Red Rabbit

Jack Ryan has left the Marines behind, and his earlier life as a historian and teacher is behind him too. In the early 1980s he starts a new career as a CIA officer, sent on loan to Britain's Secret Intelligence Service. Red Rabbit follows him through those first days in the intelligence world, before he becomes the figure readers know from Clancy's other novels. Ryan's first day brings a startling document to his desk. Poland is under heavy government repression, and Pope John Paul II has said he may resign the papacy in protest. The implications reach far beyond one country or one church. In Moscow, KGB chairman Yuriy Andropov reads the same document and sees a threat to his own position and to the Soviet state. He believes that a single man could undo everything he has built, and that a single act could stop it. The Pope commands enormous influence, but he is also a mortal man, and the novel builds toward what that vulnerability might invite.