Genre Fiction
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Tom Clancy Red Winter (A Jack Ryan Novel)
In this previously untold adventure, a young Jack Ryan goes behind the Iron Curtain to seek the truth about a potential Soviet defector in the most shocking entry in Tom Clancy's #1 New York Times bestselling series.
1985
A top secret F117 aircraft crashes into the Nevada desert. The Nighthawk is the most advanced fighting machine in the world and the Soviets will do anything to get their hands on its secrets.
In East Berlin, a mysterious figure contacts the CIA with an incredible offer-invaluable details of his government's espionage plans in return for asylum.
It's an offer they can't pass up…if it's genuine, but the risks are too great to blindly stumble into a deal. With the East German secret police closing in, someone will have to go to behind the Berlin Wall to investigate the potential defector. It's a job Deputy Director James Greer can only trust to one man--Jack Ryan.
Ryan is a former Marine and a brilliant CIA analyst who's been the architect of some of the CIA's biggest coups but this time he's in enemy territory with a professional assassin on his tail. Can he get the right answers before the Cold War turns into a Red Winter?
1985
A top secret F117 aircraft crashes into the Nevada desert. The Nighthawk is the most advanced fighting machine in the world and the Soviets will do anything to get their hands on its secrets.
In East Berlin, a mysterious figure contacts the CIA with an incredible offer-invaluable details of his government's espionage plans in return for asylum.
It's an offer they can't pass up…if it's genuine, but the risks are too great to blindly stumble into a deal. With the East German secret police closing in, someone will have to go to behind the Berlin Wall to investigate the potential defector. It's a job Deputy Director James Greer can only trust to one man--Jack Ryan.
Ryan is a former Marine and a brilliant CIA analyst who's been the architect of some of the CIA's biggest coups but this time he's in enemy territory with a professional assassin on his tail. Can he get the right answers before the Cold War turns into a Red Winter?
Readers Top Reviews
Kindle Allen J.
Fun read with Greer,Foley and Clark in their heyday. Being in Berlin before the fall of the wall in 1989, I agree the handwriting was obvious. Cameron is a Master coupling it with a story of espionage in One ADA or so much that would, but the drama in East Berlin. Enjoy since it's almost historical fiction.
DanKindle Allen
Any long-time fan of Ryan, Clark, Greer, Foley and all will NOT be disappointed. Even rewinding 35 years, this story could not have been better. Read it in two days. I am a life long Mr. Clark devotee and once again he’s just the best. You always know that Snake will come out of nowhere and safe the day. Grab this book right away. You will not be disappointed.
Paul GillespieDan
This is the first book in a long time that has made me feel like Tom Clancy could still be alive and helping to write it. It was definitely not a full Clancy novel, but it was still a good yarn written more like his style than many of the other recent books. I look forward to the next in the series, especially if they give some good background stories on the crew.
Cecelia MaddenPau
I had great expectations for this book and was really looking forward to reading the next book in the Jack Ryan series. Marc Cameron is a favourite author of mine and I have loved all his books; however I was a bit disappointed with this one. A prequel was a great idea and it was good to see how the main characters in the series first met. I found all the technical stuff a bit boring in the beginning and the story line a bit shallow. It could have been so much better had the author focused on one theme instead of two that really did not link up. Having said that it is still a worthwhile read for fans of the Jack Ryan series.
JackieCecelia Mad
Authors have been writing serial novels for a long time - once you have established a character it’s like an annuity that pays off once a year or so. The challenge comes when the author starts to run out of creativity, gets older and takes on a co-author (whether credited or not), or the character starts to age out to the point of no longer being believable. Frequently, the result is a decline in quality of the product. The estate of Tom Clancy has for the most part selected excellent authors to continue the Jack Ryan universe, and Marc Cameron has avoided the aging out of Jack Ryan by starting to fill in the rather large gaps that haven’t been covered in prior books. Some of the critical reviews I have read of this book make good, but rather small points, others seem little more than quibbles. Overall, and particularly compared to the hundreds of other books in this genre, Cameron has done an excellent job of getting things both correct and believable. It is an enjoyable read, as are the books about his own characters.
Short Excerpt Teaser
1
November 1985
The McDonald's off Clayallee seemed an unlikely place for espionage. One might as well attempt to defect at Woolworths.
West Berlin, guarded by twelve thousand Allied troops and surrounded by half a million soldiers of the Warsaw Pact? A defection there would make sense. The dark and snowy hollows of Grunewald Forest, six miles from the Wall and a stone's throw from the Berlin Brigade headquarters? Certainly.
Twenty-nine and single, with a degree in public policy from the University of Maryland, Ruby Keller was a ground-floor Foreign Service officer. She was a newbie to the State Department, handling visa applications, lost passports, and any other piddling issue that confronted U.S. citizens visiting West Berlin. She never admitted it during the daily calls to her mother, but an inordinate amount of her workday was spent getting coffee for all the good old boys in this isolated outpost of the State Department.
Everyone told her she'd be under the microscope, watched by all kinds of alphabet-soup agencies, Russians trying to get her to spy, Americans making sure she didn't. Crazy stuff for an Indiana farm girl. The Clayallee McDonald's (the first restaurant in Germany with a drive-through window) seemed safe, like home, laughably far from all the international intrigue.
Keller stomped her feet when she came in from the cold and shook the snow off her jacket. It was late, after ten, but her internal clock was still jiggered toward the time in Washington, D.C., where she'd attended eighteen months of training and her body thought it was about time to eat dinner.
She'd spent the last fifteen minutes walking from her apartment near the diplomatic mission and had to squint under the stark glare of phosphorescent lighting. It was hard to believe she was still in Germany. The whole place could have been teleported directly from her hometown of Evansville. She ordered a Hamburger Royal (a Quarter Pounder, but that didn't translate into the metric system) and fries. The shake machine was broken.
Ruby was accustomed to chilly winters and had contemplated eating outside during her walk over, but it turned out to be a little too cold for that much adventure. Instead, she found a table by the window and nibbled on her sandwich-just like the ones at home-and people-watched.
Dinner rush was well past, but Europeans eat late-and GIs ate all the time. The kids behind the counter spoke English, as did ninety percent of the customers-most of whom were soldiers or civilian employees of the British or U.S. military. Ruby spoke German, very well in fact, but had hoped to be able to practice a lot more. The vast majority of Germans she'd met since her arrival spoke English. They just gave her a sort of blank stare if she even tried to Deutsch sprechen. With all the chatter among the patrons about new American movies and V-8 hotrods it was easy to forget they were sitting smack in the heart of communist Germany.
State Department Diplomatic Security agents had warned her before she left Washington. Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung-HVA, the counterintelligence operatives of the dreaded Stasi-assumed every single person at Mission Berlin was a spy. The CIA did nothing to dissuade the East Germans of this notion since it caused them to waste manpower. From what Keller had read, that mattered little. The Stasi enlisted pretty much everyone in the country to their cause, giving them an almost unlimited supply of personnel to spy-mostly on one another.
Surveillance was a foregone conclusion. It was prudent to assume every room and telephone outside the embassy was bugged-if not by HVA, then by West German intelligence-BND. A sheltered Indiana orchestra kid, Ruby found the whole thing fascinating.
People called what they were living in a Cold War, and, for the most part, that was right, but when it boiled over, it did so in a very big way. Tensions between East and West were at their worst since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Every month, that knot of war that Khrushchev warned Kennedy about pulled tighter and tighter until it seemed there would be no untying it without swords. Pershing II missiles bristling all over Europe, American overflights of disputed islands, not to mention the President's Strategic Defense Initiative, all had the Soviets feeling twitchy and worried about their future. The rubles that had been used to prop up satellite states were repurposed for missiles meant to counter the capitalist threat of the Main Enemy-the United States. That left East Germany with a dwindling treasury and few resources to replace the missing Soviet assistance. Everyone was on edge.
Two years earlier, a Sukhoi Su-15 fighter had shot down a KAL civilian airliner when it inadvertently veer...
November 1985
The McDonald's off Clayallee seemed an unlikely place for espionage. One might as well attempt to defect at Woolworths.
West Berlin, guarded by twelve thousand Allied troops and surrounded by half a million soldiers of the Warsaw Pact? A defection there would make sense. The dark and snowy hollows of Grunewald Forest, six miles from the Wall and a stone's throw from the Berlin Brigade headquarters? Certainly.
Twenty-nine and single, with a degree in public policy from the University of Maryland, Ruby Keller was a ground-floor Foreign Service officer. She was a newbie to the State Department, handling visa applications, lost passports, and any other piddling issue that confronted U.S. citizens visiting West Berlin. She never admitted it during the daily calls to her mother, but an inordinate amount of her workday was spent getting coffee for all the good old boys in this isolated outpost of the State Department.
Everyone told her she'd be under the microscope, watched by all kinds of alphabet-soup agencies, Russians trying to get her to spy, Americans making sure she didn't. Crazy stuff for an Indiana farm girl. The Clayallee McDonald's (the first restaurant in Germany with a drive-through window) seemed safe, like home, laughably far from all the international intrigue.
Keller stomped her feet when she came in from the cold and shook the snow off her jacket. It was late, after ten, but her internal clock was still jiggered toward the time in Washington, D.C., where she'd attended eighteen months of training and her body thought it was about time to eat dinner.
She'd spent the last fifteen minutes walking from her apartment near the diplomatic mission and had to squint under the stark glare of phosphorescent lighting. It was hard to believe she was still in Germany. The whole place could have been teleported directly from her hometown of Evansville. She ordered a Hamburger Royal (a Quarter Pounder, but that didn't translate into the metric system) and fries. The shake machine was broken.
Ruby was accustomed to chilly winters and had contemplated eating outside during her walk over, but it turned out to be a little too cold for that much adventure. Instead, she found a table by the window and nibbled on her sandwich-just like the ones at home-and people-watched.
Dinner rush was well past, but Europeans eat late-and GIs ate all the time. The kids behind the counter spoke English, as did ninety percent of the customers-most of whom were soldiers or civilian employees of the British or U.S. military. Ruby spoke German, very well in fact, but had hoped to be able to practice a lot more. The vast majority of Germans she'd met since her arrival spoke English. They just gave her a sort of blank stare if she even tried to Deutsch sprechen. With all the chatter among the patrons about new American movies and V-8 hotrods it was easy to forget they were sitting smack in the heart of communist Germany.
State Department Diplomatic Security agents had warned her before she left Washington. Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung-HVA, the counterintelligence operatives of the dreaded Stasi-assumed every single person at Mission Berlin was a spy. The CIA did nothing to dissuade the East Germans of this notion since it caused them to waste manpower. From what Keller had read, that mattered little. The Stasi enlisted pretty much everyone in the country to their cause, giving them an almost unlimited supply of personnel to spy-mostly on one another.
Surveillance was a foregone conclusion. It was prudent to assume every room and telephone outside the embassy was bugged-if not by HVA, then by West German intelligence-BND. A sheltered Indiana orchestra kid, Ruby found the whole thing fascinating.
People called what they were living in a Cold War, and, for the most part, that was right, but when it boiled over, it did so in a very big way. Tensions between East and West were at their worst since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Every month, that knot of war that Khrushchev warned Kennedy about pulled tighter and tighter until it seemed there would be no untying it without swords. Pershing II missiles bristling all over Europe, American overflights of disputed islands, not to mention the President's Strategic Defense Initiative, all had the Soviets feeling twitchy and worried about their future. The rubles that had been used to prop up satellite states were repurposed for missiles meant to counter the capitalist threat of the Main Enemy-the United States. That left East Germany with a dwindling treasury and few resources to replace the missing Soviet assistance. Everyone was on edge.
Two years earlier, a Sukhoi Su-15 fighter had shot down a KAL civilian airliner when it inadvertently veer...
