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The Bear and the Dragon Hardcover – August 1, 2000
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In The Bear and the Dragon, the future is very near at hand indeed.
Newly elected in his own right, Jack Ryan has found that being President has gotten no easier: domestic pitfalls await him at every turn; there's a revolution in Liberia; the Asian economy is going down the tubes; and now, in Moscow, someone may have tried to take out the chairman of the SVR--the former KGB--with a rocket-propelled grenade. Things are unstable enough in Russia without high-level assassination, but even more disturbing may be the identities of the potential assassins. Were they political enemies, the Russian Mafia, or disaffected former KGB? Or, Ryan wonders, is something far more dangerous at work here?
Ryan is right. For even while he dispatches his most trusted eyes and ears, including black ops specialist John Clark, to find out the truth of the matter, forces in China are moving ahead with a plan of truly audacious proportions. If they succeed, the world as we know it will never look the same. If they fail...the consequences will be unspeakable.
Blending the exceptional realism and authenticity that are his hallmarks with intricate plotting, razor-sharp suspense, and a remarkable cast of characters, this is Clancy at his best--and there is none better.
- Print length1028 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPutnam
- Publication dateAugust 1, 2000
- Reading age18 years and up
- Dimensions6.5 x 2.06 x 9.34 inches
- ISBN-10039914563X
- ISBN-13978-0399145636
- Lexile measure1060L
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
But you bet The Bear and the Dragon is fun--over 1,000 swift pages' worth. In the opening scene, a hand-launched RPG rocket nearly blows up Russia's intelligence chief in his armored Mercedes, and Ryan's clever spooks report that the guy who got the rocket in his face instead was the hoodlum "Rasputin" Avseyenko, who used to run the KGB's "Sparrow School" of female prostitute spies. Soon after, two apparent assassins are found handcuffed together afloat in St. Petersburg's Neva River, their bloated faces resembling Pokémon toys.
The stakes go higher as the mystery deepens: oil and gold are discovered in huge quantities in Siberia, and the evil Chinese Minister Without Portfolio Zhang Han San gazes northward with lust. The laid-off elite of the Soviet Army figure in the brewing troubles, as do the new generation of Tiananmen Square dissidents, Zhang's wily, Danielle Steel-addicted executive secretary Lian Ming, and Chester Nomuri, a hip, Internet-porn-addicted CIA agent posing in China as a Japanese computer salesman. He e-mails his CIA boss, Mary Pat "the Cowgirl" Foley, that he intends to seduce Ming with Dream Angels perfume and scarlet Victoria's Secret lingerie ordered from the catalog--strictly for God and country, of course. Soon Ming is calling him "Master Sausage" instead of "Comrade," but can anybody master Ming?
The plot is over the top, with devastating subplots erupting all over the globe and lurid characters scaring the wits out of each other every few pages, but Clancy finds time to insert hard-boiled little lessons on the vileness of Communism, the infuriating intrusions of the press on presidential power, the sexual perversions of Mao, the poor quality of Russian pistol silencers ("garbage, cans loaded with steel wool that self-destructed after less than ten shots"), the folly of cutting a man's throat with a knife ("they flop around and make noise when you do that"), and similar topics. Naturally, the book bristles like a battlefield with intriguingly intricate military hardware.
When you've got a Tom Clancy novel in hand, who needs action movies? --Tim Appelo
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
About the Author
Tom Clancy was the author of eighteen #1 New York Times-bestselling novels. His first effort, The Hunt for Red October, sold briskly as a result of rave reviews, then catapulted onto the bestseller list after President Ronald Reagan pronounced it ���the perfect yarn.��� Clancy was the undisputed master at blending exceptional realism and authenticity, intricate plotting, and razor-sharp suspense. He died in October 2013.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The White Mercedes
Going to work was the same everywhere, and the changeover from Marxism-Leninism to Chaos-Capitalism hadn't changed matters much-well, maybe things were now a little worse. Moscow, a city of wide streets, was harder to drive in now that nearly anyone could have a car, and the center lane down the wide boulevards was no longer tended by militiamen for the Politburo and used by Central Committee men who considered it a personal right of way, like Czarist princes in their troika sleds. Now it was a left-turn lane for anyone with a Zil or other private car. In the case of Sergey Nikolay'ch Golovko, the car was a white Mercedes 600, the big one with the S-class body and twelve cylinders of German power under the hood. There weren't many of them in Moscow, and truly his was an extravagance that ought to have embarrassed him . . . but didn't. Maybe there were no more nomenklatura in this city, but rank did have its privileges, and he was chairman of the SVR. His apartment was also large, on the top floor of a high-rise building on Kutusovskiy Prospekt, a structure relatively new and well-made, down to the German appliances which were a long-standing luxury accorded senior government officials.
He didn't drive himself. He had Anatoliy for that, a burly former Spetsnaz special-operations soldier who carried a pistol under his coat and who drove the car with ferocious aggression, while tending it with loving care. The windows were coated with dark plastic, which denied the casual onlooker the sight of the people inside, and the windows were thick, made of polycarbonate and specced to stop anything up to a 12.7-mm bullet, or so the company had told Golovko's purchasing agents sixteen months before. The armor made it nearly a ton heavier than was the norm for an S600 Benz, but the power and the ride didn't seem to suffer from that. It was the uneven streets that would ultimately destroy the car. Road-paving was a skill that his country had not yet mastered, Golovko thought as he turned the page in his morning paper. It was the American International Herald Tribune, always a good source of news since it was a joint venture of The Washington Post and The New York Times, which were together two of the most skilled intelligence services in the world, if a little too arrogant to be the true professionals Sergey Nikolay'ch and his people were.
He'd joined the intelligence business when the agency had been known as the KGB, the Committee for State Security, still, he thought, the best such government department the world had ever known, even if it had ultimately failed. Golovko sighed. Had the USSR not fallen in the early 1990s, then his place as Chairman would have put him as a full voting member of the Politburo, a man of genuine power in one of the world's two superpowers, a man whose mere gaze could make strong men tremble . . . but . . . no, what was the use of that? he asked himself. It was all an illusion, an odd thing for a man of supposed regard for objective truth to value. That had always been the cruel dichotomy. KGB had always been on the lookout for hard facts, but then reported those facts to people besotted with a dream, who then bent the truth in the service of that dream. When the truth had finally broken through, the dream had suddenly evaporated like a cloud of steam in a high wind, and reality had poured in like the flood following the breakup of an icebound river in springtime. And then the Politburo, those brilliant men who'd wagered their lives on the dream, had found that their theories had been only the thinnest of reeds, and reality was the swinging scythe, and the eminence bearing that tool didn't deal in salvation.
But it was not so for Golovko. A dealer in facts, he'd been able to continue his profession, for his government still needed them. In fact, his authority was broader now than it would have been, because as a man who well knew the surrounding world and some of its more important personalities intimately, he was uniquely suited to advising his president, and so he had a voice in foreign policy, defense, and domestic matters. Of them, the third was the trickiest lately, which had rarely been the case before. It was now also the most dangerous. It was an odd thing. Previously, the mere spoken (more often, shouted) phrase "State Security!" would freeze Soviet citizens in their stride, for KGB had been the most feared organ of the previous government, with power such as Reinhart Heydrich's Sicherheitsdienst had only dreamed about, the power to arrest, imprison, interrogate, and to kill any citizen it wished, with no recourse at all. But that, too, was a thing of the past. Now KGB was split, and the domestic-security branch was a shadow of its former self, while the SVR-formerly the First Chief Directorate-still gathered information, but lacked the immediate strength that had come with being able to enforce the will, if not quite the law, of the communist government. But his current duties were still vast, Golovko told himself, folding the paper.
He was only a kilometer away from Dzerzhinskiy Square. That, too, was no longer the same. The statue of Iron Feliks was gone. It had always been a chilling sight to those who'd known who the man was whose bronze image had stood alone in the square, but now it, too, was a distant memory. The building behind it was the same, however. Once the stately home office of the Rossiya Insurance Company, it had later been known as the Lubyanka, a fearsome word even in the fearsome land ruled by Iosef Vissarionovich Stalin, with its basement full of cells and interrogation rooms. Most of those functions had been transferred over the years to Lefortovo Prison to the east, as the KGB bureaucracy had grown, as all such bureaucracies grow, filling the vast building like an expanding balloon, as it claimed every room and corner until secretaries and file clerks occupied the (remodeled) spaces where Kamenev and Ordzhonikidze had been tortured under the eyes of Yagoda and Beriya. Golovko supposed that there hadn't been too many ghosts.
Well, a new working day beckoned. A staff meeting at 8:45, then the normal routine of briefings and discussions, lunch at 12:15, and with luck he'd be back in the car and on his way back home soon after six, before he had to change for the reception at the French Embassy. He looked forward to the food and wine, if not the conversation.
Another car caught his eye. It was a twin to his own, another large Mercedes S-class, iceberg white just like his own, complete down to the American-made dark plastic on the windows. It was driving purposefully in the bright morning, as Anatoliy slowed and pulled behind a dump truck, one of the thousand such large ugly vehicles that covered the streets of Moscow like a dominant life-form, this one's load area cluttered with hand tools rather than filled with earth. There was yet another truck a hundred meters beyond, driving slowly as though its driver was unsure of his route. Golovko stretched in his seat, barely able to see around the truck in front of his Benz, wishing for the first cup of Sri Lankan tea at his desk, in the same room that Beriya had once . . . the distant dump truck. A man had been lying in the back. Now he rose, and he was holding . . .
"Anatoliy!" Golovko said sharply, but his driver couldn't see around the truck to his immediate front.
. . . it was an RPG, a slender pipe with a bulbous end. The sighting bar was up, and as the distant truck was now stopped, the man came up to one knee and turned, aiming his weapon at the other white Benz--the other driver saw it and tried to swerve, but found his way blocked by the morning traffic and--not much in the way of a visual signature, just a thin puff of smoke from the rear of the launcher-tube, but the bulbous part leapt off and streaked into the hood of the other white Mercedes, and there it exploded.
It hit just short of the windshield. The explosion wasn't the fireball so beloved of Western movies, just a muted flash and gray smoke, but the sound roared across the square, and a wide, flat, jagged hole blew out of the trunk of the car, and that meant that anyone inside the vehicle would now be dead, Golovko knew without pausing to think on it. Then the gasoline ignited, and the car burned, along with a few square meters of asphalt. The Mercedes stopped almost at once, its left-side tires shredded and flattened by the explosion. The dump truck in front of Golovko's car panic-stopped, and Anatoliy swerved right, his eyes narrowed by the noise, but not yet-
"Govno!" Now Anatoliy saw what had happened and took action. He kept moving right, accelerating hard and swerving back and forth as his eyes picked holes in the traffic. The majority of the vehicles in sight had stopped, and Golovko's driver sought out the holes and darted through them, arriving at the vehicle entrance to Moscow Center in less than a minute. The armed guards there were already moving out into the square, along with the supplementary response force from its shack just inside and out of sight. The commander of the group, a senior lieutenant, saw Golovko's car and recognized it, waved him inside and motioned to two of his men to accompany it to the drop-off point. The arrival time was now the only normal aspect of the young day. Golovko stepped out, and two young soldiers formed up in physical contact with his heavy topcoat. Anatoliy stepped out, too, his pistol in his hand and his coat open, looking back through the gate with suddenly anxious eyes. His head turned quickly.
"Get him inside!" And with that order, the two privates strong-armed Golovko through the double bronze doors, where more security troops were arriving. "This way, Comrade Chairman," a uniformed captain said, taking Sergey Nikolay'ch's arm and heading off to the executive elevator. A minute later, he stumbled into his office, his brain only now catching up with what it had seen just three minutes before. Of course, he walked to the window to look down.
Moscow police-called militiamen-were racing to the scene, three of them on foot. Then a police car appeared, cutting through the stopped traffic. Three motorists had left their vehicles and approached the burning car, perhaps hoping to render assistance. Brave of them, Golovko thought, but an entirely useless effort. He could see better now, even at a distance of three hundred meters. The top had bulged up. The windshield was gone, and he looked into a smoking hole, which had minutes before been a hugely expensive vehicle, and which had been destroyed by one of the cheapest weapons the Red Army had ever mass-produced. Whoever had been inside had been shredded instantly by metal fragments traveling at nearly ten thousand meters per second. Had they even known what had happened? Probably not. Perhaps the driver had had time to look and wonder, but the owner of the car in the back had probably been reading his morning paper, before his life had ended without warning.
That was when Golovko's knees went weak. That could have been him . . . suddenly learning if there were an afterlife after all, one of the great mysteries of life, but not one which had occupied his thoughts very often . . .
But whoever had done the killing, who had been his target? As Chairman of the SVR, Golovko was not a man to believe in coincidences, and there were not all that many white Benz S600s in Moscow, were there?
"Comrade Chairman?" It was Anatoliy at the office door.
"Yes, Anatoliy Ivan'ch?"
"Are you well?"
"Better than he," Golovko replied, stepping away from the window. He needed to sit now. He tried to move to his swivel chair without staggering, for his legs were suddenly weak indeed. He sat and found the surface of his desk with both his hands, and looked down at the oaken surface with its piles of papers to be read-the routine sight of a day which was not now routine at all. He looked up.
Anatoliy Ivan'ch Shelepin was not a man to show fear. He'd served in Spetsnaz through his captaincy, before being spotted by a KGB talent scout for a place in the 8th "Guards" Directorate, which he'd accepted just in time for KGB to be broken apart. But Anatoliy had been Golovko's driver and bodyguard for years now, part of his official family, like an elder son, and Shelepin was devoted to his boss. He was a tall, bright man of thirty-three years, with blond hair and blue eyes that were now far larger than usual, because though Anatoliy had trained for much of his life to deal with and in violence, this was the first time he'd actually been there to see it when it happened. Anatoliy had often wondered what it might be like to take a life, but never once in his career had he contemplated losing his own, certainly not to an ambush, and most certainly not to an ambush within shouting distance of his place of work. At his desk outside Golovko's office, he acted like a personal secretary more than anything else. Like all such men, he'd grown casual in the routine of protecting someone whom no one would dare attack, but now his comfortable world had been sundered as completely and surely as that of his boss.
Oddly, but predictably, it was Golovko's brain that made it back to reality first.
"Anatoliy?"
"Yes, Chairman?"
"We need to find out who died out there, and then find out if it was supposed to be us instead. Call militia headquarters, and see what they are doing."
"At once." The handsome young face disappeared from the doorway.
Golovko took a deep breath and rose, taking another look out the window as he did so. There was a fire engine there now, and firefighters were spraying the wrecked car to extinguish the lingering flames. An ambulance was standing by as well, but that was a waste of manpower and equipment, Sergey Nikolay'ch knew. The first order of business was to get the license-plate number from the car and identify its owner, and from that knowledge determine if the unfortunate had died in Golovko's place, or perhaps had possessed enemies of his own. Rage had not yet supplanted the shock of the event. Perhaps that would come later, Golovko thought, as he took a step toward his private washroom, for suddenly his bladder was weak. It seemed a horrid display of frailty, but Golovko had never known immediate fear in his life, and, like many, thought in terms of the movies. The actors there were bold and resolute, never mind that their words were scripted and their reactions rehearsed, and none of it was anything like what happened when explosives arrived in the air without warning.
Who wants me dead? he wondered, after flushing the toilet.
--Reprinted from The Bear and the Dragon by Tom Clancy by permission of G.P. Putnam's Sons, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright (c) 2000 Tom Clancy. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Product details
- Publisher : Putnam; First Edition (August 1, 2000)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 1028 pages
- ISBN-10 : 039914563X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0399145636
- Reading age : 18 years and up
- Lexile measure : 1060L
- Item Weight : 3.15 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 2.06 x 9.34 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #338,514 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,085 in Espionage Thrillers (Books)
- #2,105 in Military Thrillers (Books)
- #4,026 in War Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Tom Clancy is America's, and the world's, favorite international thriller author. Starting with THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, all thirteen of his previous books have hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. His books, THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, PATRIOT GAMES, CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER and THE SUM OF ALL FEARS have been made into major motion pictures. He lived in Maryland where he was a co-owner of the Baltimore Orioles.
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The novel begins with the sudden death of the Russian president, which sets off a power struggle within the Kremlin. Meanwhile, China is experiencing unrest as its economy begins to falter. In the midst of these events, a group of terrorists attack a U.S. oil refinery in Colombia, killing hundreds of people.
President Ryan responds by sending a team of special forces to Colombia to track down the terrorists. However, the situation becomes more complicated when China intervenes, claiming that the U.S. violated its sovereignty. As tensions between the two countries escalate, Ryan must navigate a delicate balance of diplomacy and military action.
At the same time, Ryan is dealing with a personal crisis as his wife is diagnosed with cancer. Amidst all the chaos, Ryan must also contend with a corrupt Chinese government and a Russian plot to destabilize the United States.
Throughout the novel, Clancy weaves together a complex web of political intrigue, military action, and personal drama. The story moves at a breakneck pace, with twists and turns that keep the reader on the edge of their seat.
In the end, Ryan is able to navigate the complex political landscape and save the day, but not without sacrificing some of his own personal relationships. "The Bear and the Dragon" is a gripping political thriller that explores the complex relationships between nations and the lengths that people will go to protect their interests.
The Kindle version has a lot of errors. I have the hardback of this book and it is a lot cleaner then the Kindle Version. First it's listed as a John Clark Book. It's not. Look at the Hardback. Second, there are more spelling errors/ formatting errors then seems possible. I think Clancy is turning over in his grave over this. For instance several chapters, sentences and words start out with an extra letter or the the wrong letter as this real example here. "Fit was a wark night . . ." Instead of "It was a dark night." It doesnt detract from the amazing story, it just makes it a little annoying as you read along, especially as you reach the end and realize just how many errors there are. I have a first edition hardback that doesn't have that many errors. Not sure what happened. But you should enjoy it as long as you don't mind the errors. Enjoy!
The Bear and the Dragon picks up after Rainbow Six; Ryan is still the Prez and Clark is still in England running his team of hotshots. The basic premise is that Russia, a starving, collapsing nation that is merely a shadow of its former self, suddenly has the good fortune to find not merely an enormous oil field in Siberia but also a gold mine. Poof! Russia is back on the map. Unfortunately for Mother Russia, their neighbors to the south---China---are short on money, short on land, and have ticked off the United States so badly that Ryan has ordered a trade embargo against them. Russia's new wealth looks mighty tempting.
In addition to all this, an assassin misses his target---Golovko, the Russian head of intelligence and a key character in the Ryan series---and an American spy has seduced his way into Chinese intelligence headquarters. Russia needs American assistance, and the Americans have the military power and information to help as well as a President that the Russians can relate to.
Very convenient.
These tangled storylines are twisted further by the subplots---the lousy seduction scenes between the American spy and the Chinese secretary; the infighting among members of Chinese parliament; the detailed descriptions of how lousy and untrained Russia's military is; the manhunt for the assassin in Russia; the upgrading of American anti-missile technology; Ryan's unending whine about being President; US/China trade talks full of diplospeak; and the bizarre anti/pro abortion storyline that ends up with murdered clergy and goes into depth about how illegal newborns are killed in population-controlled China.
The last drawback, and the biggest I imagine for any Chinese readers, is the profound quantity of ethnic slurs peppered throughout the book. Clancy has an obvious bias against Chinese (and perhaps all Asians, if you consider that Japan was the enemy in Debt of Honor) and his characters take this prejudice to the extreme. When reading this book in public, I was often embarrassed by things that were said and would look up to make certain no one else could see me reading such things. It is possible to make people enemies for the purposes of fiction without slandering them, regardless of your own opinions of their culture.
In essence, this is a heavy, slow, convoluted book. It has always been my practice when reading Clancy to skip the pages and pages of excruciating detail about military movements, bomb-building, virus particles, etc and move on with the story. The problem here is that every aspect of the story is bogged down by such detail. It has the potential to be a great novel, but the lack of serious editing weighs it down.
Top reviews from other countries
A must read novel, particularly if you are a Tom Clancy fan.