Clear and Present Danger
51 pages • 1-hour read
Tom ClancyClear and Present Danger
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Prologue-Chapter 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, death, and rape.
Prologue Summary: “Situation”
In the White House, the President and James Cutter, Special Assistant to the President, discuss a secret operation codenamed SHOWBOAT. The President is anxious that SHOWBOAT be a success to help him fulfill campaign promises he made about the “war on drugs.” Cutter assures the President that everything is under control.
Meanwhile in the Caribbean, two men named Ramon and Jesus board a yacht called the Empire Builder, disguised as crew. At the same time, an Army sergeant named Domingo Chavez leads a group of soldiers on his last mission.
At a Navy testing facility in California, engineers test a new lightweight bomb to ensure that its stealth mode functions like the old model. They believe the test to be a success but are mistaken.
Chapter 1 Summary: “The King of SAR”
Captain Red Wegener pilots the Coast Guard cutter Panache in search of the Empire Builder, which did not return as expected. After an extensive career in the Coast Guard, Wegener is known as the King of Search and Rescue missions. He laments that so many of his current missions are in response to drug smuggling and related violence, rather than straightforward boating accidents.
The crew of the Panache locates the Empire Builder and prepares to board. They find two Latino men attempting to clean blood off of the boat, and a large amount of cocaine and marijuana inside. Wegener speculates that the two men killed the yacht’s owner after sexually assaulting and then killing his wife and young daughter. He vows revenge.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Creatures of the Night”
CIA Agent John Clark enters Colombia in disguise on a special mission. Meanwhile, Staff Sergeant Domingo “Ding” Chavez, a former gang member recruited into the Army as a teenager, prepares to leave his post at Fort Ord, California for a teaching position at the Army’s basic training school in Tennessee. Chavez had served with the Army’s Light Infantry Division for most of his career, training in guerilla tactics and backcountry fighting.
A man introducing himself as Colonel Smith asks Chavez to give up his teaching position and join a secret mission elsewhere in the country. “Smith” provides no details about the mission, because he doesn’t know any—his only goal is to recruit soldiers. After “Smith” implies that Chavez owes a debt to the Army, Chavez agrees to the mission. When he arrives to the transport spot, he is surprised to see that all the other recruits are also Latino.
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Panache Procedure”
Panache’s quartermaster Manuel Oreza suggests that the two men found on board the yacht are likely to escape justice by identifying more important drug lords. Wegener decides to take matters into his own hands. Wegener allows the prisoners access to their marijuana, then seizes them while high to stage a court-martial following a little-used Coast Guard law. The men, whom Wegener refers to as John and James Doe, refuse to participate.
The Panache’s crew reviews the evidence found on board the Empire Builder, and Wegener declares the two men guilty of rape and murder. Along with the crew, Wegener hangs John Doe, leading a terrified James Doe to agree to cooperate. The next morning, James is amazed to find John still alive. The men are arrested by DEA agents and separated for questioning. Wegener congratulates himself, unaware of the chain of events his actions began.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Preliminaries”
Chavez is shocked when the new, all-Latino crew is transported out of California on a luxurious private jet. He sleeps on the plane but determines on arrival that they are somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Back at Fort Ord, Tim Jackson, a lieutenant in Chavez’s old team, tells his older brother Robert, a Navy Lieutenant working at the Pentagon, that Chavez will be hard to replace.
In Colombia, Clark meets up with Carlos Larson, a Danish-Venezuelan pilot who has been working undercover for the CIA for 18 months. Larson flies Clark to Medellin, which he describes as the capital of the Colombian drug trade. Larson helps Clark to identify the homes of major players in the trade and offers to provide floorplans. He attempts to explain Colombian culture to Clark, identifying machismo and bribery as essential elements.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Beginnings”
In Colorado, Chavez begins training with an all-Latino battalion under the command of a white Colonel named Brown. He struggles to adapt to the altitude.
Meanwhile, Clark visits CIA Deputy Director of Operations Robert Ritter at a safe house in the Caribbean. Clark reveals that the cartel leaders in Medellin are too well-protected and well-informed to be seized by American forces. Ritter suggests that the Colombians are receiving intelligence from Felix Cortez, a Cuban intelligence officer who defected and has been working with South American terrorist groups. Clark suggests that if the CIA is serious about taking a stand against a drug cartel, they should try an alternate route. Ritter accepts his plan, which is not described.
In Colombia, cartel kingpin Ernesto Escobedo wrestles with dissatisfaction. Despite being one of the most powerful men in the cartel, Escobedo resents the fact that he is not accepted by international society. He determines to change this.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Deterrence”
FBI Deputy Assistant Director Daniel Murray is sent to investigate allegations that Wegener and the crew of the Panache attempted to hang one of the two men responsible for hijacking the Empire Builder. Murray has learned that the owner of the yacht was a wealthy American with important connections in politics and banking, and he knows that the FBI does not want to lose the testimony collected by the Panache crew.
Red Wegener and the crew deny the accusations, although they admit that they wish they could execute the perpetrators. Murray officially accepts their stories, though he implies to Wegener that he knows the truth. Wegener determines to focus on why the cartel targeted the American family.
Meanwhile, former Cuban intelligence officer Felix Cortez arrives in Washington, D.C., to recruit for his mission to destroy American capitalism from within.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Knowns and Unknowns”
After a week in Colorado, Chavez has begun to acclimatize to life at elevation. He believes that the group has been assembled to provide counterinsurgency training in the mountains of South America. When the group begins training with heavy artillery, he realizes he is wrong.
In Washington, Jack Ryan, who is acting CIA Deputy Director, Intelligence, while his boss and mentor James Greer undergoes cancer treatment, briefs Cutter and Ritter on KGB activity in Central Europe. Ryan privately believes that Cutter wields too much power over the president. Cutter dismisses Ryan, and Ritter briefs Cutter on operation SHOWBOAT, the CIA’s codename for the anti-drug operations in Colombia. Ritter insists on Cutter’s approval of the operation in writing. Meanwhile, Felix Cortez begins an affair with Moira Wolfe, the secretary to the FBI Director.
Prologue-Chapter 7 Analysis
The Prologue of Clear and Present Danger reflects the larger structure of the novel as a whole, with an omniscient narrator moving between the perspectives of a variety of people embroiled in the same conflict, from the American president to anonymous Navy bomb techs. From the very beginning, the novel establishes a clear dichotomy between the characters in the novel and the omniscient narrator, who actively comments on the action of the characters. The Prologue ends with the perspective of the narrator: “And so began something that had not quite begun and would not soon end, with many people in many places moving off in directions and on missions which they all mistakenly thought they understood.” (21) In this passage, the narrator suggests that none of the characters involved in the novel actually understand the action of the novel beyond their own role. This establishes tension from the very beginning of the novel, suggesting that none of the individual perspectives are entirely reliable.
The narration hints at the unreliability of the individual characters at multiple points throughout the novel, while also introducing the key theme of The Moral Ambiguity of Covert Operations. After the crew of the Panache stage a violent mock trial, the narrator notes grimly that captain Red Wegener is “unaware of what he had started or how many people would die because of it” (71). This narration contradicts the confidence expressed in the passages told from Wegener’s perspectives. This pattern is repeated later, when Domingo Chavez definitively decides that the undisclosed operation he is training for is CIA counter insurgency training.
In an aside, the narrator notes that Chavez “was correct on [the branch]. It was the mission he was wrong on” (115). Later, when Chavez attempts to reassure himself that the Army’s plans always “make sense to someone important” (127), the narrator warns ominously that “Chavez wasn’t old enough to remember Vietnam” (127). In both these instances, the narrator explicitly contradicts the perspective of central characters, both foreshadowing future violence and calling their reliability into question.
The novel’s introduction to Domingo Chavez, an important protagonist, suggests that he is highly motivated by a sense of duty. The narrator suggests that, after the Army arranged for him to secure his GED, Chavez “deemed himself to be in the Army’s debt, and […] it was a debt that he would forever after work to repay” (48). Chavez’s sense of duty is so strong that the CIA explicitly invokes it while trying to recruit him for operation SHOWBOAT. The recruiter tells Chavez, “we’ve invested a lot of time and money in you” (52) and that “it’s payback time. The country needs you” (52). The fact that this tactic works, with Chavez agreeing almost instantly, reflects the subtle emotional manipulation the recruiter employs, acting as if Chavez still “owes” the government something even after his military service. The lack of clarity around what the mission is reinforces the moral ambiguity at play, as Chavez agrees to participate in something without even knowing if the tactics and objectives are something he will ultimately agree with.
The chapters in this section also reflect the novel’s thematic interest in The Abuse of Power in the American Government. The fact that Red Wegener and the crew of the Panache are able to get away with their violent abuse of prisoners despite investigators knowing they were guilty suggests that military and intelligence organizations do not always operate in strictly moral ways. FBI Deputy Assistant Director Daniel Murray attempts to justify ignoring Wegener’s crimes by pointing to the larger crimes committed by the drug cartels: “[T]hose Coasties broke loose some valuable information, and the only way we can use it is if we ignore how they got it” (110). Murray’s argument reflects how government agencies can sometimes excuse bad behavior when the American government deems it to be convenient, showing how power can easily be abused when proper laws and regulations are flouted at will.
Characters within the military and intelligence communities repeatedly complain that they are held to a standard that enemy combatants ignore. Red Wegener argues that the war on drugs is “a game whose fixed rules applied only to one side; the other was free to redefine its own rules at will” (57). Later, CIA operative Carlos Larson warns that Colombian “shooters are less restrained by rules of engagement” (79) than American soldiers. This repeated complaint suggests that the American military and intelligence communities are being defeated because they are unwilling to cross moral lines. This attitude overlooks the ways in which the American government helped destabilize Latin American countries in the first place, which inadvertently strengthened the power of the cartels, but reflects the pro-American biases of the characters who regard their side as innately morally superior.
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