Customer Reviews

Rainbow Six

5 star:		(489)
4 star:		(280)
3 star:		(214)
2 star:		(223)
1 star:		(245)

 

 

Rainbow Six, Tom Clancy's 10th novel and ninth in the Jack Ryan/John Clark series, once more focuses on the ex-CIA paramilitary field officer known in the Agency as Mr. Clark. This time, the focus once again turns to the challenges of fighting global terrorists and the menace from extremists determined not only to reshape society, but the entire planet's environment.

Clark is close to retiring as a paramilitary officer in the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Operations when Agency executive directors Ed and Mary Pat Foley, with the tacit approval of the recently elected President John Patrick Ryan, ask him to run an elite team of antiterrorist Special Ops fighters from several NATO countries. Their mission: to act as an international 911 team in hostage and other terror-related situations deemed too high-risk for local law-enforcement agencies. Based in England, this so-called Rainbow Team will be deployed mainly in Europe, but with support from U.S. and other allied nations, can operate anywhere in the world. Clark, who was an enlisted member of a SEAL team in Vietnam, is given a rank equivalent to a full colonel and the call sign Rainbow Six. (In military parlance, the designator "six" after a unit's call sign is assigned to a commanding officer.)

Rainbow Six opens with a tense incident high above the Atlantic as a small group of Basque terrorists attempts to hijack the plane carrying Clark, his wife, his protege and new son-in-law Domingo "Ding" Chavez, and Alistair Stanley, his British second in command, to London. Using their wits and finely honed skills, the three Rainbow members overwhelm the hijackers and save the crew and their fellow passengers.

With this introduction to the job, Clark then turns his attention to training the various members of the several Rainbow teams, not knowing that the airliner incident was simply one of many terrorist incidents being bankrolled by a mysterious and wealthy individual with a darker, more terrifying agenda. With the assistance of a former KGB officer and inspired by one of the most horrible aspects of the Iranian plot against the U.S. (as chronicled in Executive Orders), a group of environmental extremists is plotting to reverse centuries of man-made damage to the Earth's biosphere by committing the most horrible act of mass murder in history.

Clancy's novel paints a troubling picture of what happens when a noble idea (such as promoting global conservation) is twisted and perverted by charismatic and cold-blooded individuals, and its action-oriented plot inspired an ongoing series of computer games.

Tom Clancy's literary reverence for things military is overtly evident through his books from Hunt for Red October onwards. In Rainbow Six, he indulges in small unit tactics for a whole tome. In many ways typical Tom Clancy, the book is instructive at a layman level about anti-terrorist tactics as practiced by special forces units. I have little doubt that the usual level of research went into this book that Mr Clancy usually carries out. I admit to being an unabashed fan.

So why not five stars?
Well, to be honest, nothing ever goes wrong for these guys. The books continuously alludes to the virtual certainty of problems with operations, but then nothing really does. I kept waiting for the problem and the subsequent analysis, but it never happened. I realized that, among the other obvious things that I like about Clancy, the recognition of the failings that people have and the way these play out on a broad stage are much of what I enjoy about his books. This one doesn't really have that.

Good Clancy, but not the best Clancy

I didn't realize for years that Mr. Clancy had written other books in the Ryan universe besides _The Hunt for Red October,_ and I kicked myself when I found out what I had been missing: lots of big fat good books with equal portions brain and heart. This one took some getting into, though, because I am a granola treehugging eagles-belong-downtown envirofeminist myself. (Belong downtown? In my little Alaskan town, they crap on the cars. Everybody in the U.S. should have the privilege of wiping bald eagle crap off of their own automobile.) But on rereading, I got a chill down my spine.

Any deeply held belief system can be coopted by the taint in the human soul and turned into a Cause, as in Anything For The. Clancy's genius shows in the way he created a believable charismatic human monster in the historic tradition, but gave him a Cause for the 21st century. It made me reexamine my dismissal of the wackaloons of the environmental movement. All they need is a demagogue.

The lesser monsters who cluster around John Brightling have their finely drawn individual freakishness as well. They remind me of Hitler's supporting cast, and I suspect that that was the author's model. You have the man who scarcely blinks at human death but flinches at the deaths of small animals; the self-indulgent brute who murders rather than restrain his appetite; the enthusiastic planners who are so in love with the big picture that they find it easy to ignore its horrible scaffolding; the dreamers who really believe that their personal obsessions justify the bloody overthrow of civilization. I entertained myself on a hot afternoon by imagining life in the Kansas facility in a plotline where the Project succeeded. Then I shuddered and went out into the sunlight.

The musings of various Project members are some of Clancy's finest bits of irony to date. I liked the media room for the use of the grandchildren of the Anointed--as if fresh videotapes would spring up next to the strawberries. And the idea that the most important thing to consider, when trying to feed several thousand people on local resources, would be recipes. And the ark built by radical environmentalists that requires petroleum to keep out the deadly Kansas winter. And so on.

But Clancy is scrupulously fair. There is the brown smudge. There was the Exxon Valdez disaster. (The way a denizen of the Wonderland Beyond the Beltway drastically underestimates its scale and severity even while using it as an excuse for murder is another fine bit of irony.) There is the inescapable legacy of nuclear waste. There is the way mine tailings put arsenic in drinking water. It is human nature to use hard facts in the service of convenient lies. Clancy uses them instead to tell a whacking good story that leaves you thinking about the contradictions of humanity. He does this a lot. Go buy. Go read.

It seems that Tom Clancy's most recent novels don't measure up to his older stories. Unfortunately, Rainbow Six seems to continue that trend. The slow pace, pathetic character development, and silly main plot prevent this book from being on the same level as his earlier novels.

Without a doubt, the biggest flaw in the story is the virtually non-existant character development. The best example of this is the Rainbow squad members. I know that it's hard to give individual personalities to twenty or so different characters, but that isn't a good enough excuse to explain their total lack of develoment. They are prety much typical military stereotypes, with next to no background or personal information given about them. At the very least, I would expect Clancy to pay some attention to Ding Chavez, seeing how important he is to the story, but he also doen't have much in the way of personality. John Clark fares slightly better in this department than the other members of the squad, retaining the same personality that Clancy fans have come to love. The best character in the book is Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov, the cunning former Russian KGB agent, who is extremely greedy but still has something of a conscience. On the other side, the major villians of the story, like the Rainbow squad, suffer from lack of development, as they aren't even fully introduced until near the end of the book. For me to understantd their motivations and their ambitions, they needed to have a more deal of screen time. The end result was the shoddily developed villians you saw.

The slow pace is another culprit. Most of the book's 897 page lengh is annoying filler material which should have been edited out. The pace picks up during last two hundred pages, but it's too late to sve the rest of the book. There aren't enough action sequence to fill the entire book. Also, the main plot is rather silly. A group of enviromentalists who want to save the world by killing the entire human population? I don't need to explain just how ridiculous that is...

But the book isn't a total failure. The action parts were well-written, if a little bit predictable. There were alo some other parts of the book that held my interest, like many of the scenes with Popov. Altogether, the book has some nice action sequences and some interesting scenarios, but the book just wasn't as good as I've come to expect from Tom Clancy...

Let's face it. Shakespeares' pants, a load of plays copied straight from older storylines. But anyway, Tom Clancy is probably the best author in the world for this sort of book. However, he has fallen once again on his two main flaws to receive a perfect 5/5. These flaws are simple ones: 1. Americans are the best, superheros who are better than everyone, even the SAS, which I doubt. 2. Storylines leading to nowhere - very frustrating However, he still accumulates all the key elements for a brilliant read. In some of his books, particularly Executive Orders, I found myself sat reading for days before I read that a tiny US task force obliterated a steamroller style Iran/Iraq army defending its own ground. However, in Rainbow Six, the action comes at appropriate times so that my interest did not attenuate as I went along. Also, the action is simply fantastic, with suspense, careful planning and perfect takedowns that you would expect from such men in real life. The weapons used are awesome in power, particularly the sniper's rifles, and I was fascinated to read how such men trained. It's been made into an excellent computer game. Might we be getting a film just as good? I think we should.

In today's world, terrorism is rampant. The definition of terrorism is "the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological." This means that there are people out there trying to inhibit our freedoms by any means possible. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six revolves around the world of terrorism. It is the story of John Clark, master of the Covert and Black Operations world. Clark also stars in many other Clancy novels such as "The Bear and The Dragon."
The novel is about an international Counter-Terrorist team, named Rainbow due to its multi-national make up. Different members are recruited from the world's best Counter-Terrorist teams around the world such as Seal Team 6/DEVGRU (Naval Special Warfare Development Group), SAS (Special Air Service), HRT (Hostage Rescue Team), and GSG-9 (Grenshutzgruppe 9). The team's mission is to effectively resolve terrorist situations world-wide.
The setting is modern day. Although Clancy wrote this novel in the late 90's, the equipment that Rainbow uses is still currently used in real Counter-Terrorism teams today, except the Heart Beat Sensor, which is purely theoretical. However their equipment which includes H&K MP-10s, flash bangs, NVG (Night Vision), infrared, Primacord explosive, and tactical radios are all very real and all used today.
In the novel, Clancy uses a plain, straight-forward style of writing. He also is very descriptive. His descriptions include thoughts and feelings of both Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists. He offers an insight on our recent tragedy by letting us into the minds of the terrorists within his novel. Of all the descriptions, most memorable are his bullet impacts. For example, he details how a headshot from a sniper's 7mm bullet leaves a bloody mess. I believe he uses these descriptions to symbolize the horror that terrorism aims to create, and in many cases succeeds in doing so.
I am not an avid reader; however I felt that I could not put this book down. I am very interested in the area of Counter-Terrorism and have done personal studies on the subject, so naturally this book appealed to me. However, if you enjoy reading books or novels full of action, excitement, suspense, and emotion, read Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, and I guarantee you will like it.

Besides the length, I like to think of this as a sort of action movie in a book...it's worth reading because of a series of sequences that make it fun, but if you're looking for good literature, "Rainbow" has no hidden pot of gold. Clancy gives us almost no sense of his characters, presenting them as all-powerful, invincible human beings, just like a modern-day Bond thriller.

Of course, you could argue, who cares? That's what I said. This thick mother of a book is replete with 007-styled shoot-em-up sequences, where the pages turn a mile a minute.

So how is this book 800+ pages? Come on. It's Clancy. He gives us his usual military specifics and detailed descriptions of obsolete or unusual devices, used as filler space between his truly well-written action scenes.

Another thing. This book has no plot. What plot there is, however, nicely serves as a device to bring on Clancy's thrilling terrorist take-downs. I think he should simply exclude all "plot," simply write a series of random exciting action scenes, because this book's attempt at plot is surprisingly pitiful. Makes you feel sorry for poor Tom.

Now, I've heard folks tease him for "getting paid by the word" but...seriously, no one really cares, this book still made the top spot on The NY Times, because it's Clancy, and everyone loves him. This book might be too verbose; so what? At the very least just skim over the boring stuff, or simply skip it entirely. The rest is too good to miss.

By the way, "Rainbow Six" the game is even better...

What can I say? Wow! Right from the start, that most excellent of storytellers, Tom Clancy, throws us into action with a detailed yet gripping account of a hijacking. In some of his previous books (most notably Patriot Games, Executive Orders and The Sum of All Fears) the story dies for a hundred pages or more as Clancy explains the story (and regrettably, this has resulted in many readers stopping reading mid-way through a book...

But no more. Rainbow Six keeps up the heart pumping action right the way through as though there is no tomorrow - and there may well not be! Long as it is, Clancy has once again kept my full attention resulting in late nights, staying up far too late turning page by page to find out WHAT HAPPENS!

I was worried that Clancy was beginning to dull in his stories, having read Executive Orders which was explosively exciting in the last pages but, I felt, took too long to get there. And having read the co-authored Op-Centers, I was very worried as they all lacked the quick pace and exciting realism common to many Clancy books.

However, I felt that singling out environmentalists as the bad guys was not a good marketing move (if not resulting in an excellent book!) and that their methods and ideals were not credible enough to bring a true sense of realism. I did enjoy the fantastic end to the story and hope that, true to Clancy style, Dmitry Popov will appear in another book in the near furture!

And for the second time, Clancy has focused the book on John Kelly (otherwise known as Clark). Clark has definitely changed since the torture days portrayed in Without Remorse, become more mature, even mellowed in age. I missed good old Jack Ryan however although Clancy referred to Clark's good relationship with "The President". I felt that Jack deserved more place although, I think Clancy may have brought an end to Jack Ryan as a major role in Executive Orders. Keen followers of Clancy will note how Jack gradually rose through the ranks - ordinary history teacher and a lucky stock investor, then working at CIA, eventually becoming, DDO, DDI and eventually head of the CIA (which I believe is DCI, right?). Then going on to National Security Advisor, Vice-President (albeit for a short time) and finally President. I can think of no higher occupation for Ryan and this leads me to believe Clancy has decided to leave him out of future novels. I hope I am wrong...

Is Clancy, in his usual portrayal of realistic events (as opposed to fantasy ones) going to let John Clark and Jack Ryan simply die of old age? Whilst this would be true to form, they would be sorely missed, and only Ding seems to be able to replace either of them. Are future books to hold only Domingo Chavez and not the beloved Clark-Chavez team? Will Jack retire?

We can't tell. Clancy has shrouded us in a black cloak of curiosity until he chooses to reveal antoher piece of the unending story he weaves. And even then, we surely will not get the last piece of the puzzle. We will be left again to wait until it is time...

This excerpt was written by Chris Kreft. I am an avid Clancy fan (in case you couldn't tell) and have nearly all the books he has written from "Red October" to "Executive Orders" (I'm only missing "Clear and Present Danger") as well as all the Op Center books. I have also read some of Clancy's other books such as SSN and regard myself as a well-informed reveiwer of his books.

Thanks for reading, and Happy New Year!

Chris Kreft (ckinusa3712@aol.com)

Through Tom Clancy's various books, he has used present day environments to set the stage for his characters to do what they do best. In "Rainbow Six", Clancy takes the reader into the world where spies are for hire, America is blind to bio warfare and old CIA agents are looking for new tricks.

Clancy once again resumes the tale of John Clark who was made popular in the film "Clear and Present Danger". As a CIA Agent looking at the new world and seeing all the changes that have happened since his first exploits in the Vietnam war, Clark creates an ultra black project known as Rainbow Six.

Based in England a with a free hand to combat terrorism on a global scale, Clancy pens a very exciting drama that is tough to put down.

Ofcourse this wouldn't be a good Clancy book without plently of storylines linked together. There is a greedy former KGB agent stirring up terrorists around the world, a drug company CEO who cares more for the environment than his fellow man and a close Presidental advisor who is instrumental in exposing Rainbow Six.

Remarkably Clancy brings it all together in the final pages and leaves us wanting more.

I've read many of Tom Clancy's novels (The bear and The Dragon, Executive Orders, The Hunt For Red October, and Patriot Games to name a few), but none of them even compare to this book. I usually like to watch the moive rather than the book, but as there was no movie out for this book, I sat down to read it. This was one of only 4 books I've ever read in my life thatr I literally couldn't put down. The others being 1984, The Outsider, and Animal Farm. And while Rainbow Six doesn't strike out against society as the previously mentioned books do, it is still a very entertaing and exhilerating book. Personally, I believe it is the best Clancy novel I've read to date.