Tom Clancy's Fraternal Order

'The Teeth of the Tiger' by Tom Clancy

THE TEETH OF THE TIGER
By Tom Clancy
Putnam. 431 pp. $27.95

Early in Tom Clancy's new novel, a young FBI agent named Dominic Caruso confronts a pedophile who has killed a young girl. He proceeds to shoot the man in cold blood, whereupon he is recruited for a top-secret program to eliminate international terrorists. So is his twin brother, Brian, a Marine captain fresh from combat in Afghanistan. The twins' cousin, Jack Ryan Jr., just out of Georgetown University, also joins the program as an intelligence analyst. He is, of course, the son of Jack Ryan, the hero of most of Clancy's previous novels.

"The Teeth of the Tiger" is a major departure for Clancy. He worked hard to advance Jack Ryan from stockbroker to CIA agent to vice president to president, but the problem with a president, if you write action novels, is that he doesn't get out much. In last year's "Red Rabbit," Clancy sidestepped the problem by going back 20 years, to relate one of Ryan's early adventures, but that novel, according to Publishers Weekly, didn't sell well by Clancy standards. So now he passes the flame to a new generation: Jack Jr. (also known as Little Jack and Ryan the Younger) and Dominic and Brian Caruso. The senior Ryan remains offstage, an ex-president writing his memoirs.

The three young men are working for an outfit that purports to be an investment firm but is in truth an anti-terrorist operation with hidden ties to government. While the twins train to be assassins, Jack studies the less glamorous business of using a computer to sort through CIA and NSA data and track the terrorists' movement of money. Meanwhile, 16 Saudi terrorists cross the Mexican border into the United States and carry out suicide attacks that kill and wound hundreds in the heartland. In their aftermath, Jack helps trace those who planned the attacks, and the Caruso brothers are sent to Europe to kill them.

Clancy's strength has always been his plots, and this is a good and timely one, but it is soon overwhelmed by his usual weaknesses, which include inane dialogue, gossamer characterizations, endless repetition and bumper-sticker politics.

Clancy seems to regard Jack as akin to Shakespeare's Prince Hal, a young prince poised to step out of his father's shadow and prove his manhood, but the reader sees only a bland young man who is devoid of intellectual curiosity. When, speaking of the terrorists, Jack asks a senior spy, "What have we ever done to hurt them?" The man replies that Western actions and values sometimes offend Islamic religious beliefs. "Are you defending these birds?" Jack demands. The spy reminds the young man that his job is to understand how the terrorists think, whereupon Jack replies angrily, "Fine. They think [expletive]. I understand that." The Caruso twins are the Hardy Boys grown up, proficient with guns and dirty talk, but fun-loving lads at heart. They say things like this -- when an intended victim turns up with a companion:

"Who's wog number two, I wonder?"

"Nobody we know, and we can't freelance. You packin'?"

"Bet your bippy, bro. You?"

"Hang a big roger on that."

The novel's most bizarre moment occurs after a shopping-mall shootout. Brian Caruso, confronting a dying terrorist, dashes to a nearby store and returns with a football, which he forces into the man's hands. "It's a pigskin, [expletive], made from the skin of a real Iowa pig." Apparently this indignity will block the man's journey to Paradise and the milk, honey and virgins that await him there. We are deep in Clancy Country, where the natives communicate in a bewildering mixture of spook-speak, military tough talk and bureaucratic buzzwords. Lesser mortals are called pukes ("those White House pukes") or weenies ("those computer weenies"), and terrorists are mostly mutts. We are endlessly told that when things get "hinky" (suspicious), an agent with a "good nose" (good instincts) can "twig" (figure out) a way to whack the mutts. Reporters are "newsies" when they are not "vultures on a fallen carcass" and either way are treasonous.

If Clancy likes a word or phrase, he does not hesitate to use it twice -- or 20 times or 200. Someone says of the Caruso twins, "Their mom must have punched out two eggs instead of one that month," and later one of them declares, "Mom punched out two eggs that month." We are told twice that if a man is worth shooting once he's worth shooting twice, twice that there is a saying in Texas that more men need killing than horses need stealing, twice that the terrorists didn't come to the United States to sell Girl Scout cookies, maybe 50 times that real espionage is not like the movies, and hundreds of times that e-mail messages have been encrypted (or decrypted or reencrypted). The mind boggles.

For a novel about virile young men, "The Teeth of the Tiger" is oddly lacking in sex. Our three heroes are reputed to have had girlfriends, but none is glimpsed. Instead, we are told over and over about the lustful Saudi terrorist who employs an expensive prostitute in London. Jack, pondering this, declares indignantly that he would never "pay for it" but ventures a guess that "she slings it pretty good." The Caruso brothers' major passion is the expensive cars they drive around Europe between whacks. Brian says of his twin, "He'd rather sleep with a Ferrari than with Grace Kelly," and Jack adds that "if Maureen O'Hara had been born a car" she might have been a Ferrari. Does Clancy really think that today's young warriors lust after actresses old enough to be their grandmothers? His efforts to be hip are a wonder to behold.

Clancy's terrorist leaders are as arrogant and hypocritical as they are bloodthirsty. They scorn the decadent West but enjoy its prostitutes, fine wines and luxury hotels, and they think the zealots they send on suicide missions are fools. Although the only possible reason to read this novel is for the vicarious thrill of seeing the Caruso brothers whack the terrorists, there is little thrill involved because the Saudis are presented as such idiots that killing them is like swatting flies. Three times, one of the brothers jabs a poisoned needle into a terrorist's buttock, and three times the victim obligingly drops dead on the streets of Europe, yet their ringleader sees no reason to suspect foul play. Unsurprisingly, he is the next to go.

Since the point of this bloated, boring, silly novel -- which trivializes an important issue -- is for Jack to prove his manhood, Clancy contrives to send him to Europe to assist the Caruso brothers despite the fact that 1) they don't need him, 2) he lacks training, and 3) as the son of an ex-president he has no business in assassination plots. Jack does prove himself, more or less, whereupon the novel does not so much end as announce "to be continued." It will take additional volumes for Ryan the Younger and the Caruso boys to rid the world of terrorism. Be warned.