In this Jack Ryan thriller, #1 New York Times bestselling author Tom Clancy delivers an electrifying story of intrigue, power, and a family with two generations of heroes….
Decades ago, as a young CIA analyst, President Jack Ryan Sr. was sent out to investigate the death of an operative—only to uncover the existence of a KGB assassin codenamed Zenith. He was never able to find the killer….
In the present, a new strongman has emerged in the ever-chaotic Russian republic—the enigmatic President Valeri Volodon. But the foundations of his personal empire are built on a bloody secret from his past. And none who know of it have lived to tell. For he has set a plot in motion—a plot to return Russia to its former glory.
But when a family friend of Ryan’s is poisoned by a radioactive agent, the trail leads to Russia. And Jack Ryan Jr.—aided by his compatriots John Clark and the covert warriors of the secretive Campus—must delve into an international conflict thirty years in the making, and finish what his father started.
With President Ryan fighting the political battle of his life, and his son fighting a silent war against a ruthless foe, global conflict becomes imminent—and the possibility of survival may soon be lost for all….
“Vintage Clancy…A pleasing fairytale for people who like things that blow up.”
“Once again, the acrid scent of cordite wafted through my imagination during the climactic gun battle as Clancy’s characters from the world of intelligence achieved yet another victory over the forces of evil.”–
Command Authority was the final spy novel Tom Clancy co-authored before his 2013 death—and we can’t imagine a more perfect send-off. This gripping thriller is set in two intertwining timelines, the early 1980s and the 2010s. In the first, a green CIA analyst named Jack Ryan gets sent to Zurich to check out the death of an agent, which appears to be the work of a slippery Russian assassin code-named Zenith. Thirty years later, now-President Jack Ryan hosts a dinner at which an old Russian friend is poisoned…and all signs point to Zenith. As the Russian military starts to roll into neighboring countries, the president’s son, Jack Ryan Jr., rushes to finish the investigation his father started decades before. Clancy and co-author Mark Greaney, creator of the tremendously fun Gray Man series, craft a tense, globe-trotting techno-thriller that’s both a throwback to Clancy’s Cold War classics and an eerily up-to-date continuation.
“In the entertaining final Jack Ryan novel from bestseller Clancy (1947 2013), Russian president Valeri Volodin has imperialistic ambitions similar to those of a certain real-life Russian president. Failure to annex Estonia thanks to unexpected NATO resistance only redirects Russian attention to the Crimea and other lands currently outside NATO’s formal umbrella. Meanwhile, President Ryan’s son, Jack Ryan Jr., investigates what appears to be an unrelated case involving Russian gangsters exploiting a corrupt system to steal a vast fortune. In fact, the opportunistic appropriation links the ambitions of a once-obscure KGB officer decades ago to the events unfolding in the Crimean region and to the early career of President Ryan himself. Although the military conflict is an important part of the plot, this is a classic spy novel. Fans of extended combat sequences should look elsewhere, as the focus is on high stakes espionage and assassinations carried out in rented rooms and dark alleys, not well-lit battlefields.”
The Russian Federation invaded its sovereign neighbor on the first moonless night of spring. By dawn their tanks ground westward along highways and back roads as if the countryside belonged to them, as if the quarter-century thaw from the Cold War had been a dream.
This was not supposed to happen here. This was Estonia, after all, and Estonia was a NATO member state. The politicians in Tallinn had promised their people that Russia would never attack them now that they had joined the alliance.
But so far, NATO was a no-show in this war.
The Russian ground invasion was led by T-90s—fully modernized fifty-ton tanks with a 125-millimeter main gun and two heavy machine guns, explosive-reactive armor, and a state-of-the-art automated countermeasure system that detected inbound missiles and then launched missiles of its own to kill them in midair. And behind the T-90 warhorses, BTR-80 armored transporters carried troops in their bellies, disgorging them when necessary to provide cover for the tanks, and then retrieving them when all threats had been neutralized.
So far, the land war was proceeding nominally for the Russian Federation.
But it was a different story in the air.
