History Literature / ClearAndPresentDanger

* TrainingFromHell: The ''SHOWBOAT'' teams train for their mission in the Colorado mountains, where the oxygen level is very low, in order to prepare themselves for operations in the Colombian mountains. They don't try playing the DrillSergeantNasty version, though, specifically because the troops all have enough combat experience neither to need such treatment nor to stand for it.

* ChekhovsGun: [[spoiler:Ritter's safe combination is revealed to Ryan at the beginning of the novel for a very good reason: he uses it to break into Ritter's vault to discover the facts about Operations SHOWBOAT and RECIPROCITY.]]

* CorruptCorporateExecutive: The owner of the ''Empire Builder'' had laundered money for the Cartel on a massive scale, and his elimination was due to the Cartel discovering that he had been skimming off the top. The records the FBI discover in his home lead to ''Operation TARPON''.

* DarkHorseVictory: [[spoiler:The President was heavily favored to win the election but deliberately throws it, allowing Bob Fowler to win an upset victory. As described by Arnie van Damm (Fowler's campaign manager) in later books, with actual reverence bordering on fear:]]
--> [[spoiler:'''Arnie''': He threw it. He threw a presidential election. He fired his campaign manager and his campaign was for shit the whole way. Jesus, Jack, ''what did you '''do'''''?]]

* TheNondescript: The description of Cortez that the FBI and CIA have to work with boils down to "Latino male, early middle age, average height and build, no distinguishing marks" - which they freely admit is utterly useless from the perspective of a counterintelligence officer trying to find him. However, after Escobado [[spoiler:has the [=FBI=] director assassinated]] and the leaks of the director's travel plans is traced back to his executive secretary, Moira Wolfe, she is (due to embarrassingly intimate circumstances) able to produce the most exact and in-depth physical description any law enforcement officer had ever seen. This is further helped later on by camera footage of [[spoiler:Clark's laser-designated air strike on Untiveros's house]], which is corroborated by Moira.

* NoCelebritiesWereHarmed: Ernesto Escobado is a thinly-veiled stand-in for real life Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.

* RightManInTheWrongPlace: Ryan is only able to do what he can to shut down the operations because of his position as DDI.

* SomeoneToRememberHimBy: In ''[[Literature/TheSumOfAllFears]]'', it's revealed that [[spoiler:Carol Zimmer was pregnant with her husband's eighth child, and was planning to surprise him with it the next time he came home]].

* TheStarscream: Cortez, after the Cartel make the decision to [[spoiler:murder Jacobs in response to ''TARPON'', decides to subvert their leadership with the aim of eventually taking over]].

* CoolCar: Untiveros' monster truck, [[spoiler:which Clark uses as the target for the first RECIPROCITY attack, disguising an air-to-ground strike as a car bombing]].

* DarkHorseVictory: [[spoiler:The President was heavily favored to win the election but deliberately throws it, allowing Bob Fowler to win an upset victory. As described by Arnie van Daam (Fowler's campaign manager) in later books, with actual reverence bordering on fear:]]

* AffablyEvil: Larson points out that the drug cartel leaders can be quite nice and generous, while most are also dedicated family men. He could easily get a half-a-million dollar loan by simply asking, though he'd have to pay it back by doing drug courier flights. However, he also warns Clark that, gentlemanly as they are, the cartel leaders can still be ruthless and cruel to those who cross them.

* BewareTheNiceOnes: Cortez tries to teach Escobedo this in regards to the United States, reminding him that America's open borders and lack of response to the drug trade are a result of Americans' belief in freedom and the limitations of their police forces, not a lack of resolve. He even warns Escobedo against trying to target Americans, and especially American government officials. Predictably, the cartel ignores Cortez and the U.S. starts dropping laser guided bombs through their front doors.

* DarkerAndEdgier: The Ryanverse was never a warm and fuzzy place, but it takes a level in darkness in this one. Admiral Greer [[spoiler:dies of cancer]]; high ranking members of the U.S. government who had previously been shown as men of honor and integrity, including Judge Moore, Bob Ritter, and the President, are shown engaging in a covert operation that eventually [[spoiler:slides into a criminal conspiracy]]; Admiral Cutter gives us our first CorruptPolitician in the series; and by the end, [[spoiler:the President having thrown the election as part of a deal to avoid exposure]], it's implied (and sadly borne out by the next book) that the incoming administration will be even worse. The American soldiers deployed to Colombia are [[spoiler:betrayed by a superior trying to cover his own ass]], resulting in the deaths of most of them. Finally, the book touches on two heavily topical and controversial issues for the late eighties, the war on drugs and the Iran-contra scandal, in contrast to the general {{Eagleland}} Type 1 portrayal of America in the first few books.

* DarkHorseVictory: The President was heavily favored to win the election but deliberately throws it, allowing Bob Fowler to win an upset victory. As described by Arnie (Fowler's campaign manager) in later books, with actual reverence bordering on fear:
--> '''Arnie''': He threw it. He threw a presidential election. He fired his campaign manager and his campaign was for shit the whole way. Jesus, Jack, ''what did you '''do'''''?

* DidYouJustFlipOffCthulhu: invoked in-universe by Felix Cortez. He refuses to divulge the identity of his sources to Escobedo, saying that not only is this a principle of intelligence operations but that ''Castro himself'' once asked him the same thing and was given the same answer. Privately, he acknowledges this is baloney: not only was he never that close to Castro, but no one in Cuba would have dared refuse him if he ''had'' asked. It's a good story to improve your street cred, though. He's also privately flipping off Escobedo, a very powerful drug lord, by lying to him, demonstrating how little respect he actually has for his boss.
* DontSneakUpOnMeLikeThat: This exact line is said by Clark when the pilot Larson walks up behind him without warning first. Actually [[IdiotBall incredibly stupid of Larson]], since Clark just ''killed'' four heavily armed mercenaries.

** [[spoiler:Moira Wolfe attempts suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills, after she finds out that she was used by Cortez for the information that was used to kill Director Jacobs during his visit to Bogota.]]

* DudeWheresMyRespect: Cortez is constantly feeling this in his employment with the Cartel. He's a KGB trained professional intelligence officer who's managed to compromise the freaking FBI, yet his advice is usually ignored or not even sought out. [[spoiler: It's what prompts his coup attempt against the Cartel and detente with the U.S. government.]]

* EnemyMine: between Admiral Cutter and Felix Cortez. They both have an interest in eliminating most of the Cartel's leaders - Cutter because it's an enemy of the United States, Cortez so that he can take over.

* GeneralFailure: Vice Admiral Cutter, by sheer incompetence, manages to escalate the US operations in Colombia to illegal levels. To make matters worse, Cortez discovers the U.S. involvement and then blackmails Cutter into assisting him in his power grab, which involves betraying the ''SHOWBOAT'' teams and leaving them to die.
* GeniusBruiser: Clark. He's a former non-commissioned officer with no college degree who's kept around partly as the CIA's in-house hitman. He also speaks six languages, several of them well enough to pass for a native, is fully capable of planning complex operations (both intelligence and military), and his ability to restructure these operations on the fly in the face of changing circumstances while still achieving the best outcome borders on XanatosSpeedChess.

** In lesser measure, Bob Ritter himself, as Clark explains while venting to Larson. Not only has he had a desk job for so long that he's losing his memory of how things work in the field, but his own career in the field consisted mostly of running spies in Eastern Europe, which is very different from the "low intensity warfare" that the CIA is now practicing in Colombia[[note]]Best exemplified when the soldiers point out (internally) that their orders are to prevent ''any'' contact with the enemy, or even the ''chance'' of contact, which prevents them from doing such simple things as patrolling their area to determine enemy defenses and logistics[[/note]].

* TheNondescript: The description of Cortez that the FBI and CIA have to work with boils down to "Latino male, early middle age, average height and build, no distinguishing marks" - which they freely admit is utterly useless from the perspective of a counterintelligence officer trying to find him. However, after Escobado has the [=FBI=] director assassinated and the leaks of the director's travel plans is traced back to his executive secretary, Moira, she is (due to embarrassingly intimate circumstances) able to produce the most exact and in-depth physical description any law enforcement officer had ever seen.
* NoOneGetsLeftBehind: Averted. Most of the American teams don't make it out and even the ones that do suffer heavy casualties, with those who fall being left behind and likely ending up in unmarked graves.

* RoaringRampageOfRevenge: The United States's response to the Cartel for murdering Director Jacobs.

* SomeoneToRememberHimBy: In later novels, it's noted that at the time, [[spoiler:Carol Zimmer was pregnant with her husband's eighth child, and was planning to surprise him with it the next time he came home]].

* TheStarscream: Cortez, after the Cartel make the decision to murder Jacobs in response to ''TARPON'', decides to subvert their leadership with the aim of eventually taking over.

* BoringYetPractical: Invoked by Director Jacobs, who argues that, instead of covert special operations and bombing, good, honest police work can do much more to sink the Cartel. He makes a pretty good case, seeing as how Operation TARPON makes by far the biggest hole in the Cartel's power.

* BadGuysDoTheDirtyWork: Cortez and Escobedo's fate. Both are captured by the end of the book, but neither can be brought to the United States for trial without exposing the illegal operation the United States was running in Colombia. So Escobedo is [[spoiler:returned to the cartel, whose other leaders believe he was trying to flee the country after betraying them]]; Cortez is [[spoiler:returned to his home country of Cuba, where he is still wanted for defecting]].

* ExactWords: Ryan and Murray promise Cortez that he won't be prosecuted. True to Ryan's word, he isn't prosecuted. [[spoiler:He's handed back to his former agency in Cuba, where his fate is most likely to be far less pleasant than what it could be under the US criminal justice system.]]

* PutOnABus: NSA Advisor Jeffrey Pelt is mentioned to have retired sometime prior to the novel, paving the way for Cutter to take the position.

* EliteAgentsAboveTheLaw: The book is titled after President Bob Ritter's judgement that the Columbian cocaine cartel has become a threat to US national security. As such, he has his NSA man, James Cutter, cherrypick an elite team to conduct covert sabotage operations against the cocaine cartel. When actions escalate into an airstrike that obliterates one kingpin's compound (wives, mistresses and children included), that's United States military killing foreign nationals on their home soil, which is an act of war. Once this indiscretion starts unraveling, [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness the politicos leave their underlings to be killed or captured]].

* ElitesAreMoreGlamorous: Averted. John Clark recruits his soldiers from regular U.S. Army light infantry units and then gives them additional training in guerrilla warfare. The reason he doesn't recruit from Special Forces is that the Special Forces community is small enough that people would notice the missing soldiers and start asking questions. [[spoiler: It turns out that even regular Army units will notice when people don't end up where they're supposed to.]]

* CallBack: Clark's violent history with drug dealers is briefly hinted at. Dovetails with a CallForward in ''Literature/WithoutRemorse'' in which Ritter notes the CIA had been thinking of becoming involved in anti-drug operations - and recommends formally recruiting Clark in part because of said history.

* CorruptCop: Ernie Braden, a detective in the Mobile police force, was hired by the Cartel to search for and steal evidence prior to the hit being put on the Corrupt Corporate Executive above. His failure to discover the records subsequently result in the Cartel putting a hit on him.

* RealityEnsues:
** Dropping laser guided bombs on drug kingpins is all fun and games until the rescue teams start pulling the bodies of the kingpins' family and innocent house servants from the wreckage.
** After the first attacks on the cartel processing sites, Admiral Cutter is stunned to learn the American teams have taken light casualties. Ritter points out this was inevitable; even with all their extra training, the sheer odds of combat meant that some American soldiers were going to get killed.
** The American teams are reliant on stealth and outside support to succeed. Once their supplies are cut off and the cartel learns where they are, the sheer numbers of the cartel foot soldiers can overwhelm them.

* AnonymousRinger: At one point in the book, the relationship between the US forces stationed in Panama, the military forces of Panama, and their leader, are discussed as strained. The leader of Panama at the time of writing, of course, [[{{UsefulNotes/Panama}} being the dictator Manuel Noriega]].

** When tracers are used (particularly in the miniguns on the Pave Low helicopters), it's specifically mentioned that only one out of X bullets is a tracer round, for the purposes of assisting with aim[[labelnote:*]]miniguns aren't equipped with sights, as they're for area denial and not precision shooting[[/labelnote]]. Given [[GatlingGood minigun]] [[MoreDakka rate of fire]], it's also mentioned that it looks like a laser beam at full "rock and roll".

The [[Film/ClearAndPresentDanger 1994 film adaptation]] starred Creator/HarrisonFord as Ryan and Willem Dafoe as John Clark.

* TheNondescript: The description of Cortez that the FBI and CIA have to work with boils down to "Latino male, early middle age, average height and build, no distinguishing marks" - which they freely admit is utterly useless from the perspective of a counterintelligence officer trying to find him.

** The text says only son, not only child, and ‘’Literature/WithoutRemorse’’ when featuring a scene with Greer and another Vietnam-era bigwig who lost his son in combat mentions that both have other children.

* WasItReallyWorthIt: This is discussed in a later book when we learn that the operation was a success, in the sense that the Cartel eventually came apart as a result of the EnemyCivilWar initiated here. On the other hand, this made no serious dent in Colombia's organized crime problem or in the drug trade, as [[EvilPowerVacuum another cartel simply took its place]]. On the ''other'' other hand: "True, and they haven't killed any American officials, have they? Somebody explained to them what the rules are."

* ArtisticLicense[=/=]AnachronismStew: In the real world, 1988 featured UsefulNotes/GeorgeHWBush running against Michael Dukakis, since it was impossible for UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan, who got elected in 1980, to run for a third term. However, for the purposes of the story, the President in the last two novels was elected to his first term in 1984, theoretically making him either Harold Stassen or Walter Mondale. But this is impossible, since ''Red October'', which has the same President, clearly states that December 3rd took place on a Friday that year, which makes it only possible to happen in one of four years in the post-Vietnam, pre-2000 era: 1976 (Impossible as Ryan would have still been in college at that time, and ''Red October'' has explicit references to events that happened in 1981), 1982 (''Red Rabbit'', which takes place before ''Red October'' is explicitly stated to take place in this year), 1993, or 1999. This gets more confusing in later novels where Clancy treats the Reagan and Bush presidencies as happening as normal. Furthermore, the President in ''Clear and Present Danger'' is implied to be a Republican, or at least right-wing (the parties are never named in the Clancy novels), because his opponent Fowler's foreign policy is very dove-ish and pro-Cuba and his convention is in Chicago, a traditional location for [=DNCs=]. In addition, Clark mentions that he's been in the spy business for twenty-odd years, which, since ''Literature/WithoutRemorse'' had him get recruited by the CIA in the early seventies[[note]]Unless he's counting his time in Project Phoenix and MACV-SOG, which could put in him the late 60's[[/note]], implies this story takes place in 1996 at the earliest.

* GeneralFailure: Vice Admiral Cutter, by sheer incompetence, manages to escalate the US operations in Columbia to illegal levels. To make matters worse, Cortez discovers the U.S. involvement and then blackmails Cutter into assisting him in his power grab, which involves betraying the ''SHOWBOAT'' teams and leaving them to die.

** TheCartel's decision to [[spoiler:assassinate the US Ambassador to Columbia, the Director of the FBI, and the head of the DEA]] displays a tenacious grip on the IdiotBall. Cortez is the only one that realizes this.
** This is reciprocated by the United States when they decide to start using the ''SHOWBOAT'' teams to hit Cartel processing sites, which essentially is an act of war against Columbia since they're now technically using armed soldiers to kill Columbian citizens inside of their borders. It's also noted that hitting the processing sites is stupid, because there's hundreds of them, and taking out 2 or 3 a night won't have any effect.

** When the Cartel discover the implications of Operation ''TARPON'', and that Emil Jacobs would be flying to Columbia to meet with their Attorney General, [[spoiler:they make the rash decision to murder him]]. Of course, this results in compromising Moira Wolfe, the FBI source who gave Cortez the information.

* TrainingFromHell: The ''SHOWBOAT'' teams train for their mission in the Colorado mountains, where the oxygen level is very low, in order to prepare themselves for operations in the Columbian mountains. They don't try playing the DrillSergeantNasty version, though, specifically because the troops all have enough combat experience neither to need such treatment nor to stand for it.

* TheNondescript: The description of Chavez that the FBI and CIA have to work with boils down to "Latino male, early middle age, average height and build, no distinguishing marks" - which they freely admit is utterly useless from the perspective of a counterintelligence officer trying to find him.