Rainbow Six » (Abridged, 5 CDs, 6 hrs.)

Known for originating the techno-thriller genre, Tom Clancy writes complex novels dense with hardware and international intrigue. Perhaps the strongest indication of his power as a writer is the fact that he is often treated by the media like a character in one of his books, asked for opinions about military readiness and the subject of rumors about being debriefed by the Pentagon. Not bad for a former salesman who was rejected for service because of bad eyesight.

4 cassettes / 6 Hours
Read by David Dukes
(also available on CD)

Mark Athitakis

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