“Chilling authenticity… has the fascination of being on a high-speed train which is about to crash. The description of a submarine patrol racing for the safety of the icepack is as vivid as I ever hope to read.”
NO MAJOR SPOILERS
I’m reading this one for at least the 3rd time. It keeps calling back to re-read it, see. I got a tatty copy of Debt of Honor which got me hooked on Clancy’s books. I lost that hook with Teeth of the Tiger and didn’t buy anymore, it was certainly his worst book to date when that one hit the shelves, and he got heavily hammered for it. That was the end of ‘Ryanville’ stories.
Anyway …
Back to Red Storm then … like any story we read we can never remember everything in them; this one is no different, and at 830 pages, is it surprising? This one starts with militant Muslims attacking an oil refinery in USSR, and in so doing, they set off WWIII. Of course, the yanks are the heroes being helped along by the rest of NATO. The Russians are the bad guys of course and use deceit to lull NATO into a false security. Tension ratchets up and NATO gets a heads up when a major of Russian special forces is caught with the plans of his mission. War kicks off from that point on, in various parts of Europe and the Atlantic.
Wars are terrible events for everyone involved, military and civilians alike. A ship is sunk taking over three thousand men with it, and yet the enemy say, ‘We killed a ship,’ leaving the lives lost out of it, trying to forget about that part of it. Same in dogfights between fighter jets and bombers; submarines are sunk; infantry fighting vehicles are killed along with the tanks they are supporting. In reality, they are all killing each off as if tomorrow will never come. Clancy mentions this in several places, I’m just pleased he doesn’t go into graphic details of how the men died. By the time page 830 is reached, you are ready to sit down and breath freely again.
It’s quite obvious that I do like this book, three readings of it make that clear I think. I feel pretty much the same with all Clancy’s earlier work, but this one is the one I keep being called back to; go on, spoil yourself and have a read of it.
Reviewed by:
Ron Clark
Added 6th May 2017
