History Literature / RainbowSix

* CanadaEh: Puts in a brief appearance as the RCMP who pick up the would-be Basque terrorists who tried to hijack the plane that Clark and Chavez happen to be on, but otherwise ignored.

* EvilMalthusian: The Horizon conspirators claim they're going to kill most of humanity to save nature, but naturally they themselves are exempt from the rules. If there's less people, there'll still be a net drop in emissions even if they drive their smog-belching cars, right? And no one is going to complain about hunting Rhinos after the population recovers!

** The books is, in its vision of terrorist threat, very "90s". More concerned with the IRA and remnants of communist groups from the previous decade, and various regional independence armed groups. No mention is made of Islamic terrorism (Which wasn't exactly unknown at the time, the first World Trade Center attacks having occurred). Rainbow's training and entire philosophy is based around terrorists who take hostages to make demands or advance a point, and not those who, say, are solely concerned with killing as many innocents as possible. Ironically, the main villains in terms of methodology are much closer to this model. Still, reading this book post 9/11 is sort of jarring in its vision of what the world threat on terrorism in 2000 should've been.

* DeathBySex: Part of the villains' testing of their lethal-if-not-vaccinated biological agent involves getting uninfected captives to have sex with infected ones while both sides are drugged with aphrodisiacs. True to form, said virus can be spread by intercourse.

** The first group of terrorists in the prologue are so inept their plan had no chance of success in the first place; the person they were trying to kidnap wasn't even on the plane and they ''didn't check for this'' before pulling their guns. They had no prior experience, managed to do nothing more than temporarily hijack the plane, and were quickly thwarted by equally unprepared people of superior skills.

** The Communist couple fit Dr. Bellow's earlier description of "Good Terrorists"; they are the first whom, ignoring their goals which they were tricked into by Popov, don't commit obvious tactical blunders. They, for the first time in the story, pose a challenge to Rainbow as they realize they forgot to acquire a helicopter, forcing them to improvise. While less kill-crazy than Ernst, they have far more ideological dedication to Communism and thus will not even consider backing out, refusing to negotiate or give up their hostages at all. While Ernst killed when he lost his cool, these are ready to kill anything and anyone between them and their goal.
** The terrorists at the Amusement Park are again a step up, being the largest group encountered so far, have the largest amount of potential hostages, and tied to a RealLife terrorist of known danger and skill (The Jackal). They show there are no lines they will not cross to accomplish their goals when they take sick children hostage and then ''execute one''. They also pick the most complex locale for Rainbow to assault. For the first time both teams deploy.

** Then the main villains, who seek to kill the ''entire human race'' (except themselves). They are only thwarted because their plans are so horrific Popov is willing to risk exposing himself to Rainbow and Clark (whose wife he had just arranged a mission against) than let them complete their mission... but they are only the most dangerous due to their plan, as they are actually the weakest enemy in direct combat.

* CorporateConspiracy: Horizon Corporation is an example of a Corporate Conspiracy motivated by ideology, as it is secretly [[spoiler:an EcoTerrorist group that plans to mitigate the inevitable fall of human civilization by quickening it through a genetically-engineered strain of the Ebola virus to wipe out 99% of humanity]].

* HeroOfAnotherStory: Covington and Team-1. Most of Team-1 [[RedShirt go unnamed]]. Covington himself gets to assist in a few incidents [[spoiler:And gets ambushed by the bad guy along with Team-1]].
* {{Hypocrite}}: The ecoterrorists have this in spades, with relentless lampshading. As just one example, they have chosen the Hummer, one of the most fuel inefficient vehicles in existence, as their main mode of transportation for their bases in Kansas and Manaus, Brazil. Considering that these people supposedly love nature so much, you'd think they'd pick something more economical.
** There's also the fact that they denounce modern human life as being at odds with pure, good nature, yet seemingly think nothing of the fact that they benefit from modern human innovation. For instance, their headquarters weren't made from tar and twigs, after all. Being villains, they probably HandWave this as a necessary evil to achieve their goals. They do explicitly note that they don't personally have to be as careful with nature, since the "large-scale" destruction won't be going on much longer.
** Dr. Kilgore, one of the biochemists developing the virus, is eagerly looking forward to going big-game hunting in Africa once the endangered species rebound and he can shoot as many of them as he likes without being afraid of de-populating them;

* IdiotBall: The ecoterrorists flee the U.S. for South America, looking to stay out of American hands long enough to bring a legal defense into play, despite the fact that being inside the US was their only protection against being hunted down by the ''military'', who have far fewer restrictions than American law enforcement. For example, they aren't required to read you your Miranda rights before [[spoiler: leaving you in the jungle to die.]]
** One can handwave it in that their plan just fell apart at the very last minute, and they had no contingencies to either being found out and the plan failing, so late in the game, so they figure taking some distance to build their legal defense. They also likely never figured RAINBOW would immediately muster against them - prior to this RAINBOW had only responded to incident in progress. They are in fact sort of right in their expectation - Clark is told the military won't move right away, but RAINBOW can. It's an idiotic decision made on wrong assumptions by people out of their elements who are panicking.

* IHaveYourWife: [[spoiler: the IRA terrorists take Clark and Chavez's wives hostage at the hospital they work in.]]