TOM CLANCY TRUE FAITH AND ALLEGIANCE

Greaney is at the helm of the action-adventure enterprise built by the military maestro from Maryland (Tom Clancy Commander In Chief, 2016, etc.), this time with a devious yet believable story about radical terrorist attacks in America.

Romanian hacker Alexandru Dalcu worms into a lost U.S. Office of Personnel Management file containing American security clearance applications. Dalcu’s techno-skulduggery employs open-source intel "fusing legal data with an illegal theft of data and then weaponizing the results." Wanting another price-boosting oil crisis, a rogue Saudi pays Dalcu to build dossiers on key American anti-terror fighters. The Saud then sells the info to Islamic State group honcho Abu Musa al-Matari. Abu recruits "cleanskins"—radical sympathizers unknown to security services—to strike the targets within America. The who-wants-to-kill-whom is further complicated because Dalcu and ARTD, his shady employer, had been hired for spy work by the People’s Republic of China, and they’re out for blood too. As previously, there’s a difficult buy-in: the chief protagonist is Jack Ryan Jr., son of longtime Clancy hero and now U.S. President Jack Ryan. Junior works (sans Secret Service) as an Uzi-toting operative for Hendley Associates, a private CIA–type company hiring out for blacker-than-black ops. Longtime Clancy characters like the indestructible Clark, Ding, and the president’s nephew, Dominic Caruso, are also Hendley agents. Newbie "Midas" Jankowski, former Delta Force op, adds one more iron-jawed one-dimensional terminator. Action around a female Army helicopter pilot/gunner in Iraq provides an additional minor thread as Hendley operatives Gulfstream from Bucharest to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the tense, fast-paced action reels out ripped-from-headlines homeland terror attacks.

A generation past Red October, the America-hating bad guys have added spyware, hacking, the dark web, and Bitcoins to those ubiquitous AK-47s.