Tom Clancy Act of Defiance

A rogue nuclear Russian submarine is steaming toward the East Coast of the United States. For President Jack Ryan, memories of past events may seem stunningly vivid, but the dangers are terrifyingly real in the latest entry in this #1 US intelligence is reporting turmoil in the Russian navy. Their deadliest submarine, the Belgorod, has unexpectedly launched, and taken along with it a long list of questions. Who authorized the departure? What mission is it on? And, most disturbing of all, what weapons do the giant doors on the sub’s bow hide? It''s been four decades since a similar incident with the Soviet sub, Red October, ended happily, thanks to a young CIA analyst named Jack Ryan. Now, President Jack Ryan finds himself with fleets of ships, squadrons of jets, and teams of SEALs at his command, but what he doesn’t have is insight into the plans of the Belgorod’s commander. It falls to a younger generation of Ryans to do the dangerous work that will reveal that information. But there’s always a price to be paid. When the final moments tick away, will Jack Ryan have to choose between the safety of his country and the safety of his child?

Auteur
Thirty-five years ago, Tom Clancy was a Maryland insurance broker with a passion for naval history. Years before, he had been an English major at Baltimore’s Loyola College and had always dreamed of writing a novel. His first effort, The Hunt for Red October, sold briskly as a result of rave reviews, then catapulted onto the New York Times bestseller list after President Reagan pronounced it “the perfect yarn.” From that day forward, Clancy established himself as an undisputed master at blending exceptional realism and authenticity, intricate plotting, and razor-sharp suspense. He passed away in October 2013.

Navy veterans Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson (Andrews & Wilson) are the writing team behind the bestselling Tier One, Sons of Valor, and Shepherds book series. Brian is a nuclear engineer and Park Leadership Fellow who served as an officer on a fast-attack submarine. Jeff is a vascular surgeon and jet pilot who conducted combat operations with an East Coast–based SEAL team. In addition to writing books, they have multiple film & television projects under development with partners at Skydance, Walden Media, Picturestart, Sony, Endeavor Content, and Imagine Entertainment.

Échantillon de lecture
PROLOGUE
Tuesday December 21st, 1984
Nevsky Prospek
Leningrad, USSR
2231 Local Time
 
Dimitri Gorov resisted the compulsion to shove his hands into his overcoat pockets.

It wasn’t just the bitter cold making him tremble.

Fear was the true culprit.

Tonight’s clandestine, face-to-face meeting with his American CIA contact had been months in the planning. They had a simple brokered arrangement: information in exchange for freedom. In Dimitri’s coat breast pocket, he carried a microfilm roll containing the schematics and engineering details of the Red October—the Soviet Union’s most advanced and stealthy Typhoon class ballistic missile submarine. With its revolutionary “caterpillar drive,” the Red October would be able to slip undetected past the American’s undersea hydrophone arrays, past their SH-60 Seahawk helicopters with dipping sonar, and past their Los Angeles class fast attack submarines patrolling the Atlantic like sea wolves. This new submarine had cost the Kremlin tens of billions of rubles and was the product of a decade of research and design collaboration between the country’s greatest scientific minds. He took great pride in his contribution to the project, but pride didn’t change his station in life. Pride didn’t put quality food on the dinner table, buy his wife a fur coat, or give his son a chance to find greatness as a man.

*Nyet…pride is a poor man’s compensation for following the rules.

• Dimitri had grown weary of following the rules.
  
  A blast of artic air buffeted him as he trudged west toward the city center. The metaphor was not lost on him. Even at this late hour, the Rodina bullied him, trying to turn him back. Jaw set, he undid the fur lined earflaps on the top of his wool ushanka and knotted the ties under his chin. As if in response to his obstinance, a streetlight flickered and went dark as he made his way along Nevsky Prospekt. Leningrad’s main promenade, and quite possibly the most famous of all streets in the Motherland, was utterly abandoned. Only the desperate or deranged would be out at this hour and in this weather, and the thought brought a fatalistic smile to his face.

  *Which one am I? Probably both…

• He’d lived in Russia his entire life, but this was his first visit to the city formerly known as St. Petersburg. Originally named after Saint Peter, not Peter the Great which was a common misconception, the city was the most western and cosmopolitan of all Russian cities. It was often compared to Venice, due to the city’s many rivers and canals, but Dimitri had never traveled outside of the Iron Curtain, so who was he to validate this claim? Regardless, Leningrad was beautiful, even blanketed in snow. He’d arrived earlier in the day by train with his wife and son at Moskovsky Station—named as such, he presumed, because in Russia all roads lead to Moscow. They’d taken a walk along Nevsky Prospekt while the sun had been up and the city had been bustling. The architecture bespoke a bygone age—an era of Tsars and prosperity—when hotels, opera houses, and even apartment buildings were designed to compete with palaces.

  A lifetime of conditioning under the tenets of communism at first made him scoff and resent such waste, but the beauty and possibility advertised by such design quickly crept into and excited his bitter heart. This bygone city, eclipsed and barely persevering in the shadow of communism, represented but a fraction of the wealth and opportunity he would find in the West. In America, the land of prosperity and dreams, he and his family would eat meat every night. They would buy Levi’s blue jeans, wear comfortable shoes, and Alina could go to a salon to have her hair done every week. But the thing he looked forward to the most was living in a house with central heat.

  *In America, we will finally be warm…

• Squinting into the wind, he spied the landmark he was looking for ahead—grand equestrian statues flanking the eastern entrance to the Anichkov Bridge. As he approached, the Horse Tamers came into focus-- four sculptures, depicting men in the various stages of breaking a stallion, had been commissioned by Emperor Nicolas I and sculpted by Pyotr Karlovich Klodt. On Dimitri’s side of the street, a bare-chested, kneeling horse master pulled against the reigns of a rearing stallion. Despite not being an actual sculptor himself, Dimitri did consider himself an artist. Where Klodt was a sculpture of bronze, Dimitri was a sculpture of iron and titanium. Where Klodt depicted man overcoming nature, Dimitri’s art literally empowered his fellow man to tame the sea. At this very moment, Marko Ramius and his crew were traversing the depths of the cold and unforgiving North Atlantic. Inside the Red October, they were warm, provisioned, and immune to both wave and weather. But take away the metal and the machine, and they wouldn’t last a day.

“I would have liked to have gone to sea on my creation,” he murmured, as he approached and stared up into the wild eyes of the rearing stallion, “if only for a day, it would have been enough.”

He’d met the Captain at the Red October’s christening ceremony. Handsome and self-assured, imposing in his black and gold…