Whatever else it has accomplished, Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost has robbed espionage novelists of an easy villain. Refusing to be cowed by the prospect of peace or the lack of a nasty Russkie, however, the resourceful Tom Clancy has found a new outlet for his skill with technology, weaponry and bureaucracy. Like every other public figure, he has declared war on drugs, except that the approach of his characters might be described as "just say nuke."
"Clear and Present Danger" suggests, with occasional credibility, that a sitting president, disgusted with the drug problem and the devastation of drug-related crime, approves a complex series of covert actions at the Colombian cartels. That it is an election year and he is behind in the polls inspires him with a little more courage than we have come to expect from his office, but the president makes sure that the unprecedented and illegal actions carry "plausible deniability," i.e., the inability to be proved.The motivating force behind the actions is the national security adviser, who directs a series of operations against the Cartel, a federation of drug lords that processes, smuggles and distributes cocaine. A specially trained force of elite light infantry is infiltrated into the jungles of Colombia to find the Cartel's secret airfields and attack its small, mobile "factories." Air Force jets intercept the smugglers' planes, forcing some to land and shooting down others.
All of that, of course, amounts to an armed invasion of a friendly foreign country, not the sort of thing that any president would approve. When a carrier-based airplane drops a smart bomb right in the middle of a meeting of some of the Cartel's top honchos, killing a number of women and children, everyone starts to experience unease about what had seemed a brilliant plan. The national security adviser, who turns out to be the villain, decides to pull the plug on the whole operation. He leaves the infantry to be killed in the South American jungle but preserves the president's Teflon.
The novel takes an extremely long time to reach its quite exciting climax and, for a thriller, moves at a decidedly unthrilling pace. Clancy orchestrates a great number of stories and characters, constantly shifting from one to another so that the various narrative lines will converge simultaneously. This method works best in the last 100 pages of this very long novel, when all the major characters gather from many different points in a desperate attempt to salvage the operation and rescue the soldiers whom their government has betrayed and abandoned.
Clancy demonstrates his usual expertise with contemporary technology, military methods and nomenclature, and the operations of government, all of it conveyed in the pedantic tone of the privileged insider. He tells us what the Oval Office looks like; how to fly a giant, troop-carrying helicopter; how to operate a silenced submachine gun; how to establish a defense position against infantry attack; what a state-of-the-art smart bomb looks like, and so forth. The book is so crammed with abbreviations, initials and acronyms that it sometimes resembles an instruction manual rather than a work of fiction.
As with most writers of the "techno-thriller," Clancy is better with machinery than with those people, all of whom seem cut from the same sheet of thin, shiny, durable cardboard. The author now and then attempts something that he apparently believes is philosophical introspection about his subjects, but it is about as profound as his astonishingly shallow inquiry into the complicated problem of cocaine in the United States.