Mark Greaney. Support and Defend. New York: Putnam, 2014. Print.
Well, this is the big test. Even though the cover of Support and Defend has the name Tom Clancy in letters as large as the title and the back cover has a photo of Clancy, this book is not by Tom Clancy. Clancy passed away almost exactly a year ago. Greaney was the co-author of Clancy’s last few novels. Now Greaney has written a book continuing the saga of Hendley Associates, a.k.a. the Campus, and he will be coming out with a new Jack Ryan novel in December. So is Support and Defend a The Man with the Golden Gun or is it a Scarlett?
Technodudes and dudesses will not be disappointed with the story line. Support and Defend focuses on Dominic Caruso, a member of The Campus who is on R and R after a close call with some Palestinian terrorists in India. These Hamas commandos wipe out the family of an Israeli friend of his in India, and he is looking for revenge. In this way it resembles Debt of Honor where the mysterious Mr. Clark takes on an urban gang when they molest his girlfriend.
These jihadists tracked down this retired Israeli military officer who was involved in the capture of the SS Ardahan, the Turkish vessel supposedly carrying food to Palestine but in fact transporting weapons. They were able to trace him to India because some classified American documents had been stolen with the intent to post them on a Wikileaks type web site called the International Transparency Project (ITP). While the documents had not been posted yet, clearly someone inside the ITP had passed the information on to Hamas.
The leaker was an overconfident and frustrated employee serving as a White House National Security Council specialist on the Near East. As we are introduced to this idealistic but amoral Ethan Ross, I said to myself, “He sounds like he could have gone to Harvard.” It turns out he did—at least for grad school. Undergrad he was a Yalie. As the old saying goes, “You can always tell a Harvard man…but you can’t tell him much.”
Dominic does some work with the FBI and the CIA as he tries to trace the source of the leak.
By the time authorities are able to get enough evidence to arrest Ross, he has left the country. And he has used a sophisticated network crawling software given to ITP via Iranian spies to download many gigabytes of classified files. While the story also involves Yemenis, Venezuelans, and Panamanians, we discover that the idealists in the ITP have been “played” by Iran. In some ways the naïve ITP “hacktivists” may remind Clancy fans of the environmental activists in Rainbow Six.
The plot of Support and Defend will not disappoint. It is a good story—believable enough given the state of today’s world. At one point the leader of the Iranian plotters says to an American, “We are at war with the West…You just do not know it.” (497) That is a message from this book. Radical Muslims have been at war with the United States at least since 1968 when one assassinated Robert Kennedy, U. S. Senator and leading presidential candidate. It has been 46 years. At some point Europe and North America will have to figure this out.
Curiously, the title comes from the oath that both enlisted men and officers swear when joining the American military. There are actually few military men in this story, unless we understand that Dom Caruso once took that oath and, while no longer in the military, still takes the oath seriously.
Is there a noticeable difference between Greaney and Clancy? Yes. Clancy developed his characters more. We got into the heads of the protagonists and the antagonists. Support and Defend has much less of that. Clancy’s novels blended character and action with flair. At the end of Support and Defend, you really do not know much more about Dom Caruso, let alone the other cast members, than you did at the beginning.
Still, Clancy fans will have fun with this one. It is a “good yarn,” though completely plot-driven. It will be interesting to see what Greaney does with Jack Ryan or Jack, Jr., in the novel that is coming out in December.