Time For Classier Clancy Author’S Latest Has Usual Violence, Thin Plot

“Rainbow Six” By Tom Clancy (Putnam, $27.95)

This Tom Clancy novel does not star Jack Ryan, last seen putting the world right as POTUS - you know, president of the United States - in “Executive Order.” This is not a bad thing. Ryan had become an impossible, insufferable jerk.

Clancy did this once before, in the oh so appropriately named “Without Remorse,” when he turned the spotlight over to Jack Clark, another jerk who views the world clearest through a rifle sight and rarely likes what he sees.

Well, Clark is back.

Not that it matters. Clancy’s cookie-cutter characters, as memorable as a sackful of nine-penny nails, tend to get lost in the gunplay and guy talk - think of any actual plot development as macho interruptus.

There is a plot, though, in the same sense that Robert Ludlum’s hectic, disjointed, hysterical chases around the globe are plots - something big and threatening to peace and the American way is afoot, and requires first-class airfare and counterfeit credentials every few pages.

Come, put aside logic and follow this one.

Some mysterious Mr. Big has hired a cashiered KGB supervisor to set up a series of terrorist incidents around Europe, using long-dormant baddies who apparently lost their judgment around the time they lost their causes.

Also, some mysterious outfit has created the ultimate weapon - Shiva, a really, really serious organism that could kill every man, woman and child - okay, animals, too - in the world.

There’s a plot to spring Il’ych Ramariz Sanchez, a k a Carlos the Jackal, from a French prison, which involves raiding a theme park in Spain. Whew. A couple of young women in New York wind up, along with some winos, at a top-secret lab somewhere in the middle of Kansas. Among various ecological nuts threatening the very survival of, like, the world, is an Oval Office insider.

And like that.

Enter our heroes, the elite international military strike force called Rainbow, based in England, ever-ready to fly off somewhere and kill people. Rainbow Six is the code name for, surprise, Jack Clark.

Unfortunately, one of the guys celebrates missions by smoking a pipe, an idiosyncrasy that leads the KGB guy to discover Rainbow’s existence. A couple of first-class fares later, he is passing the news along to Mr. Big.

Sure, it sounds like Mission: Implausible, and it is, but Clancy has this talent for turning computer-game scenarios, arms-manual lingo and bang bang action into something that keeps the fans coming back.

But the ending is strictly for violence voyeurs. By now, Clancy should, no pun intended, be aiming higher.