Clear and Present Danger

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Clear and Present Danger
Cover of the first edition
Written by: Tom Clancy
Central Theme:
Synopsis: A rogue adviser to the President launches a covert and illegal war on the Columbian narcotics industry, and Ryan must rescue the soldiers before they are abandoned to their fate.
Series: Jack Ryan
Preceded by: The Cardinal of the Kremlin
Followed by: The Sum of All Fears
First published: August 17, 1989
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"You see this? That's your new target, unless it's not big enough."
—John Clark

Jack Ryan must investigate the murder of a life-long friend of the POTUS in relation to what appears to be a drug cartel in Columbia, only to be pulled into a war illegally started by the US government.

Written by Tom Clancy with film adaptation starring Harrison Ford.

Tropes used in Clear and Present Danger include:
  • Action Duo
  • Action Survivor
  • A Disgrace to Blackbeard: Averted. The pirates introduced at the beginning are just cruel and sadistic as the namesake of this trope would approve of, to ghastly results.
  • Armchair Military: When the operation starts to unravel and people not cleared start to figure it out, one person states rather bluntly that if the CIA had actually bothered to include the organizations they were suborning, the operation would have run smoother, would not have been discovered, and would've been a hell of a lot more deniable, basically a screed against the Armchair Military that set up the operation in the first place.
  • Badass: John Clark
  • Black and Grey Morality: A recurring theme. While all involved (save the drug lords) agree Drugs Are Bad, the reactions to them rarely are lily white and morally justified from anyone on the "good guy" team. Not even Ryan is exempt from this, though he certainly tries to avert greying his morality as much as possible.
    • Cortez is very dark grey element on the black side, realizing very sensibly the drug lords are conniving at their own destruction limiting themselves to the drugs trade and that relying on cold blooded murder and other forms of brutality to maintain their power is not only counterproductive in the long run, it's also utterly barbaric, and has an embryonic plan in the works to restructure the Cartel into a much more economically viable organization that can still profit minus a majority of the cruelty, half the drug exports, and cuts a deal to get the secret cooperation of the United States in the scheme (via Admiral Cutter) so they can benefit from the positives of the reduced drug exports while guaranteeing the target gets taken off the Cartel's back.
  • Calling the Old Man Out: "How dare you, sir!"
  • Coast Guard: USCGC Panache, a definite Cool Boat, plays a very prominent role in the book. In the film it's an unnamed Coast Guard cutter.
  • Cool and Unusual Punishment: The Panache crew cleverly fake a trial and mock execution to scare the pirates they caught into confessing their crimes.
    • Later, a group of Marine fake attempting to feed captured drug pilots to an alligator to scare them into cooperating.
      • Well, being fair, the alligator was entirely real. It was merely the threats to leave the drug pilot staked out for the alligator that were a bluff.
  • Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: Invoked by Clancy by design of the plot, as even the more honorable characters wind up doing some morally grey things at best to combat drug trafficking. Even series hero Jack Ryan is forced to compromise his ethics on more than one occasion if only to prevent worse ethical breaches from happening, and he darkly muses no one in the story was going to come out of it looking like a good guy by the end.
  • Deceased Fall Guy Gambit: In the movie, the President threatens to do this to Admiral Greer. In the book, John Clark does this successfully to Admiral Cutter.
    • In the book, Clark specifically goads Cutter into becoming the deceased fall guy after revealing to him Cortez sold him out and that he's going to be disgraced, which prompts Cutter to later commit suicide via throwing himself in front of a transit bus, which allows the others to pin all the blame on Cutter's corpse while not worrying about his living body exposing the scandal to the world in a later congressional hearing.
  • Dirty Cop: The Cartel has a few on their payroll, one of which they murder after he fails to prevent their records from being seized.
    • Even the cops not on their payroll aren't above this trope, as they arrange to have the pirates from the beginning of the book murdered by inmates and rewards them by getting evidence against them tainted so they walk free in exchange for murders committed at police behest.
  • Dirty Coward: Cutter is reviled by anyone with an ounce of good sense for being a General Ripper up until it backfires, then he immediately wimps out.
    • The pirates introduced at the beginning of the book are killers, but when they find themselves behind bars and unable to trade information for immunity, they immediately show how yellow their bellies really are.
  • Don't Sneak Up On Me Like That: This exact line is said by Clark when the pilot Larson walks up behind him without warning first. Actually incredibly stupid of Larson, since Clark just killed four heavily armed mercenaries.
  • Droit Du Seigneur: Cortez muses disgustedly the drug lords are not above this trope.
  • Drugs Are Bad
  • Exact Words: In the novel, when Cortez is finally taken by the Americans he cooperates freely in return for a promise that he will not be prosecuted or extradited to face trial elsewhere. At the end of the novel the US returns him to Cuba... where, as a traitor and defector from the Cuban intelligence service, he will be immediately killed without a trial.
    • Invoked on two separate levels in the same sequence in the novel, when the cartel leader Escobedo is taken into custody during the final extraction mission under circumstances where it's impossible to arrest him. After Ryan vetoes Clark's suggestion to just throw him out of the helicopter he orders Clark to do the only other thing they can do - take him back to Colombia and let him go. Clark does so, but also while in his cover ID as a drug-smuggling mercenary tips off Escobedo's fellow Cartel leaders to the entirely truthful yet incomplete story of 'Senor Escobedo was trying to make a sudden flight out of the country under highly suspicious circumstances, so I figured I'd better bring him back here to you'... which of course makes Escobedo's peers immediately conclude that he was the traitor who had been helping the US kill off rival Cartel kingpins, thus still guaranteeing Escobedo's death while Clark obeys his orders not to kill him.
    • The trope is also discussed when when the CIA takes action to kill off Cartel members, and when that threatens the political standing of the President, Cutter points out the CIA never were told to do what they did in the sense of this trope, they just interpreted what they heard as an excuse to kill.
    • The plot also notes the President and others who know their words could be used against them later are appropriately vague when they have to be, just in case this trope bites them on the ass.
  • Even Evil Has Standards - Cortez has the mindset of a professional intelligence officer, so while he mostly has a lot of Pragmatic Villainy moments, he does show genuine disgust with the methods used by the Cartel to intimidate their rivals (even paraphrasing Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil at one point in the book).
    • The pirates are utterly reviled even by other hardened criminals, as even they consider the multiple rape and murder of women and children a bridge too far.
  • Every Helicopter Is a Huey: Justified in the film by Rule of Symbolism.
    • Subverted in the books, as the helicopter is identified as a Pave Low.
  • Everything Is Online: Mocked. After Cortez and Ryan both start to suspect that a car bombing was actually caused by a missile [or at least something that was supposed to look like a car bomb but wasn't), they research the issue. Ryan, the Deputy Director of the largest intelligence organization in the world, has to pull an all-nighter alone looking through Jane's Armaments. Cortez just searches a slick, high-tech database.
    • Inverted in the original novel, where Cortez finds out that the 'car bombing' was actually a smart bomb by simply reading the police forensics report and realizing that the type of explosive involved is only used in high-end military ordinance, and the thick cardboard cover of his copy of Jane's is how Cortez figures out how the bomb didn't leave any traces of the bomb casing.
  • False-Flag Operation: Several are pulled off by the Americans to fool both the press and the Cartel into believing something other than the truth. This backfires when Cortez cottons on the ruse and suborns Cutter into making him a crucial element in maintaining it, threatening him with exposure for treason if he doesn't.
  • Friendly Sniper: "Ding" Chavez, who becomes a major recurring character.
    • Only in the movie. In the book, he's a recon specialist who majors in CQB.
  • Gaslighting: The crew of the Panache fake a well staged trial and execution of one of the pirates in order to convince his buddy to spill his guts about their crimes lest he dies too. It works so well the man who was fooled is gobsmacked to see a man he thought dead alive the next day.
  • "Get Out of Jail Free" Card: Which is interpreted differently in each version. In the movie, it exists to protect Ritter from the consequences of his actions. In the book, it's to protect the CIA as a whole.
    • The card itself (actually a permission slip of sorts) becomes a major plot point later on in the book, when Ritter doesn't make sure he gets it renewed and later takes actions NOT covered by it which Cutter uses to blackmail him into a cover-up lest they both be disgraced and possibly imprisoned..
  • Gilligan Cut: Jack Ryan knocking on the cartel boss's door.
  • Hauled Before a Senate Subcommittee: A major concern of the parties who initiated the drug interdiction ops, and in both book and movie they try to set up things so they can escape this fate. In the movie, Jack Ryan foils this by testifying in front of Congress about the unraveled conspiracy. In the book, he instead manages to avoid having it happen in exchange for the parties involved spilling their guts privately about what happened to the proper congressmen, with the proviso that in doing so they only walk free if they leave government service. As since Cutter commits suicide in the book, most of the blame for the really damning acts is pinned on his corpse, making it easier to hush things up.
  • Hollywood Hacking: Averted.
  • Incurable Cough of Death: Admiral Greer, we hardly knew ye.
  • Ironic Echo Cut: "What the hell is this..."
  • Lampshade Hanging: Quite a bit of this is done as part of the plot, with tropes of Spy Fiction and Morality Tropes of all varieties are commented on by the various characters.
  • Leave Behind a Pistol
  • Literary Allusion Title: the "Clear and present danger" clause in law. Title Dropped in the book. Interestingly, it is related to the First Amendment freedom of speech provision and has little, if any, relevance to the plot.
  • MacGyvering: Two inmates later murder the pirates in a prison shower while using knives they made with improvised prison shop materials.
  • Make It Look Like an Accident: The plan to topple the Cartel involves duping them into thinking someone within their own ranks is doing their own colleagues in, and the perception this is true is officially encouraged by the Americans to disguise their own involvement.
  • Morality Chain: The US government has FBI Director Emil Jacobs, who initially tries to get the President to back off the secret ops against the drug lords on their own turf to no avail, and it's his death that gets those very actions escalated. Admiral James Greer is dying of cancer and unable to serve as this to his CIA colleagues, and Jack Ryan is kept ignorant as much as possible because the US government conspirators fear (correctly) he wouldn't be silent about the immorality of their actions. Towards the end, though, at least Ryan manages to be this trope to the point Judge Moore and Bob Ritter are moved to follow their conscience regardless of the consequences they know they'll face for it.
  • Neck Snap: Moira, in the film.
  • Odd Friendship: Alan Trent, a gay Democrat from Massachusetts and Sam Fellows, a Mormon Republican from Arizona.
  • Off with His Head!: The KNIFE team tries to do this a guy who noticed them to scare his buddies into not pursing them, but it doesn't work.
  • Only Sane Man: Each side has one. Felix Cortez is the one person in the Medellin Cartel who has to resist the urge to scream because despite his repeated counsel for caution and not taking the Americans lightly, his bosses let it go in one ear and out the other. Jack Ryan is this for his side, as he's one of the few government officials who later realizes they've gone in too far and the operations his government are doing are ultimately a long-term mess. It's for this reason Jack is kept in the dark most of the book by his own superiors, and Cortez, once he cottons on to the same facts, uses them in an attempt to salvage things so he comes out on top of the US Government-Medellin Cartel feud.
  • Our Presidents Are Different: Even though it's stated the President is the same one who has been in office from The Hunt for Red October, his characterization comes off as a far more corrupt and self-serving take on his former portrayal, where he showed moments conscience and respect for the rule of law that are largely avoided in this story, though it's justified by his descent from grace being triggered by a combination of re-election pressure and having a close friend die as a result of the actions of the drugs trade that clouds his honor and morality.
    • Even more curiously, while the story take place chronologically around the time Reagan was president and the story itself is a fictional counterpart to the Iran-Contra scandal to a considerable extent, Reagan is mentioned as having served his own term in his own right, and the reference causes a Continuity Snarl between the timeline of the series and Real Life.
  • Plausible Deniability: Sought after by everyone involved in taking down the drug lords. Unfortunately, initial early attempts that prove mostly successful cause those who sought it in the first place to throw caution to the wind, and by the time this backfires, the consequences are so bad even these people who did what they to uphold the law are driven to committing perjury and treason to save themselves from disgrace.
    • Cortez offers this to Admiral Cutter]] as a Deal with the Devil mixed with some Blackmail, which amounts to "I'll keep your secrets and you out of prison, but only if you help me murder people, and if you don't, you have far more to lose than I do already."
  • Punch Clock Villain: Many people working in the drugs trade are revealed to simply be doing so either for pay or just to put food on the table, often because they have few if any better alternatives. The story does not negate the wrongs they helping to perpetuate by mentioning this, but it is something the characters working against them are forced to remember more than once.
  • Puppet Gun
  • Rescued From Purgatory: ...sort of
  • Revenge Before Reason: Both the drug lords and U.S. government are involved in an escalating war of this trope, and it only makes matters worse for both sides.
  • Revised Ending: Or, in the movie's case, reversed ending. The book ends with Ryan agreeing to keep the whole operation secret (which causes him trouble years later), Cutter Driven to Suicide and the Administration protected. The movie ends with Ryan angrily telling off the President, then spilling everything to a Senate committee.
    • Actually, the book has Ryan take the secret to the heads of the House and Senate committees on Intelligence... and its they who agree with the President to keep the whole thing buried, in return for the President's deliberately failing for re-election. Ryan's contribution is to keep quiet about this afterwards, but as he points out in a later novel he can truthfully testify under oath that to his knowledge no deals were cut and nobody was left off the hook; he fulfilled his own legal requirements by reporting events to the relevant oversight committee and they're under no requirement to tell him the exact reasoning processes by which they reached their verdict, only what it was.
  • Running Gag: "Plus change."
  • Right Man in the Wrong Place
  • Ruthless Modern Pirates: Two of these kick off the plot by murdering an American who double crossed the Medellin Cartel. This comes back to bite them on the ass later.
  • Shaped Like Itself; Cortez is able to deduce the Americans are the parties who are working against the Cartel because their attempts to stay covert bear clues only American tools and means would use.
    • The ammunition used is identical to ammo used by US soldiers, and a mere attempt to disguise the point of origin does little, since the cartridge shape is identical.
    • The raids on the drug labs and airports are like that done by soldiers, something only Americans would have the expertise and MO of doing, which tips their hand even though they chose those very methods to DISGUISE the origin of the operations.
    • The raids also take care to avoid collateral damage and noncombatant deaths, something that none of the Cartels' criminal or terrorist rivals would have the slightest concern about.
    • The Americans use helicopters for insertion and extraction of their raiding parties rather than ground transport not only because they are operating from a base outside the borders of Colombia but also because moving around the local road network in trucks would be seen by local observers and they're trying to remain as invisible as possible. When Cortez' investigations turn up that no one saw any suspect vehicles anywhere, he immediately deduces 'Americans' because if the raiders are not using the ground then they're coming by air and the Americans are the only one of the Cartel's possible enemies that would use helicopters for this mission.
  • Shoot Out the Lock: Played straight for once, when Larson shoots out the lock at an airplane strip where Colonel Johns's chopper lands to refuel before heading out to Panache. Though it is slightly Justified in that he uses five rounds to do so and specifically aims to separate the lock mechanism from the door.
  • Smug Snake: Both sides have a few, with Admiral Cutter on the American side and Ernesto Escobedo on the Cartel side being the most prominent.
  • Spot the Thread: This becomes a big problem almost from the very start of the operations against the Medellin Cartel, as despite all attempts made at keeping the details secret, too many people in the military and civilian aspects of those operations figure out what is going on merely by noticing elements that don't make sense with their own compartmented orders. By the time they realize this, all those dangling threads catch the attention of the Cartel, which causes the operations with said threads to implode.
  • Spy Speak

Commando: "The chicken is in the pot."
Clark: "Cook it."
BOOM

    • Slightly different in the book, where they use musical terms, but the end effect is the same.
  • Swiss Bank Account: Deconstructed. As Emil Jacobs points out, they aren't a guaranteed shield for illegal acts, especially if the cops have open-shut case proof one is connected to criminal acts.
  • The Cartel
  • The Cavalry: after everything goes to hell, Ryan and Clark help organize a rescue for the troops left behind on the ground. The book goes into much further detail, with the Pave Low, their MC-130 support, Larson's King Beech, and the Panache all playing big roles.
  • The Starscream: Col. Cortez
  • Title Drop
  • Western Terrorists
  • You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: The drug cartel intelligence officer Felix Cortez snaps Moira Wolfe's neck after getting from her the information his employer desired.
    • This is in contrast to the book, where she's left alive, but made unavailable due to Escobedo using the information that Cortez had collected for an attack on a US delegation visiting Colombia. After the US discovers the source of the leak and gets her cooperation in capturing him, his returning to the US would have resulted in being arrested.
    • She does attempt suicide in the book (but is saved by medical intervention) after realizing that she had inadvertently betrayed and helped kill her boss, but Cortez did not plan on this event and is in fact slightly appalled when he finally hears about it.
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