Review of Rainbow 6 by Tom Clancy 1998 G.P. Putnam's Sons (Penguin) 740 pages ISBN 0-399-14419-7 $27.95 Tom Clancy is an agreeable vice. Sure, he's jingoistic, painfully Catholic, a vicious hawk, wildly right-wing, and has a distinctive kind of punchy dialog. However, when faced with one of those thick books full of action-packed action, flag-waving, and warmongering, you know you're in for a good time. There have been stumbles on the road to Clancy's victorious domination of the technothriller field. Though _Cardinal of the Kremlin_ and _Sum of All Fears_ stand out as really visionary work and a real joy to read, I can say without remorse that _Without Remorse_ was one of the morally worst books I've ever read. Clancy's black-and-white view of guys in white hats (true blooded Americans) and guys in black hats (everyone else) couldn't deal with the nuances of the drug problem in America. In that book, superspy John Clark just starts murdering drug dealers in an ugly string of unjustified murders, ending with a horrifying torture scene. Could these drug dealers be rehabilitated? Could they be given economic opportunities in the "normal" world, freed from a lifetime of selling drugs or poverty? Could drug dealing be eliminated entirely by limited legalization of drugs? Nah---according to Clancy/Clark, you should just send in Special Forces guys to kill them. *That'd* keep order in the streets. Eeek. The hero of this book is again John Clark. I opened the book with trepidation, worried that this would be a repeat of the stomach-churning _Remorse_ experience. Instead, five pages in I was having a great time. I'd already had one action scene, an acronym I didn't understand, and needless nationalism. It was great. Plot? Well, the guys in the white hats (in this case, more Special Forces and British SAS guys along with a few foreigners) are setting up a quasi-legal international anti-terrorism force. Think international S.W.A.T. staffed by pleasant supermen. Our old friend (from _Clear and Present Danger_) Domingo Chavez is Clark's second-in-command. Whenever terrorist trouble strikes anywhere in the world (or, well, Western Europe---apparently atrocities in Rwanda and Kosovo can continue without their intervention, much less Thailand), these guys swoop in from their home base in England and kill the terrorists. Yeeha! Yippie-yai-kai-yay! However, Rainbow's visible terrorist enemies are pawns in a larger game, a game of such Pure, Unadulterated Evil, I shouldn't give it away. But I'm going to anyway. Clancy, having run out of Middle East terrorists and Russians to set his cowboys against, finds a new insidious world enemy: ecologists. Yep, left-wing greens, treehuggers, rabbit-squeezers. There's a vast conspiracy of these nuts (the president of the Sierra Club just about froths at the mouth at one point) and they're going to implement an aggressive population control measure. It's funny to think of Clancy sitting alone in his office deciding that radical environmentalists are the next big threat to world stability, most especially biologists and vegetarians. It's clear that the mindset of your typical environmentalist is as foreign to him as any other fascist (his word), and though he correctly identifies some of the major environmental problems, he always spins it wrong. It must be a sign of his fame and fortune that no one called him on the scene where the vegan eats an egg salad sandwich.** [** In case you didn't know either, vegetarians eat no meat, but most will drink milk, eat eggs, and many happily wear leather. Vegans believe in no animal exploitation at all, and refuse to use any of the above products and anything else that is derived from their ilk.] There's always a "thump" moment in a Clancy book. That's when you hit a page where some bit of totally unswallowable conceit hits you and you throw the book across the room where it thumps the wall. In _Cardinal_ it was clearly the point where we find out that an American became a spy because she had an unrequited lesbian love. _Sum of All Fears_ required us to believe that the Pope could solve the problems between Jews and Muslims in the Middle East. In _Rainbow Six_, it's that the mechanics of the environmentalists plot to stop humanity's abuse of the planet are pretty tenuous. These people are overfunded brilliant scientists, and this is the best they can think of? Yow. However, I'm being harsh. I'm like a trekkie complaining about the writing of episodes I skip classes and homework to watch. I've read nearly every Clancy book with relish, and this was no exception. This counterterrorism force (called "Rainbow" for all the nationalities invovled) gets three really great action scenes in the book written with gritted-teeth tension. The movie in my mind was playing in technocolor and I knew who to root for. Pow! Pow! I revelled in the thrill of the violence and the cleverness and skill of our men in uniform. I could see through the sniper's scope and my heart actually raced as I tore through page after page. There are also good moments of spywork, another Clancy strength. My only real complaint (besides the loony plot and spotty research on vegetarianism) was that the pacing of the book was a little odd; the best action scenes were bunched in the beginning and the middle, leaving for a somewhat hollow finish. But if you liked the other Clancy books, this is another fun one, though certainly not the best. Read it.