Tom Clancy and Mark Greaney. Command Authority. New York: Putnam, 2013. Print.

Russia will invade Ukraine, probably within the next few weeks. They will annex the Crimea. From there, if they meet no resistance from the West, they will take more of the country, all the way to the Dneiper River. (57)

Tom Clancy’s last book was prescient about a young computer contractor skipping off to China with terabytes of classified files. Now Command Authority is about Russian invading Ukraine in response to Ukrainian nationalism. For one last time, Clancy got it.

Of course in Clancy’s fictional world of President Jack Ryan, the American and NATO responses are a bit different from the way things are currently going (March 2014). But, most of all, Command Authority is a great story. While none of Clancy’s books are bad, this may be his best in a while.

Like several of Clancy’s recent novels, the main character in Command Authority is Jack Ryan, Jr., the President’s son. Taking time off from the highly classified “Campus,” he joins a venerable British investment research firm. A Scottish client of theirs has lost billions in the Russian government’s takeover of Gazprom, the Soviet-style Russian natural gas corporation. Ryan is investigating international bank transactions to see if the client has a chance of regaining some of his money in the courts of a country where some of the money passed through.

This investigation becomes more dangerous when a couple of Swiss bankers die under suspicious circumstances. No, wait! That was thirty years ago. This time the former head of the Russian Security Service dies under suspicious circumstances in America. But it is all related. About two dozen of the ninety chapters are set thirty years in the past when Jack Ryan, Sr., was a financial analyst for the CIA and those bankers lose their lives.

While the story focuses on Ryan Junior, most of the old crowd is here: Clark, Chavez, Mary Pat. In typical Clancy fashion, the action shifts among many nations including the USA, Russia, Switzerland, England, Scotland, Germany, with cameos from France and Belgium.

The reader may be able to connect the dots in the complications of the plot, but there is a lot of action. Clancy’s story maintains what many Westerners suspect is true—that the Russian government depends more and more on criminal gangs to do its enforcement. Political opponents seem to disappear with unusual frequency, and prior to the invasion of Ukraine many members of one particular criminal gang are setting up shop in Kiev.

Clancy’s storytelling technique is to use short chapters presenting the points of view of most of the characters. He still does that in Command Authority, but there is a slight twist. There are two very mysterious “deep” operatives. They are so deep that even their codes names are mostly rumors. We never have a chapter from either of those characters. (Well, there may be one chapter that does, but the exception proves the rule.) That adds to the mystery of the story and to the depth of the action.

Alas, Command Authority is Clancy’s last novel. I suspect that his co-author, Mark Greaney, may have contributed a lot to this tale. Greaney is described as an expert in international relations. I wonder if those uncannily prescient plot twists in the last two books were his contributions.

I wonder if Greaney will keep up the Jack Ryan stories the way that Eric van Lustbader is writing Bourne stories or the way Kingsley Amis and others have contributed to the James Bond corpus. If Greaney does continue, he may be able to fill Mr. Clancy’s seven-league boots.