Command Authority

Mark Greaney is developing very well as a classic Tom Clancy style writer. He gives us a great novel with Command Authority. It is written with good detail, lots of action, lots of references to previous adventures that Jack Ryan has been involved in and that his son Jack, Jr. is now starting to discover in his own right. The writing is crystal clear, spot on in regards to intelligence work and totally believable. The action doesn't let up from the beginning to the end. The Clancy Franchise continues to give us great novels to read written by those whom Tom was mentoring and developing. We miss Tom, but his style lives on through the writing of people such as Marek Greaney.In this story the Campus is still on hiatus because of the leaks within it's organization and / or the government. The operatives are all sitting on the sidelines waiting for the order to go back to work. Caruson, Clark, Chavez and Driscoll are working hard to keep their talents and skills honed to a fine point. But without somewhere to point their energies they are frustrated.Jack Ryan, Jr. on the other hand is in the United Kingdom where he is back to working as a financial analyst and doing a bit of Intelligence work on the side. He is bored. He is frustrated. He wants back in the action just like the rest of the Campus group.In the course of his work he will come across material that will lead him to delve back into his father's adventures and tie them together to current events to come up with a grip on the current Russian crisis that might cause the world to change as we know it.How will he take that info and put it to use? How will his dad, who is in his second term as President take this material and use it to win the day? Will The Campus get back on it's feet and the operatives get back into the game?I started reading as soon as I could and found that I was unable to put the book down. I just kept wanting to know how things were going to work out. I wanted to know how Jack, Jr. was going to handle the pressures of intelligence work. I wanted to know if World War III was around the corner and whether the Russians were going to take back control of their many nations that spun off at the end of the cold war. Will natural resources really be the thing that destroys us?I loved the book. I loved the fact that Greaney has learned enough and grown enough to give us continued good reading material in the long line of Clancy novels.Thanks Tom for helping young writers get going.Thanks Mark for keeping the thrill alive.

Tom Clancy, you will be missed. RIP and God bless.If you'll pardon the cliché, the plot line of "Command Authority" is highly prescient and could very well be "ripped from the pages of today's headlines"--at least the present-day portion of the novel's timeline, set in Russia and Ukraine, that is.Unique among the Clancy novels (granted, most if not all of it was written by Mark Greaney as opposed to Clancy himself), "Command Authority" is essentially two novels in one, or perhaps more accurately, two interconnected timelines in one:(1) the present day, wherein U.S. Jack Ryan Sr. is contending with a resurgent belligerent Russia, thanks to new Russian President Valeri Volodin (a fairly obvious and thinly veiled fictitious stand-in for Vladimir Putin) and his right-hand (hench)man, the mysterious Zalin Talanov, the new intelligence chief who consolidates the SVR and FSB back under a single umbrella organization, a disturbing emulation of the KGB. Volodin spreads his Soviet-style terror both domestically--murdering members of the political opposition, including none other than former KGB/SVR Director Sergey Golovko, Jack Ryan Sr's old friend and onetime adversary (dating back to "The Cardinal of the Kremlin" storyline)--and internationally, first in a small-scale incursion into Lithuania in Chapter 1, followed by a large-scale invasion of Ukraine (just like in real-world history, Crimea is annexed and place names like Debaltseve, Donetsk, and the Dnieper River are factored in). There is evidence that Volodin and Talanov have ties with the Russian Mafiya, more specifically a powerful organized crime group known as the Seven Strong Men.Meanwhile, President Ryan's son, Jack Ryan, Jr, is on a sort of leave of absence from the Operations of "The Campus," which is going through a re-organization after the attack by rogue elements of the People's Republic of China (as occurred in the previous novel in the series, "Threat Vector"). Junior is working temporarily in the UK for a London-based firm called Castor & Boyle, which investigates financial crimes and whose co-founder and namesake, Hugh Castor, is a former British Intelligence operative and contemporary of Jack Sr's old friend Sir Basil Charleston (former Director of MI6, now retired). On behalf of C&B, Jack Jr. is investigating some shady Russian business deals that are apparently connected with the oil oligarchs, the Seven Strong Men, and high-ranking government officials ("siloviki," reminiscent of the Soviet-era "nomenklatura") ....including quite possibly the aforementioned Messrs. Volodin and Talanov. The plot thickens when Junior's investigation reveals the moniker of a cryptic and possibly apocryphal former KGB assassin codenamed "Zenith, whom Jack Sr. had investigated 30 years earlier....(2) .....thus providing the segue for the "flashback" portion of the novel, 30 years earlier. (As a nice artistic touch for the benefit of the reader, the authors and/or the publisher decided to place vertical grey borderlines running the length of the "flashback" pages, thus enabling the reader to easily discern the "past" from the "present" chapters.) Then-relatively new CIA analyst Jack Ryan Sr. (AKA Sir John to the Brits) is living and working in the UK with wife Cathy, toddler daughter Sally, and infant Jack Jr, approximately 1 year after the events of "Red Rabbit" and 2 years after the events of "The Hunt for Red October" (or is it the other way around). More specifically, Jack has been assigned by Admiral Jim Greer as a liaison to then-MI6 Director Charleston. Jack is tasked with helping British SIS investigate the mysterious murder of a Swiss banker and SIS informant, a murder that may or may not have been orchestrated by the KGB. Jack's suspicion that the is KGB involved is further bolstered when the original MI6 operative assigned to the Swiss banker case turns up dead himself; the circumstantial evidence indicates that this British operative simply died due to a drunken accident, and that is certainly the prevailing opinion of the MI6 investigative team sent to Switzerland--and later West Germany--and to which Jack is attached as a sort of junior partner. Jack's intuition tells him that the death was NOT an accident, but he has no physical evidence to prove it, thus causing friction between himself and his team leader, the by-the-book Nick Eastling. The plot thickens further, as does Jack's belief in a plot by KGB elements, as a series of terrorist attacks occur, seemingly perpetrated by the leftist terrorist group Red Army Faction (RAF, obviously not to be confused with the Royal Air Force), but may actually be the workings of the aforementioned shadowy KGB assassin Zenith. Much to Jack's frustration, he is unable to prove that this Zenith even exists.....Thus the reader is bounced back and forth between past and present, as Jack Junior's investigation becomes intertwined with Senior's 30 year-old unresolved Zenith mystery AND the present day shenanigans of Volodin and Talanov (for the sake of avoiding spoilers, I won't elaborate from there).Meanwhile, Junior's old Campus compatriots--good ol' John Clark, "Ding" Chavez, Dom Caruso, and Sam Driscoll--become involved in the black ops proxy war against Volodin's aggression in the Ukraine, from a daring rescue attempt at a CIA safehouse in Sevastopol to additional ops that, again for the sake of avoiding spoilers, I won't elaborate upon here (except to note that the Campus team works hand-in-hand with some active US Army elements such as Delta Force Col. "Midas" and the dynamic helicopter duo of CW2s "Dre" Page and Eric Conway).Overall, Mark Greaney does a credible job of capturing the personalities of Clancy's familiar old characters from the "Ryanverse" (to use a Wikipedia term), and like Clancy, Greaney does a very good job overall of keeping the pages turning with the dialogue and the hard-hitting high-tech military action alike.Just a few technical nitpicks (that Clancy himself would've probably caught had he been more directly involved in the writing of this novel) that prevent me from giving this book a 5-star rating:--referring to USAF SpecOps/CSAR pilots as "pararescue Black Hawk pilots;" while these intrepid USAF pilots provide the aerial transportation for the Air Force special operators known as pararescuemen--or "PJs" for short--the pilots themselves are not considered PJs, and while they do fly a variant of the Army Blackhawk helicopter, the Air Force has re-christened their version of the chopper as the Pave Hawk.--the PA-63 pistol is NOT made by famous German gunmaker Walther, but rather by Hungarian arms maker FEG--Greaney uses civilian rather than military time jargon when discussing military mission planning, i.e. "8:30pm" and "1am" instead of 2030 and 0100 respectively; this doesn't ring of military authenticity.Those nitpicks aside, it's still a worthwhile read, an engrossing and entertaining page-turner that makes one shudder at the parallels with real-world events, and also gives the reader a sense of solemnity knowing that this book was Tom Clancy's swan song.

Non stop action and a real good read. This to me was one of the best Jack Ryan books with all of its twists and turns. Looking forward to the next in the series.

Ridicule I gave a maximum rating on the syar chart therefor I do not have th need to write more

Muy fácil de leer, a pesar de los nombres de los numerosos personajes que intervienen a lo largo de la novela.Desde luego tiene sus imprescindibles dosis de acción, complot a nivel mundial, primeras figuras de EEUU y Rusia, y un cierto maniqueísmo respecto a quienes son los ángeles y los demonios (no hace falta pensar demasiado para adivinarlo).He echado en falta, aparte de la aparente falta de sentimientos en la mayor parte de los "secundarios", una pizquita de humor que hiciera algo más llevadera la trama y acción.

一気に読みました、彼の作品もっと読みたかったですね、本当に残念

O livro retoma a forma de narrativa comum de encontrar nos livros mais antigos, onde o Jack Rayan (pai) era o personagem principal. Leitura fácil e divertida.