Rainbow Six

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Rainbow Six

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Paperback(Mass Market Paperback - Reissue)
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Overview

In this #1 New York Times bestselling John Clark thriller, author Tom Clancy takes readers into the shadowy world of anti"terrorism"and gets closer to reality than any government would care to admit...

Ex-Navy SEAL John Clark has been named the head of Rainbow, an international task force dedicated to combating"terrorism" In a trial by fire, Clark is confronted with a violent chain of seemingly separate international incidents. But there is no way to predict the real threat: a group of terrorists like none the world has ever encountered, a band of men and women so extreme that their success could literally mean the end of life on earth as we know it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780425170342
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/01/1999
Series:	John Clark Series , #2
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	912
Sales rank:	15,714
Product dimensions:	4.13(w) x 6.88(h) x 1.42(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

A little more than thirty years ago Tom Clancy was a Maryland insurance broker with a passion for naval history. Years before, he had been an English major at Baltimore’s Loyola College and had always dreamed of writing a novel. His first effort, The Hunt for Red October, sold briskly as a result of rave reviews, then catapulted onto the New York Times bestseller list after President Reagan pronounced it “the perfect yarn.” From that day forward, Clancy established himself as an undisputed master at blending exceptional realism and authenticity, intricate plotting, and razor-sharp suspense. He passed away in October 2013.

Hometown:

Huntingtown, Maryland

Date of Birth:

April 12, 1947

Date of Death:

October 1, 2013

Place of Birth:

Baltimore, Maryland

Education:

Loyola High School in Towson, Maryland, 1965; B.A. in English, Loyola College, 1969

Interviews

Tom Clancy is the author of ten novels, including THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, RED STORM RISING, and CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER, and six nonfiction titles, including INTO THE STORM: A STUDY IN COMMAND. His latest novel, RAINBOW SIX, is now available from barnesandnoble.com.

AOLiveMC5: Welcome, Tom Clancy! Let's get right to our questions!

Question: Hello, Mr. Clancy. You're an excellent author! I was wondering, have you written or considered writing any novels concerning the space shuttle? Thank you.

Tom Clancy: No, I've never really thought about that.

Question: RAINBOW SIX deals with the threat of ecological terrorism. Is this a fictional device for you -- or do you see eco-terrorism as a true threat?

Tom Clancy: Oh, it's a potential threat. Exactly how real it is hard to say. There's all sorts of crazy people out there.

Question: Who came closer to the Jack Ryan you imagine, Harrison Ford or Alec Baldwin?

Tom Clancy: [chuckles] I'm going to keep away from that dispute.

Question: Mr. Clancy, have you ever been censored by the government for giving such detailed "secure" information in your novels?

Tom Clancy: Never. No. Not ever. Not once.

Question: Generally speaking, how much time is involved in your research for a book?

Tom Clancy: Never more than three weeks. And that was for PATRIOT GAMES.

Question: Mr. Clancy, you are now one of the world's most prominent fictional authors. What do you feel are your responsibilities in that role with regard to readers' insatiable appetite for realistic plots? And how do you fulfill them?

Tom Clancy: I have a covenant with my readers. And that covenant is to speak the truth. If it's in my books, it's possible or it has already happened. And it's a covenant I can never break. Within the limits of fiction.

Question: Mr. Clancy, as a Department of Defense employee, I appreciate all you have done to promote a strong national defense. Any recommendations for trench rats, as to how we can get the attention of the nation? Is Jack still President in RAINBOW SIX?

Tom Clancy: Jack is still President in RAINBOW SIX. Write your congressman, write your newspaper. Try to get the truth out. We all do it.

Question: What is your military background? It seems as though you do have one.

Tom Clancy: None. I've never been in the military service. I was rejected because of bad eyesight.

Question: What is your current assessment of the armed forces (e.g., too large, too small, still effective)?

Tom Clancy: I think they're still effective.

Question: How old is John Clark in this new novel?

Tom Clancy: Middle 50s.

Question: Do you know how your books will end when you start writing them, or do they just happen along as you write them?

Tom Clancy: Not always, very often you discover the ending as you tell the story. And that was true in this one.

Question: Your newest novel has just hit the stands.... Do they become somehow easier to produce as you are published more?

Tom Clancy: Not really. Your abilities increase with practice, but your expectations increase even more quickly; you're always in competition with yourself.

Question: When you have time to pick up a book yourself, what authors do you like to read?

Tom Clancy: Oh, God. Lots of them. Freddy Forsythe. John Keegan for military history. He's the best in the world. I think the best in America is John Varley, a science fiction guy. Just brilliant.

Question: Tom, Jack Ryan is said to be your alter ego. I know John Clark is his "darker side," but is he modeled after anyone?

Tom Clancy: Not really, no. He's a fictional character.

Question: In the autographed edition of your new book, RAINBOW SIX, is the book only autographed, or is there a script written along with it?

Tom Clancy: It's just autographed, as far as I know.

Question: Do you have access to privileged military information, or is all of your research based on material available to any civilian?

Tom Clancy: No, I do not. I have never seen a classified document. For me to do so would be a felony. And I don't want to go to jail. Public sources. But I've never done an FOI [Freedom of Information Act]. It's cheating.

Question: Do you think that you would have any interest in writing about government corruption?

Tom Clancy: Oh, I think I already have, in some ways. Maybe someday, but not now.

Question: Is it true you were debriefed by the White House over THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER?

Tom Clancy: Absolutely false. Never happened.

Question: Of the books you wrote, which one is your favorite?

Tom Clancy: No, they're all children of my mind.

Question: Hello, Mr. Clancy. First and foremost, congratulations on completing your latest book. It is a work of genius. I was wondering if you planned on making a movie out of RAINBOW SIX?

Tom Clancy: Oh, maybe. We're in discussions now, but nothing has been finalized.

Question: Mr. Clancy, have other world powers inquired about your book-writing skills?

Tom Clancy: Not to my knowledge, no.

Question: Why did you choose Beretta .45s for the standard sidearms?

Tom Clancy: 'Cause I like Beretta pistols.

Question: How has the end of the Cold War affected the East/West aspect of your novels?

Tom Clancy: Well, it's changed somewhat, but my last real Cold War novel was RED STORM RISING, in 1986.

Question: Mr. Clancy, I am an aspiring author. Do you depend upon your own experiences or consultants to keep the details accurate?

Tom Clancy: No, I do it all myself. And I don't always do it right, but I try very hard.

Question: Was RED OCTOBER based on a true story that was denied by the U.S. government?

Tom Clancy: Yes. November 8, 1975, a Soviet frigate named Storzhevoi attempted to defect to Sweden. And RED OCTOBER is based on that incident. The U.S. government has never denied it. It's a well-known incident.

Question: How did you get the idea to make environmentalists the bad guys this time?

Tom Clancy: Hey, I have to pick somebody.

Question: Mr. Clancy, Your books are wonderful, as are the movies that have been made of them. I'd like to know about "Netforce." How long will the production be in Virginia, and were you instrumental in selecting the stars for the miniseries?

Tom Clancy: No, I do not do casting, and I really don't know when production's going to be finished.

Question: What was your favorite book to research?

Tom Clancy: Hmm...probably RED STORM RISING.

Question: Well, you were right on the money with the problem with India. How did you think up that one?

Tom Clancy: It's obvious, isn't it?

Question: Do you feel your readers take your books too seriously?

Tom Clancy: Oh, some do. Most don't.

Question: Most of your novels are interlinked. Are you going to do another one like RED STORM RISING?

Tom Clancy: No. No, the Soviet Union is dead. And there's no point in repeating that.

Question: What do you believe will the major strategic threat to the United States in the next five to ten years?

Tom Clancy: I don't think there is such a threat. And there's no rule that says there must be.

Question: I want to know what's next for Jack Ryan. He is the President in EXECUTIVE DECISION, and I know he is going to run again. Give us a hint as to what is his next crisis.

Tom Clancy: No. I will not do that.

Question: Mr. Clancy, would you detail a bit of the process you follow when the books like OP-CENTER and POLITIKA are written in conjunction with another author? Who does what? What is your role, etc.?

Tom Clancy: My role is executive supervision, and that's all.

Question: Mr. Clancy, would you give us a short "required reading" list for those of us who are interested in learning more about agencies such as the CIA, the State Department, the Secret Service, etc.?

Tom Clancy: Uh, books by Jeffrey Richelson.

Question: In DEBT OF HONOR, what inspired you to write the truly shocking ending that greets readers in the last chapter?

Tom Clancy: I thought it'd be fun. And if you're a dramatist, as I am, you're supposed to do exciting endings.

Question: Where do you get your inspiration? And how come you are always ahead of the news?

Tom Clancy: I get my inspiration 'cause it's my job and I get paid for it. And I'm ahead of the news because I've got a good imagination, I guess.

Question: What's tougher for you as a writer, character development or concept development? (BTW, you do both very well.)

Tom Clancy: It's all part of the same thing.

Question: Any advice for writers who don't know how to get their work published?

Tom Clancy: Keep submitting it.

Question: Before you started writing, did you think of yourself as a good storyteller?

Tom Clancy: I'm better now than I was, I guess.

Question: If you could change one thing about any of your books, what would it be?

Tom Clancy: I have no idea.

Question: Is there a way to find out your schedule of where you are going to be signing copies of RAINBOW SIX?

Tom Clancy: Call Putnam.

Question: Mr. Clancy, do you believe the U.S. military is unprepared for another major regional conflict like Desert Storm?

Tom Clancy: No, I do not.

Question: Where do you live? Where do you like to write? Is it on computer?

Tom Clancy: I'm a Mac Driver, and on my Macintosh.

Question: Do you think the movies do your novels justice?

Tom Clancy: I'll let the reviewers decide that.

Question: Mr. Clancy, I have seen your pictures on various military vessels and assorted hardware. What is the most spectacular piece of U.S. military hardware that you have been allowed to tour?

Tom Clancy: The USS Wisconsin. Battleship.

Question: Who is your hero?

Tom Clancy: The world's full of heroes. Doctors are heroes. Cops are heroes. Firemen are heroes.

AOLiveMC5: Thank you so much for joining us this evening, Mr. Clancy.

Tom Clancy: Thank you. My pleasure.

AOLiveMC5: We are looking forward to your new book. Thank you very much for joining us, audience. Goodnight.

Tom Clancy: Goodnight.

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Praise for Rainbow Six

“Action-packed.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Gripping...bolt-action mayhem.”—People

“A thrill ride.”—USA Today

“Mr. Clancy is in his element...When the door blows open and the shooting starts, nobody does it better.”—The Dallas Morning News

More Praise for Tom Clancy

“He constantly taps the current world situation for its imminent dangers and spins them into an engrossing tale.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A brilliant describer of events.”—The Washington Post

“No one can equal his talent for making military electronics and engineering intelligible and exciting...He remains the best!”—Houston Chronicle

From the Publisher

The Barnes & Noble Review
Tom Clancy has scored a big hit with his new blockbuster, Rainbow Six. Clancy is known for his epic techno-thrillers, often about a larger-than-life hero against a larger-than-life threat to humanity or, at the very least, the American way. The Hunt for Red October established him as one of the best-selling writers of the century and soon made his major hero, Jack Ryan, a household name among Clancy enthusiasts. But also appearing in some of the Ryan books is John Clark. John is a more ambiguous hero of Clancy's, a haunted man who delves into an even darker side of humanity than Jack Ryan does.
Clark is at the center of Rainbow Six, a complex, multi-layered story of an elite team of international antiterrorists. Clark and his buddies do not shy away from using violence as a means of resolving issues with terrorists, and this gives Six something of a dark edge to it. Clancy handles all this superbly, and crosses over into the horror-thriller area with his various subplots. There are a ton of subplots, but by the end of this novel, they're all interwoven like lost strands of some grand tapestry.
The story opens with a terrorist hijacking. Clark is an ex-Navy SEAL, a man who is quick to make decisions and to take the toughest but quickest road to success. He and a couple of his men are onboard the jet as the terrorists redirect the plane to an area of Spain. The terrorists want the Spanish ambassador, who was supposed to be on board, but it turns out that only his wife is there. They are doomed from the start, as they are far too amateurish forJohnClark and the men of Rainbow Six. In short order, Clark and his men have the jet back in the hands of its rightful pilot and are heading for their next destination, the Rainbow Six headquarters in England. Rainbow Six is a top-secret group that works internationally and consists of highly skilled men in excellent physical and mental shape who are up to the task of being superheroes of sorts. Clark's son-in-law, Ding Chavez, is also part of the crew.
Meanwhile, someone is taking in homeless drunks and giving them a comfortable setting in which to live, as well as all the expensive liquor they could desire. But something is in the booze, something that might just be a key to unveiling a terrifying experiment. A Russian assassin is also on the loose, overseeing presumed terrorist operations that seem to involve huge superpowers. When the next international incident occurs, Clark and his men are ready to go in.
This time, it's a Swiss bank. Several men are holding hostages at the bank, and Rainbow Six gets in despite all obstacles. To protect the lives of the hostages, the good guys kill the robbers. But are they really robbers? Did whoever is behind the scenes of these terrorist activities intend for Rainbow Six to eliminate these men? The questions and complexities grow when we learn of top-secret experiments with drugs that may just break the genetic code.
As Clark and his team get closer to what may be an international terrorist conspiracy, they learn that even the highest-placed officials in the halls of Washington, D.C., and the lowliest of assassins have more in common than at first meets the eye. Good and evil cross over into each other for Clark as he struggles to set right the imbalance of the world of terrorism.
Clancy has penned a thrilling novel, full of paranoia, intrigue, terror, and tension that you can cut with a knife. His millions of fans, as well as newcomers to the genre, will eat this one up, and deservedly so! Highly recommended.
—Douglas Clegg

. . .Clancy . . .clearly knows his stuff. . . .It may be decoder-ring literature, but within the genre, there's no doubt that Clancy is king.
— Entertainment Weekly

Kennedy

In some respects, Tom Clancy isn't terribly different from Don DeLillo. Both are deeply concerned with the secret workings of the world -- the covert operations, shadow conspiracies and hidden histories that make things twirl whether we like it or not. In fact, like DeLillo's White Noise, the plot of Clancy's 10th novel, Rainbow Six, revolves around an "airborne toxic event." An international band of eco-terrorists funded by a pharmaceutical company CEO are plotting to unleash a deadly Ebola-like virus upon the entire world.
These evil-doers do a lot of plotting. It's not until about halfway through Clancy's 700-page tome that their nefarious plan finally reveals itself in full: Humans are doing so much damage to the planet that most of the population must be removed to let Mother Earth heal herself. (And of course, it's a plot that stretches all the way to the White House.) DeLillo could probably fill a few hundred intriguing pages sorting through the moral rot that presents itself here, but Clancy is a more literal -- and more hero-minded -- writer. His books aren't so much about evil as they are about the military's unstoppable ingenuity when it comes to preventing major bummers like this man-made plague. Which is probably why Rainbow Six has a video game tie-in, and Underworld doesn't.
The hero of Clancy's earlier novels, Jack Ryan, is absent here, but Rainbow Six offers another familiar face in Jack Clark, who's called upon to head Rainbow, an ultra-secret international anti-terrorist commando team based in England. (Clark is "Rainbow Six," hence the title.)
Rainbow Six is breezy reading, even by Clancy standards. The long action sequences in the book's early sections are ostensibly there as a way for the eco-terrorists to test Rainbow's mettle, but it feels more like page-padding. You read on, not in suspense, but in the hope that something -- anything -- less contrived will happen. In one sequence, an IRA splinter group discovers Rainbow's home base, where a Rainbow member's wife, who's nine months pregnant, is staying. (Think they'll meet up?) The book is almost certainly Clancy's most mean-spirited work to date. An unapologetic pro-military conservative, Clancy spews pages of invective against tree huggers of the Earth First!/Discovery Channel/Sierra Club ilk. Even the KGB looks better than environmentalists, who kidnap people off the streets to test their "Shiva" virus before unleashing it on the masses.
Except for the introduction of a people-finding device that reads enemies' heartbeats in the field (Clancy claims it exists), there are no new techno-marvels in Rainbow Six. And the author stretches his narrative powers so thin and voices his politics so stridently that the results are flimsy even by his own standards. It's no wonder Clancy has so much contempt for environmentalists: Anti-logging policies mean less paper for his outsize books. But the joke's on Clancy. Rainbow Six is recyclable. -- Salon

Mark Athitakis

Two years ago, Executive Orders, which thrust Jack Ryan into the Oval Office, raised the bar for its immensely popular author. This first Clancy hardcover since then, though a ripping read, matches its predecessor neither in complexity nor intensity nor even, at 752 pages, length, despite a strong premise and some world-class action sequences.
Instead of everyman Ryan, its lead is the more shadowed John Clark, the ex-Navy SEAL vigilante of Without Remorse who has appeared in several Ryan adventures. Clark now heads Rainbow Six, an international special-ops anti-terrorist strike force -- and, despite the novelty of the conceit, that's a problem, as the profusion of protagonists, though sharply drawn (including, most notably, "Ding" Chavez, Clark's longtime protege), deprives the book of the sort of strong central character that has given Clancy's previous novels such heart. The story opens vigorously if arbitrarily, with an attempted airline hijacking foiled by Clark and Chavez, who happen to be on the plane. After that action sequence, the duo and others train at Rainbow Headquarters outside London, then leap into the fray against terrorists who have seized a bank in Bern, Switzerland. And so the pattern of the narrative is set: action sequence, interlude, action sequence, interlude, etc., giving it the structure and pace of a computer game. A major subplot involving bioterrorism that evolves into an overarching plotline syncopates that pattern, though Clancy's choice of environmentalists as his prime villains will strike some readers as odd.
All of Clancy's fans, however, will revel in the writer's continued mastery at action writing; Rainbow's engagements, which occupy the bulk of the novel, are immensely suspenseful, breathtaking combos of expertly detailed combat and primal emotion. While not Clancy's best, then, his 10th hardcover will catapult to the top of bestseller lists -- and for good reason.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

. . .Clancy . . .clearly knows his stuff. . . .It may be decoder-ring literature, but within the genre, there's no doubt that Clancy is king.

Entertainment Weekly

...Clancy's labyrinthine new behemoth of demonic perils arrived too late for a full review. John Clark, the ex-Navy SEAL and master of secret operational missions from several earlier Clancy novels, including 1993's Without Remorse, is now "Rainbow Six" and mastering CIA strike teams out to fight terrorists around the world. At first, an incident at a Swiss bank, the kidnaping of an international trader in Germany, and a ghastly raid on an amusement park don't seem related. But the charged clouds of good and evil build toward a typically foreshadowed and explosive Clancy finish. Namely, a supremely powerful biotech company is led by a bonkers (yet well-spoken) environmentalist with the vision for a Project even more luminously insane than any frothy megaloid plot hatched by James Bond's archenemy SPECTRE: a murderous ecoproject that may get underway during the Olympic games in Sydney, Australia, and involve the destruction of almost all human life, merely to insure the survival and greater safety of Nature itself. No disappointments here, but an unusually sumptuous cut of steak can't hide the familiarity of the menu. Book-of-the-Month Club main selection

Kirkus Reviews