The penultimate Clancy thriller, Debt of Honor (1994), ends with a Japanese terrorist flying a Boeing 747 into the U.S. Capitol as both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the cabinet have gathered for a presidential State of the Union address. What happens in the aftermath is told in Clancy’s ninth and most recent book, Executive Orders, which has spent five months on the best-seller lists.
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Jack Ryan, now President, must reassemble the leadership of the U.S. government. His task is complicated not only by a disgraced Vice President who publicly questions the new President’s legal right to govern but by an evil Iranian mullah, Mahmoud Haji Daryaei, who makes the Ayatollah Khomeini look like a kindly grandfather. At the cleric’s direction, Saddam Hussein is killed and his possible successors are neutralized; Iran thereupon absorbs Iraq and moves decisively to seize Saudi Arabia. As the mullah uses military force to achieve Middle Eastern hegemony, Iranian agents bottle a rare airborne strain of the deadly Ebola virus to wage biological warfare against the U.S. Meanwhile, homegrown militia types are striving to achieve some of the same violent ends from inside American borders.
I haven't read that one.
It’s a good one.
The penultimate Clancy thriller, Debt of Honor (1994), ends with a Japanese terrorist flying a Boeing 747 into the U.S. Capitol as both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the cabinet have gathered for a presidential State of the Union address. What happens in the aftermath is told in Clancy’s ninth and most recent book, Executive Orders, which has spent five months on the best-seller lists.
Listen and Subscribe to the Commentary Podcast Jack Ryan, now President, must reassemble the leadership of the U.S. government. His task is complicated not only by a disgraced Vice President who publicly questions the new President’s legal right to govern but by an evil Iranian mullah, Mahmoud Haji Daryaei, who makes the Ayatollah Khomeini look like a kindly grandfather. At the cleric’s direction, Saddam Hussein is killed and his possible successors are neutralized; Iran thereupon absorbs Iraq and moves decisively to seize Saudi Arabia. As the mullah uses military force to achieve Middle Eastern hegemony, Iranian agents bottle a rare airborne strain of the deadly Ebola virus to wage biological warfare against the U.S. Meanwhile, homegrown militia types are striving to achieve some of the same violent ends from inside American borders.