***

9August2023

eponymous sentence:
p18: "Carney, call the director, and tell him Rainbow Six is on the line...."

product:
p605: The same was true of Rifle One-Two, Sergeant First Class Fred Franklin, formerly an instructor at the Army's marksmanship training unit at Fort Benning and a deadly shot out to a mile with his huge MacMillan .50 bolt-action rifle.

p620: The big MacMillan sniper rifle fired the same cartridge as the .50-caliber heavy machine gun, sending a two-ounce bullet off at 27,000 feet per second, covering the distance in less than a third of a second and drilling a half-inch hole into the soft side of the truck, but there was no telling if it hit a target or not.

p666: Noonan had come through big-time, having killed three of them with his pistol, along with Franklin, who'd just about decapitated one with his big MacMillan .50, then used his monster rifle to kill the little brown truck and keep the five terrorists in it from getting away.

When I first read this I haven't read Executive Orders yet. Now it's become apparent that this (and also the first Clark book) doesn't coincide with the Ryan timeline. (31August2023 -- No, I was wrong. It does coincide with the Ryan timeline. Jack Ryan wasn't mentioned at all in this book--that threw me off. The next volume, The Bear and the Dragon, makes that clear.)

It's scary to think that the recent COVID-19 pandemic might have been something similar.

I think this book showed that Tom Clancy has run out of ideas and that's probably why this series seems to have finished after one more book (and two prequels.) This made two straight books on biological warfare with Ebola and I can only think he had more to say, or another scenario to play out, and thought to tell it from John Clark's point of view. This certainly had none of the complexity or richness of his previous books, bringing disparate threads together. This was just a straightforward vanilla thriller, and way too long for that kind of banality. Nor was the surprise ending much of a surprise since he'd painted himself into a corner by the time it arrived. A disappointment.

Let me start out by saying that the idea of starting rainbow six was intriguing and I do enjoy some of these characters. In saying that the whole plot and how redundant the author was throughout the book was horrible. This book should be completed at least in a quarter of its time. I was very disappointed. He contradict himself throughout the book. Other books seem he was trying to stay right on the edge of reality and this one seem more of a satire at times and went way over the top. This one part was simple in the book but it just made me roll my eyes. You had Clark and Chavez sitting at the table with their wives having dinner and talking business. They know their wife’s and specially Chavez his wife does not like killing people and did not know everything they do but they proceeded to talk about their business and help people do get hurt and even killed well they are just in training. They proceeded to talk even more about how close they came to him being killed. It was just too much and ridiculous. Oh yeah, and on rainbow six all the members are so stereotypical, the Hispanics are 5‘6“ and built like a bull wow the Caucasians are usually tall blonde and blue-eyed. The narrator of this book did not do it any justice, I do not want to hear another English accent for a while. Another thing, even though there’s some smart women characters in this book he really goes back to the 60s or 70s the way he has the men more domineering. I will now go to the next book in this series and I’m hoping he steps up his gane.
One other thing that I just recalled and it really did bother me is the word that the author chose to use more than a handful of times throughout was “niggardly“. I know what the meaning of this word is but again as I mentioned before, I listen to these books, there’s a narrator and I had to go back and listen to a few times to make sure I was hearing it right. And again I know what the meaning of the word and how it was applied but just the way the word looks and for me the way it sounds was a little much. This author is very bright, there’s an abundance of other words that could’ve been used. I’m disappointed in him and the editor and any proofreaders not to catch that.

Reread after abut 20 years.

Clancy writes a very good story however, he writes that story in 900 pages when he could have written 600 pages and not eliminated anything important. Back in the day he must have been paid by the page.

This is my first Tom Clancy book. I first knew about Rainbow Six by the PC game that was launched together with the book back in the 90's. The "Rainbow Six" brand became one of the most famous Tom Clancy games of all time, together with Splinter Cell. There are big differences between the book and the game, especially in terms of firefights even though the first game is an strategy game first and a first person shooter second.

The Rainbow group is quite interesting. The characters are typical military stereotypes, but good ones. The low point is that they are mainly American and British with token non-Anglo-Saxons just for show. The German Weber and the French Loiselle do receive good coverage but the really important stuff is done by English-speakers, either US or British heroes. The game is far more "international" with Italian, Spanish, Austrian, Swedish, Russian and Brazilian operatives - others would join the group in the following games. The game also has women and demolitions and recon soldiers. Clancy should talk more about the soldiers whose unit gives the title of the story. Instead many pages are wasted in dull moments. The soldiers' names and biographies aren't mentioned for the most part of the story; this was a huge plot hole as unimportant people got more lines than the Rainbow commandos. The author really got it wrong in this part. Even in the first Rainbow Six game each character had a small bio (the Brazilian has its bio all wrong, starting by his Spanish name, but that's better than nothing). Curiously the most interesting character is the ex-KGB colonel Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov, and his character development is the best in the story. Popov constantly contrasts his experiences in both sides of the Iron Curtain, gets a major participation in most of the plots and we even get a little glimpse into his personal life - his father was also from the intelligence service and we hear about his sister, Maria Arkadeyevna, just to show the ordinary public that Russian names have gender modifications. The Russians are always dividing opinions, and even an American flag waver as Tom Clancy showed admiration for them - as shown in this book and others like The Hunt for the Red October.

The rescue operations are great and the preparation plus execution are breathtaking, with a lot about CQB (Close Combat Battle) and hostage rescue know-how; this is the heritage that remained in the video game franchise, with the most recent one "Rainbow Six: Siege" being solely dedicated to it. The jungle battle, on the other hand was very anti-climatic and disappointing. The first mistakes are geographical, with Manaus being in northern Brazil, not the center. The author mentions only two rivers, but the region is the single largest riverine basin in the globe; some places are acessible only by boat and aircraft. The correct spelling for the river close to the Horizon facility would be "Rio Grande", not "Río Grande". Those mistakes are excusable but the battle description is not. The first mistake is that one does not wear kevlar helmets in thick jungle: it would stiffle the troops for no discernible gain in terms of protection. If you look Brazilian, French, Ecuatorian and Colombian jungle footage, you will see soft headgear (jungle hats and caps), amazingly enough the game is more accurate in this case, with the player able to equip its men with either light (cap), medium (hat) and heavy (balaklava) jungle equipment.

The jungle of the Amazon is way more enclosed than the jungles of Southeast Asia, with very tall trees and the like (which does get mentioned in the narrative) thus making the combat distances very short. Plus, the battle happened at night, narrowing the fighting distance even further; it is common for pointmen to carry shotguns because of the short distance. The Rainbow soldiers were not trained in jungle operations and they should be using assault rifles with 5,56mm or 7,62mm ammo, not the M10 submachine guns used in Close Quarters Battle in urban perimeter (again, the game was more faithful). The 7,62mm is better for thick jungle because it turns cover into concealment. The bad guys are using the HK G3, which is good but Brazilian Amazon is "FAL country", with the Belgian classic a favorite for me. The firefight was dull and one-sided, with the Rainbow unit winning not by superior skill and fieldcraft, but because they had a magic technological gizmo - Heart Beat sensor - that won the battle for them. Typical American mindset, and a wrong one. The small unit action I was expecting didn't really materialize, and the American tech won the day once again. The small unit tactics should have won the battle with a firefight and wounded commandos, not the pathetic turkey shot it was.

Another fine point was the choice of enemies, that today may be seen as ridiculous but after the fall of the Soviet Union the left was shacken to its core and only the ecologists remained, and they did proclaim such absurd ideas as shown in the book, with activists claiming part of Humanity should be eradicated; and by the means suggested in the book. The usage of terrorists from a defeated ideology was brilliant in the way it showed the uncertainty of the immediate post-Cold War period. The training moments are great and more than once I caught myself smiling while reading this book, with the mundane things that happen in the barracks and the jokes between the Americans and Brits. Other than that, the professionalism of the Rainbow operatives, and the planning before the action under the direction of the psychologist Dr. Bellow (inspired in "I Dream of Jeannie" maybe?), followed by the fast pacing close combat action after doors are blown up are the main prizes of this Tom Clancy classic.

Good manly read, could’ve easily been half the size.

John Clark leads an anti-terror group based out of England.

THIS was the longest book I read in 2022?! Yeah, it felt long.

I read this out loud to my husband, on his request. It took forever. It went between being very interesting to "why do I care about this group at all??" and ultimately seemed extremely padded out for the story it was trying to tell.

It was extremely patriotic. I didn't mind the element of environmentalists being the baddies; any passion can become stupidly obsessive. What I minded was how much of my time it took to get to the point, get to the tension, and how very many dull chapters I had to read through to get there. I get it, Rainbow Six Is Cool And Smart And Can Do Nothing Wrong. This story could still have used some severe editing.

My husband tells me the game is much better.

Rainbow Six marks a refreshing return to the military action formula for Clancy after he made some unfortunate tangential departures in his John Ryan canon, straying into revenge fantasies (the myopically unremarkable Without Remorse) and conservative/libertarian political fantasies (the all-but-unreadable Debt of Honor and Executive Orders). Rainbow is most similar to Clancy's Clear and Present Danger and The Sum of All Fears in both pacing and content. 400 pages of story crammed into 900 editing-be-damned pages, with a terrorism scenario that is as unlikely as it is plodding, interwoven with numerous lengthy pages of ponderous and oversimplified explanations of political issues not to mention technical details of military weaponry that are best skimmed until you get to the good parts, usually where something blows up.

I chose Tom Clancy's Rainbow six because of my favoring of books militaristic in nature. Rainbow six was no let down; The story features John Clark, an ex-Navy SEAL, leading a multinational group of counter terrorist experts from different countries. The group encounters multiple terror attacks, dealing with each one with precision and professionalism. Later, they learn that one Russian agent was responsible for these attacks. The Russian agent Popov soon defects after learning about his client's business with biological weapons of mass destruction, used to wipe out earth's populace just because of their harm to the environment, and decides to warn Rainbow. My favorite quote is "My name's Clark and I suppose I'm the boss here." This quote gives of a supposed feeling of control that a group like Rainbow has over things. The book is written in third person omniscient point of view. The writing style is extremely descriptive and offers constant point of view changes. I enjoyed this book because of it's pure action and suspense. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves action books/movies/games.

The first and only Clancy book I shall ever read and quite possibly the worst book I have ever read. My god what a boring book! All it is, is one chapter they go somewhere, the next they do something, then in the next they come back, that's all it is, interspersed with the odd chapter about some very obviously dodgy Russian bloke and some estate in the middle of nowhere in America. It's taken me 9 years to read less than 600 pages, one day, I shall finish it, and leave it on a train for someone else to endure, although I'm guessing that will still be a good 10 or 15 years away!

Good story. I really enjoyed this one and it was nice to have John Clark and Domingo Chavez working together again. The whole story I visualized Willem Dafoe and Raymond Cruz (the respective actors in the 1994 film Clear and Present Danger) in the story.

Good book. Give it a read if you find the time!