College because of severe myopia, quickly became the Navy's favorite houseguest. Captain J. Michael Rodgers, who commanded the destroyer squadron in which Clancy first went to sea aboard the U.S.S. Gallery, puts it this way: "The Aeneid begins, 'I sing of arms and the man.' In that tradition, Tom is our minstrel."
That voyage not only launched a friendship between Rodgers and Clancy, a fellow classicist, but it also gave the novelist a new vocational dream. "I've told my friends in the Navy for five years now, I would trade what I do to be a commanding officer of a ship," Clancy says. One could almost see him standing on deck, a tall, sandy-haired C.O., wearing dark glasses and an intense expression. "As I get a little older, I get further away from it, but command of a ship is probably the best job in the world."
Many in the Pentagon were stunned by the accuracy of Red October. "When I first met Clancy at a White House lunch," recalls former Navy Secretary John Lehman, "I joked that if he had been a naval officer, I would have had him court-martialed: the book revealed that much that had been classified about antisubmarine warfare. Of course, nobody for a moment suspected him of getting access to classified information."
Clancy prides himself on the verisimilitude of the technical details in his novels, but insists that his methodology is simple: "It's amazing what you can get from the public press." Yet in conversation, Clancy can also purport to be privy to more than a layman's share of sensitive information, thanks to his legion of admirers in the military. At times, he will break off an anecdote by saying, "It's a shame that I can't tell you about that."