Rainbow Six (novel)

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Rainbow Six
Written by: Tom Clancy
Central Theme:
Synopsis: Badass John Clark and Junior Badass Ding Chavez join an international paramilitary counterterrorism force. Little do they suspect that they'll be facing an enemy within their own country.
Genre(s): Techno-thriller
Series: Jack Ryan
Preceded by: Executive Orders
Followed by: The Bear and the Dragon
First published: August 3, 1998
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Rainbow Six is a techno-thriller novel set in Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan universe. Legendary CIA operative John Clark creates an international counter-terrorism task force named RAINBOW. Composed of American, British, French and German soldiers, RAINBOW is the cream of the crop. Little do they know that their first few terrorist attacks are masterminded by a sinister corporation with designs that threaten the lives of everyone on Earth. Only John Clark (AKA Rainbow Six), his son-in-law Domingo "Ding" Chavez and the RAINBOW teams can prevent the end of the world as we know it.

Originally not related to the series of games by the same name, it was decided during development to base them on Tom Clancy's upcoming book. Both versions feature a similar plot, though obviously the book offers more detail, including the point of view of the villains.

Tropes used in Rainbow Six (novel) include:
  • A Fate Worse Than Death: The Horizon executives get to experience the wonderful jungle without any tools (or clothes!) as a means to commune with nature. Clark notes that jungle survival was tough as nails for him, a hardened Navy SEAL, and gives them a month to live, tops. Chavez even more bleakly writes them off to a week at most.
  • Affably Evil: Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov is very polite, even-tempered and enjoys a good conversation despite being responsible for three terrorist attacks that he was paid to instigate. Most of the members of the Project can be considered this as well.
  • Badass
  • Boom! Headshot!: Rainbow soldiers are trained to aim for the head when hostages are present. They also shoot people in the head as a matter of practicality (the only time they aim for the torso is in the finale).
    • Sole exception prior to the finale: one of the Rainbow snipers shoots a terrorist in the liver, leaving him to die a slow and painful death. This terrorist is the same one who murdered the little girl in the wheelchair, so it's quite clear why he did it. He is chastised only slightly afterward, because if he could aim that precisely, he should have got the guy in the knee so they could interrogate him.
  • BFG: Franklin's McMillan Tac-50 anti-materiel rifle is used to decapitate an IRA member and disable their escape vehicle.
    • Oso's M60 machine gun, which he laments he never gets to use. He only ever gets to shoot out windows with it.
  • Cool Guns: Averted, generally. Rainbow's shooters use generally accepted and sensible weapons such as sound suppressed Heckler and Koch sub-machine guns and military issue Berettas with a 10mm clip, with a smaller leavening of other standardized NATO issue hardware. The snipers, on the other hand, get more leeway, with Fred Franklin of Team One using a .50 caliber sniper rifle. The trope is also mused upon by Homer Johnston, who compares his weapon (a Winchester variant similar to the same sniper rifles used by the Secret Service, albeit with a customized ammo loadout) to that of his Friendly Rival Dieter, who uses a German Walther, which he considers to be this trope and much less efficient in all areas save rate of fire.
  • The Captain: Ding for Team-2, Covington for Team-1.
  • Chekhov's Gun: Tim's heartbeat detector, as well as his cellphone jamming software.
    • The former never shows up in any Clancy work after this novel, as it was based on Real Life tech that turned out to be a rigged mock up that didn't actually function.
  • Code Name:
    • Rainbow Six: John Clark
    • Rainbow Five: Alistair Stanley
    • Bear: Dan Malloy[1]
    • Rifle Two-One: Homer Johnson
    • Rifle Two-Two: Dieter Weber
  • Corrupt Corporate Executive: John Brightling. He does have some personal moral reservations about what he plans to do, but it's not enough to stop him from going ahead with it.
  • Death by Sex: Part of the villains' testing of their lethal-if-not-vaccinated biological agent involves getting uninfected captives to have sex with infected ones while both sides are drugged. True to form, said virus can be spread by intercourse.
  • Depopulation Bomb: The Shiva virus.
  • Disposable Vagrant: The Shiva virus is initially tested on the homeless by men posing as the local charity group.
  • Drives Like Crazy: oh yes. Among the vehicles that get involved: two Jaguars, a moving van, and a Black Hawk.
  • Easy Logistics: Averted. Clark's recurring nemesis throughout this novel is budget meetings, he has to threaten to pull strings with the President of the United States to get one helicopter and crew permanently assigned to him (and that only after another operation took a great risk of failure by using a local helicopter and pilot), it is mentioned at several points that providing Clark with troops and vehicles is drawing assets away from other special operations units who find their losses inconvenient, and at one point Clark has to turn down a reasonable suggestion ('We could use more organic medical capability instead of relying on local hospitals and EMTs') with a flat refusal of "I just don't have the funding."
  • Elites Are More Glamorous: Rainbow is made up of Special Forces commandos from around the world (Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, Green Berets, Mossad, Special Air Service, GSG-9, and Delta Force)
  • Even Evil Has Standards: Popov will organize terrorist attacks, get people who trust him killed and stolen from, but even he balks at The Project's plan - despite being safe from it, this prompts his Heel Face Turn, shooting the Horizon exec who told him this and running to warn Clark and Rainbow of what they are planning.
    • This overlaps with Pragmatic Villainy. Popov's conscience can easily tolerate killing innocent bystanders in cold blood solely for material gain—so long as there's actually a logical progression from 'these people die' to 'profit', and you're killing only in necessary amounts for the plan rather than indiscriminately doing people just because they're there. Horizon's plan is going to kill billions of people for a goal Popov doesn't even regard as comprehensible, let alone rational, and so he's horrified beyond words.
  • Evil, Inc.: Horizon; however, this is revealed in the epilogue to have only been the case with the top executives, as after they are gone, Horizon goes on to produce an effective method of stopping heart attacks and age-delaying medication. The same applies to the security firm working with them. Only it's top dog and his handpicked goons were in on things, everyone else was neutral or would have turned against them at worst.
  • Five-Man Band: Many of the roles are present for Team-2:
  • Fluffy the Terrible: "Team Rainbow," a collection of the World's Biggest Badasses.
  • Former Regime Personnel: Popov, who is Ex-KGB.
  • Friendly Sniper: Both team two snipers are like this.
  • Hero of Another Story: Covington and Team-1. Most of Team-1 go unnamed. Covington himself gets to assist in a few incidents And gets ambushed by the bad guys along with Team-1.
  • Hypocrite: The ecoterrorists have this in spades, with relentless lampshading. As just one example, they have chosen the Hummer, one of the most fuel inefficient vehicles in existence, as their main mode of transportation for their bases in Kansas and Manaus, Brazil. Considering that these people supposedly love nature so much, you'd think they'd pick something more economical.
    • There's also the fact that they denounce modern human life as being at odds with pure, good nature, yet seemingly think nothing of the fact that they benefit from modern human innovation. For instance, their headquarters weren't made from tar and twigs, after all. Being villains, they probably Hand Wave this as a necessary evil to achieve their goals. They do explicitly note that they don't personally have to be as careful with nature, since the "large-scale" destruction won't be going on much longer.
  • I Have Your Wife: the IRA terrorists take Clark and Chavez's wives hostage at the hospital they work in.
  • Interquel: Set after Executive Orders, but before The Bear and the Dragon, and its cast plays a role in the latter.
  • Karmic Death: The villains are ecoterrorist nuts who believe Earth would be better off without evil humans destroying everything with war and pollution. They construct a survival compound in the South American rainforest and plan to sit out the apocalypse they have set into motion. In the end, Rainbow destroys their base and leaves them stranded in the wilderness they loved so much to fend for themselves. The epilogue suggests this didn't end well for them.
  • Karma Houdini: Popov. Despite getting people that trusted him killed, and despite organizing the death of several Team-1 members, he gets away unpunished. In fact, he becomes rich(er), thanks to taking over a ranch from one of the Horizon executives.
    • Then again, he was allowed free considering he traded information to literally save the world, the FBI/CIA/SIS/RVS know who he is (being a spy by trade, this is basically leprosy), what he's done, and he knows they know, so he'll only get to enjoy his freedom so long as he keeps his nose clean for the rest of his life.
  • Lightning Bruiser: Oso is often mentioned as being the largest, most musclebound member of RAINBOW yet Ding often notices how this does not slow him at all, or make him any less nimble. As a terrorist learns when Oso comes down a rope, kicking a window and landing on top of him in perfect balance before punching then shooting said terrorist dead.
  • Mauve Shirt: Team-1, to Team-2. Only a handful of them are named, and those with names are either fine or simply injured during the PIRA ambush.
  • The Men First: John Clark believes in this.
  • Meaningful Name: "Rainbow" is derived from the multiple national flags (as in, their colors) their membership draws its volunteers.
  • Mugging the Monster: Early in the novel, terrorists attempt to hijack a plane transporting three Rainbow operatives: Former US Navy SEAL, former British SAS, and former US Army Special Forces, respectively. They're also licensed to carry firearms on airplanes.
  • Multinational Team: The titular Rainbow organization.
  • Nom De Guerre: Dan "Bear" Malloy, and Julio "Oso" Vega.
  • Obvious Beta: The plague the Iranians attempted in the preceding book is discussed as adhering to this trope, as the villains deliberately tailored their own version of the same plague to not have the flaws the Iranian version did.
  • Omnicidal Maniac: John Brightling. He believes human civilization is doomed to collapse within a century anyway, so he plots to hasten its demise with a genetically-engineered Ebola outbreak. Bill Henriksen, is likely even worse, as he doesn't even have the slightest moral hesitation over the idea or its consequences.
  • Pragmatic Villainy: Popov and Bill Henriksen both believe in this, with the former willing to do all sorts of acts to incite terror, but shies away from being an Omnicidal Maniac if only because he wants to live prosperously after the job is over and while amoral, is not crazy. learning he's working for people like that prompts a Heel Face Turn for both his own protection and because even he cannot condone the lunacy his former employers wanted. The latter knows Popov is more dangerous dead than alive since he might have left a record behind in event he was killed, so he opts for keeping Popov under tight oversight, Which works until one of his handlers foolishly spills more than he should to Popov when they are alone, and Popov uses that to kill the handler and run while he can.
    • A lesser example comes from when the the ultimate villains intend to goad the IRA into a terrorist job, to which Popov is willing to set up the possibility, but points out that even though he'd get them interested in the attempt, they'd need a reasonable chance of survival and a large fiscal reward for the attempt before they would seriously commit to the actual terrorist act, prompting Popov's handlers to provide the means of both to hand off to the IRA as bargaining chips.
  • Readers Are Goldfish: The book has a tendency to repeat certain points over and over. Such as the villain's goals, or just how gosh darn elite the members of Rainbow are.
  • Reckless Gun Usage: Played straight in the final battle at the Brazilian facility—the primary obstacle towards negotiating a truce is that the ecoterrorists' riflemen are keyed-up amateurs and so they're all blasting at anything they think is moving and keep shooting even after being ordered to cease fire. Their own tactical commander has to personally go around to each fighting position and dope slap/argue each man into compliance.
    • Contrasted with Rainbow, who have only one person (their heavy-weapons gunner) firing during this sequence, who stops shooting immediately upon being told to.
  • Red Shirt: RAINBOW's only casualties are two members of Team-1, who are conveniently never named.
  • Renegade Russian: Popov, twice.
  • The Dragon: Willian Henriksen is one for Brightling.
  • The Fettered: Minor character Dr. Weiler, the staff physician for Worldpark, in the denouement of that sequence. Earlier in the chapter one of the terrorists had deliberately shot a sick young girl in the chest just to demonstrate that they were serious. Dr. Weiler, who had previously treated her as a patient, is (as was pretty much every other person in a three-mile radius with even the slightest shred of human decency) enraged by this. Indeed, one of the Rainbow snipers was enraged enough to deliberately violate policy and shoot the terrorist in the liver rather than the head precisely so that he would die slowly and in agony. When Dr. Weiler is called upon to treat the wounded and dying, he comes across this man... and without hesitation puts him out with a shot of morphine, so that he can die without pain and in comfort. This despite the fact that he intensely wants this man to suffer, and the fact that he knows every single police officer and soldier standing around the scene would cheerfully turn a blind eye to any amount of torture that anyone might care to wander by and inflict on the individual in question. Why does he do this? Because he's a doctor. Even the Rainbow troops accord him all due respect for his gesture, even if they're simultaneously disappointed that the terrorist dies clean.
  • Too Dumb to Live: The ecoterrorists in the final arc and its lead-up. Upon being informed that their plans have been discovered and their virus attempt has failed, they quite sensibly flee US jurisdiction to a non-extradition country, which is all well and good. They intend to stay there, composing and rehearsing a cover story that explains all the circumstantial evidence against them, until they have it down pat enough that they can withstand interrogation (while simultaneously sponsoring what covert actions they can to destroy or invalidate remaining evidence), at which point they intend to go back and take their chances with the grand jury. Again, all well and good. However, rather than buy a mansion in a prosperous Rio suburb and hire some PMCs to guard it and make a very generous 'donation' to the Brazilian government to not allow extradition, they all move into a remote jungle research facility their leader happens to own—meaning that they are wide open to a covert US military raid, because while the Brazilian government hasn't given the US permission to enter the country what they don't know about they can't object to. And since their plan involved attacking the world with biological weapons, and the US had earlier waged war on and threatened to nuke another aggressor who did that earlier in the setting timeline, they really should have expected some kind of military response and not just criminal charges.
    • Compounding the above is after when the ecoterrorists' are in their jungle compound and realize that they are under attack by a military special operations team. Do they fort up in their armored building, stocked with over a years' worth of supplies, and prepare to withstand siege? No. Do they immediately get on the satellite phone to the Brazilian government to report this international incident in progress, while simultaneously filming the US military helicopter hovering over there in plain view and uploading it to Youtube, to create a political climate that will require the covert mission to be withdrawn? No. Do they decide that because 'they know the jungle better' they can send a couple dozen of their own people, whose experience with weapons tops out at things like 'Used to go hunting a lot' and 'Did OK on the firing range', out into the jungle to get into a close-quarters battle with a mixed detachment of Delta Force, Navy SEALs, SAS, and the hand-picked best of half the special operations units in NATO? Yes. It goes exactly like you'd expect.
      • What's worse is that their one experienced man, their security chief, is a former senior agent of the FBI Counterterrorism Division and thus should know exactly what kind of opposition they are facing and what its capable of, and should thus have proposed one of the above legal/political plans first off. Instead, he tries this, and after his troops get slaughtered like sheep he has nothing left but unconditional surrender.
  • The Squad: Team-1 and Team-2. Especially the later.
  • Straw Man Has a Point: Prior to the terrorist attack on World Park, one of the terrorists works there as a means to suss out the place for the later attack, and while his motivations are obviously biased, he does point out in his own mind, with a fair degree of sense, that making an amusement park ride based on the same planes that carpet bombed Europe during WWII in a European park is in horrible taste at the very best.
  • Strawman Political: Taken Up to Eleven with the ecoterrorists. The Ebola scientists think how adorable lab rats are but think the human race can die a horrible death, take it right into Nightmare Fuel.
    • Given that real-world Harvard academics have, with a straight face, argued that the entire human race can and should die because of 'bioethics', this one's definitely Political but isn't as much Strawman as it looks.
  • Swiss Bank Account: Dmitriy Popov sets up a Swiss Bank Account for the terrorists he's hired, as a secure way to transfer their payment to them. Once it becomes obvious that they're going to fail at the mission, he transfers all the money to an account he set up for himself.
  • Unreliable Narrator: Zig Zagged. While the villains in the book mostly don't lie about what they intend for the world to themselves, they certainly comes up with all sorts of rationalizations of their Hypocrisy concerning their methods and goals.
  • Utopia Justifies the Means: John Brightling's goal.
  • Truce Zone: One is in effect between American and Russian personnel of their intelligence agencies, as they both abide by an unofficial yet deadly serious covenant to not harm the families of operatives on the other side as it distracts from their real missions. Clark manages to wangle some information on the mastermind of the terrorists from RVS director Golovko based on knowing this when he has proof a likely former KGB member broke said covenant, and Golovko concurred and sold the guy who broke the truce out.
  • Villains Act, Heroes React: Clark muses on this principle as one of the difficulties of running an anti-terrorism unit.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: Brightling's group wants to save nature... and will kill all humans to do it.
  • Western Terrorists: The novel involves Spanish and French Fascists, German Communists, and the IRA who are all (except the fascists) being backed by an eco-terrorist corporation trying to unleash The End of the World as We Know It. There's also a Basque splinter group in the prologue.
  • Xanatos Gambit: Regardless of whether the eco-terrorist corporation backed terrorists succeeded or failed in their goals Horizon Corporation would still benefit (the real goal was to increase awareness of terrorism so Horizon would get the security contract for the Olympic Games where they planned to unleash the Shiva Virus).
  1. ↑ Vega is called "Oso", which also means Bear in Spanish
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