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Jack Ryan: Difference between revisions
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** John Clark, who is already approaching sixty by ''Rainbow Six'', isn't quite what he used to be in ''Without Remorse'', but as noted in ''Rainbow Six'', he's still on everybody's "don't-fuck-with list."
** Secret Service Special Agent Don Russel, Katie Ryan's bodyguard, who has grandchildren of his own. {{spoiler|When terrorists with AK-47s attack Katie's daycare center, Don has one second of warning and takes down 3 before getting shot, and kills a fourth with his dying breaths}}.
* [[Bavarian Fire Drill]]: The terrorists in ''The Sum of All Fears'' impersonate TV network service personnel to get their bomb (disguised as a commercial VCR) into the Denver Skydome. Their German terrorist accomplices get onto a Soviet army base in East Germany by donning Soviet officer uniforms, and pretending to be there for a surprise inspection.
* [[Black Best Friend]]: Robby Jackson rarely fails to have stories about his childhood in Alabama with his preacher father, or his time flying Tomcats for the Navy.
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* [[Chinese With Chopper Support]]: The PLA appeared in ''The Bear and the Dragon.''
* [[Church Militant]]: Daryaei uses religion as a pretense for creating the UIR and threatening their neighboring states, intending to bring all of the world (or as much of it as he can) under the rule of Shi'a.
* [[Closest Thing We Got]]: A veterinary surgeon is drafted into providing care for gunshot victims in ''Patriot Games''. Treated realistically in that he fails to save at least one life.
* [[Code Name]]
* [[Cold Sniper]]: Played straight, inverted, and [[Deconstructed]] in different novels.
* [[Cold War]]
* [[Continuity Nod]]: All over the novels and some of the games.
* [[Contrived Coincidence]]: See the entry on that page. In general, lots of what gets the plot moving depends on either someone having a change of heart at the right moment, such as {{spoiler|Popov spilling the beans entirely to Clark about Horizon's goals in ''Rainbow Six'', and Team-2 just happening to be at the Sydney Olympics at the time}}, or someone making a discovery that went ignored by everyone else just in the nick of time. To be fair, much of this is justified since it's uncovered by analysts who are doing what they're paid for.
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* [[Middle-Eastern Coalition]]: Iran forms this with Iraq and attempts to expand it to include others forcibly in ''Executive Orders''.
* [[Mnogo Nukes]]
* [[Mugging the Monster]]:
** Note to muggers (and nosy cops) -- John Clark is ''not'' the kind of person you want to mess with on a dark street at night.
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* [[My Secret Pregnancy]]: An occurrence of this due to family planning laws sets off the principal conflict in ''The Bear and the Dragon''.
* [[Mythology Gag]]: A minor one. In the beginning of ''Debt of Honor'', Ron Jones quips to his former CO, now-Rear Admiral Bart Mancuso, that ''USS Chicago'' is currently in the Arctic Ocean tracking whales. In ''[[Red Storm Rising]]'', ''Chicago'' was the boat commanded by Mancuso's [[Expy]] Dan McCafferty, who at one point asks his sonarman to report some anomalous contacts as they are traversing the Arctic Ocean on their way to conduct attacks on Soviet air bases... which turn out to be whales.
* [[Nice Job Fixing It, Villain]]: In ''Executive Orders'', the Mountain Men subplot involves some domestic terrorists intent on exploding a truck bomb at the White House. Iran's biowarfare attack, however, causes a travel lockdown that {{spoiler|keeps them penned up at a motel long enough for them to get caught}}. It may come across as a [[Shaggy Dog Story]] but the moral is that evil sometimes defeats itself. There's some [[Irony]] here as well, in that Daryaei himself laments near the beginning that if only all of these plotters would ''coordinate'' with each other, they'd be more successful.
* [[No Party Given]]: Trent and Fellows's parties are not explicitly named, even though it's quite obvious that Trent is a liberal and Fellows is a conservative. Ditto for Fowler and Durling, who belong to the same party as Fellows.
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* [[Roaring Rampage of Revenge]]: Clark ''lives'' off of this trope in ''Without Remorse''.
* [[Royals Who Actually Do Something]]: The Prince of Wales in ''Patriot Games''. He gets to show off his military training during the penultimate shootout.
* [[Scary Black Man]]: Invoked by Robby Jackson in ''Patriot Games'' in order to intimidate a terrorist, who had ''very'' unwisely dropped the N-Bomb towards Robby's wife.
* [[Science Marches On]]: Several books set [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future]] make use of proposed weapons systems that never went into production, or never existed in the first place.
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* [[Shrine to Self]]: Several military characters are shown to have this attitude.
* [[Smoking Is Cool]]: Largely averted. While Ryan was a former smoker (and occasionally fell back into the habit after {{spoiler|becoming President}}), most of the actual badasses don't smoke, with the US Army Rangers and Rainbow being specifically singled out at various times. The occasional military personnel does smoke, but Clancy makes it fairly clear that they do so as a stress reliever.
** It even get derided in a few books as either very foolish from a military perspective (it kills one's night vision), or a sign of stress one is tryign to conceal and the smoking is a dead giveaway.
* [[Smug Snake]]: Ernesto Escobedo's default attitude towards America and Americans in ''Clear And Present Danger''. In fact, quite a few villains fall into this category, including the Prime Minister of India, the drug dealers in ''Without Remorse'', the leader of Iran in ''Executive Orders'', etc.
* [[Sociopathic Soldier]]: Soviet KGB troops tend to get this treatment, as distinct from the Red Army's soldiers. Even the Red Army soldiers show their disdain for their green-shoulder-board-wearing comrades.
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* [[Straw Civilian]]: Several. Especially noted when Navy pilot Robby Jackson states that jet engine noise is the "Sound of Freedom". To the people living near the military airport, the value of freedom from low blood pressure, sound sleep, and good hearing is left unmentioned, but that's Robby's response to the complaints.
* [[Strawman Political]]: Clancy makes regular use of strawman liberals, pacifists, and environmentalists throughout his novels.
** That said, the rare aversions (such as
** On the other hand, it's downright parodic in ''Threat Vector'', where every character with a remotely liberal bent is portrayed as a self serving, hypocritical, scheming wretch who embodies every single undesirable aspect of the political left. This notable since even in earlier and even later books even the strawmen characters were handled with much more finesse.
* [[Take a Third Option]]: Much of the setup in ''Debt of Honor'' revolves around {{spoiler|Japan}} launching their systematic attacks on America's financial sectors and military in such a way that any response would not be possible for months or years. Ryan finds a way to sidestep all of these through clever [[Loophole Abuse]] and special operations maneuvering. As President Durling noted when he gave Jack some advice, "I fought in [[The Vietnam War|a war]] where the other side made the rules. It didn't work out very well."
* [[Take That]]: Clancy takes the opportunity in several of his novels to note that the that none of the things that happen in Ian Fleming's ''[[James Bond]]'' novels would ever pass muster in reality. Pot shots are also taken at NBC and environmentalists in ''Executive Orders'' and ''Rainbow Six''.
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