Clear and Present Danger
51 pages • 1-hour read
Tom ClancyClear and Present Danger
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Chapters 26-30Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, death, and death by suicide.
Chapter 26 Summary: “Instruments of State”
Cutter meets with Ritter to demand the immediate shutdown of operations SHOWBOAT, EAGLE EYE, and RECIPROCITY, and the destruction of all related paperwork. He tells Ritter that Cortez has evidence of the operations and warns him that they will both go to prison if the public learns about their illegal operations. Cutter promises to get the remaining soldiers out of Colombia on his own. Ritter agrees, although he knows Cutter will likely abandon the soldiers. Cutter secretly transmits the soldiers’ locations to Cortez, then shuts down their encoded communications system. In Colombia, the soldiers are confused when they cannot contact the team scheduled to extract them.
Clark contacts Ryan to ask for help extracting the soldiers in a covert operation. Ryan convinces Murray and Shaw to assist him. He asks Ritter directly about the actions in Colombia. When Ritter refuses to answer, Ryan claims he is taking a leave of absence to think about his role at the CIA. Ryan calls Robert Jackson to arrange secret transport to Pensacola. There, they obtain a helicopter, which takes them to the Panache, off the coast of Mexico. Captain Wegener agrees to help Murray since Murray warned him about the FBI investigation.
Chapter 27 Summary: “The Battle of Ninja Hill”
FBI agents search Cutter’s trash and find a disk containing evidence he tried to destroy. The obtain two sets of prints, one of which is confirmed to be Cutter’s. They begin recovering evidence from the disk.
In Colombia, Ramirez and his men grow increasingly alarmed by the lack of communication from their superiors about the planned extraction. He begins to suspect that they have been abandoned. Ramirez sends Chavez and a soldier named Leon to scout for cartel soldiers in the mountains. The men spot an oncoming force and successfully set up an ambush, killing 30 cartel soldiers. However, the surviving cartel soldiers quickly receive reinforcements, and a larger group begins chasing the American troops across the mountains. Over an hours-long firefight in the mountains, the Americans kill over 100 cartel soldiers. However, the majority of the Americans, including Ramirez, are also killed. Chavez leads a small group of survivors away.
Meanwhile, Clark and Larson fly over the area searching for the SHOWBOAT troops. They make contact with two battalions and arrange to extract them by helicopter the following night. When Clark learns that Chavez and the surviving members of his battalion have been compromised, he promises to personally extract them.
Chapter 28 Summary: “Accounting”
When Ryan doesn’t attend James Greer’s funeral, Ritter begins to suspect that he knows about the CIA’s involvement in the violence in Colombia. Along with CIA Director Moore, he searches Ryan’s office and discovers evidence that Ryan was in his office and likely has copies of the files related to the Colombian operations.
Ritter learns that Clark has personally restarted the process of extracting SHOWBOAT troops, and he and Moore decide to support the effort without informing Cutter. They send Ryan and Clark intelligence about a planned meeting between Cortez and Escobedo, along with photos of both men. Both men are relieved to be taking action, rather than taking orders from Cutter and the President.
Helicopter retrieval expert Paul Johns organizes the rescue of two SHOWBOAT battalions on a heavily armored helicopter, with Jack Ryan providing support via a machine gun. Meanwhile, Clark successfully makes contact with Chavez and the four other surviving members of the combined battalion that was ambushed. Clark takes the remaining SHOWBOAT troops on an unplanned mission to target the Cortez-Escobedo meeting, capturing them both along with another cartel leader.
Chapter 29 Summary: “Fill-Ups”
Cutter calls Ritter to confirm that the Colombian operations have been stopped. He is suspicious of Ritter’s calm reply and attempts to contact Johns personally to ensure that the extraction mission is cancelled. When he can’t locate Johns, he flies directly to Johns’s base in Florida, then to Panama, bullying junior officers into revealing his location. He learns that Johns is on a mission but does not learn the details.
Meanwhile, Johns and his co-pilot Buck Zimmer attempt to extract the final SHOWBOAT battalion with the support of Clark and Chavez. When the battalion comes under attack by cartel fighters, Ryan and Zimmer fire at the cartel while Clark and Chavez help wounded soldiers aboard. Zimmer is fatally wounded in the firefight. As Zimmer is dying, Ryan promises to help his seven children through college.
When Ryan expresses concern about bringing Escobedo into the United States without raising suspicion, Clark decides to return him to the cartel. The helicopter drops Clark and Escobedo at an airfield, where they meet Larson, who flies Clark and Escobedo back to Colombia. They leave him with fellow cartel leaders, who imply that he will be killed. Meanwhile, the helicopter, unable to pass through a dangerous hurricane, lands on the Panache.
Chapter 30 Summary: “The Good of the Service”
Days after the rescue mission, Clark sneaks into Cutter’s office disguised as an assistant. Clark provides Cutter with a taped deposition from Cortez in which Cortez identifies Cutter as a co-conspirator and provides proof. Clark encourages Cutter to die by suicide rather than allow the scandal of the Colombia operations to damage national security and confidence in the government. Shortly after, Cutter runs into traffic, dying instantly.
After Cutter’s funeral, Ryan confronts the President at the White House. He reveals the details of the Colombian operations in front of two members of Congress, arguing that it is his responsibility to do so as Deputy Director (Intelligence). The President denies any knowledge of the operations, but Ryan knows that he is lying.
Ryan agrees that the scandal would be too damaging to public trust in the government and allows the President to discuss the matter with the members of Congress. Despite holding vastly different political views, the Congressmen agree to keep the operations a secret. The President deliberately loses the election to prevent the scandal from leaking.
Clark recruits Chavez into the CIA. Meanwhile, Moira Wolfe watches as Felix Cortez are returned to the Cuban intelligence agency he abandoned to join the cartel.
Chapters 26-30 Analysis
Clear And Present Danger ends on a pessimistic note, suggesting that the operations in Colombia were ultimately meaningless and highlighting The Abuse of Power in the American Government. In the novel’s Prologue, the President explicitly indicates that the goal of Colombian operation is to make conspicuous progress in the war on drugs in order to boost his approval ratings. In the novel’s final chapters, these goals fail on every level, having resulted in many deaths.
Although the operations stopped a few deliveries to the United States, and Felix promised to slow others, the novel suggests that “reduced supply would merely increase price” (559), and that the operation would ultimately “have a small but positive effect on Cartel income” (559-60). Regardless of the operation’s effects, Cutter acted illegally in organizing the operations, meaning the President could not publicize them. In fact, the novel’s final pages suggest that he deliberately lost the election to avoid the scandal. Moreover, the cartel remains largely undisturbed, as the novel suggests that new leaders have stepped up to take Escobedo’s place.
The deaths of multiple soldiers in the final section of the novel also suggest that the operation were ultimately meaningless in a way that is common in the history of military action. After cutting off communication with the SHOWBOAT soldiers and cancelling their planned extraction, Cutter reflects that they will likely die without knowing why. He notes that “most often [soldiers] never really understood what it was all about” because “what they were told wasn’t always the truth” (555). Cutter attempts to justify lying to his troops by arguing that “you really needed a perspective to understand what it was all about […] and that didn’t always—ever?—jibe with what the soldiers were told” (556). He reflects that “an army was composed of young kids who did the job without understanding, serving with their lives, and in this case, with their deaths” (556). The fact that Cutter ultimately dies by suicide rather than justify the deaths of the soldiers publicly suggests that he does not truly believe this justification, exposing how abuses and corruption of power harms most those with the least amount of power (the soldiers).
The majority of the rescue missions depicted in the final chapter are conducted by field operatives like John Clark, Domingo Chavez, and Captain Wegener, rather than officers like Ritter, Cutter, and Moore. The field operatives repeatedly draw attention to the distinction between themselves and the “useless, order-generating bastards who gets us line animals killed” (592). They repeatedly refer to these officers by the pejorative “REMF” (580, 592), which stands for “rear-echelon motherfucker” (592). The term reflects the perceived distance between the officers who give the orders and the field operatives whose lives are actually on the line.
This distinction is referenced in a lighter note when Daniel Murray, an Assistant Deputy Director at the FBI, plans a sea rescue mission in the middle of a hurricane. Captain Red Wegener of the Panache jokes that he knows that Murray is responsible for the plan “because you ought to have checked the weather” (573), implying that an experienced sailor would have known a hurricane was coming. Although helicopter rescue expert Paul Johns successfully lands on the Panache, Wegener’s joke reflects the widespread belief that officers lack the experience and skill of the field agents under their command.
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