(4 of 5)
Surprisingly, Clancy claims to have researched Danger in less than a week. He felt no compulsion to visit Colombia, since he subscribes to the you've-seen-one-jungle-you've-seen-them-all philosophy. Clancy finds it routine that he learned all that he needed to know about the Army's light- fighters during a three-day visit to Fort Ord, Calif. "A warrior is a warrior," Clancy insists, using a favorite term of praise, "whether they're light infantrymen, submariners, fighter pilots or whatever. The way they express themselves may be different, but the personality types are pretty much the same."
Clancy has been at loose ends since he came down from the adrenaline rush of completing Danger (he wrote the final 45 manuscript pages in a single day to meet his May 1 deadline). His self-reward was a cross-country train trip with wife Wanda and their four children (the youngest is a three-year-old daughter), plus Rodgers and his wife. Clancy, who shares his hero Ryan's aversion to flying, rented an entire Amtrak parlor car for the trip.
Clancy has resisted signing a new book contract with his publisher, Putnam, "because I don't want all the pressure over me, the delivery date and all that stuff." Even though he talks boldly about taking an entire year off "to do something different," Wanda predicts that his sabbatical will not last another two months. Over the summer, Clancy has already been tinkering with three different books -- a new Ryan tale, a World War II naval adventure and a half-completed novel called Without Remorse, about a moralistic CIA assassin named Clark. Clancy's rationale for his new spate of writing: "You just can't sit at the computer and stare at the blank screen."
But such frenetic activity cannot dispel the persistent sense that Clancy is grappling with his own form of mid-life crisis: the dilemma posed by answered prayers. "Tom is doing what you and I would do when we achieve a goal," says Lieut. Commander Gerry Carroll, a Navy pilot who has been Clancy's close friend since high school. "He's asking himself, 'Now what should I try to do?' It's not the great American ennui in the sense of a mystified now-what. It's more of an earnestness to hitch up your wagon and get on to the next horizon."
For Clancy, the beckoning horizon has long been Government service. He is still enough of an earnest outsider to recall each of his seven visits to the White House (the most recent: in March, to watch a screening of New York Stories with George Bush). But ever since Ronald Reagan stepped forward as Clancy's First Reader, the author has had more reason than most to muse about the what-ifs of being officially on the inside.