Without Remorse

Without Remorse

Author	Tom Clancy
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	Ryanverse
Genre	Thriller, novel
Publisher	Putnam
Publication date	1993
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	639 pp (hardback edition)
ISBN	ISBN 0-399-13825-0 (hardback edition)
Followed by	Patriot Games

Without Remorse is a novel by Tom Clancy set in 1971, in the middle of the Vietnam War. It makes passing references to Jack Ryan and his family, but is focused on John Clark. The book serves to give a history of Clark's life, and develop his persona of being intelligent, resourceful, and just.

Without Remorse differs from most thrillers by focusing on character development. John Kelly, the protagonist, is particularly complex, but even lesser characters are nontrivial.

Plot summary

The story involves two wars: the Vietnam War, which was entering its final phase; and Kelly's private war on a drug gang that had murdered the woman he loved.

The story is set after 1970, as the raid on the Son Tay prison camp (Operation Ivory Coast), referred to throughout the book, occurred on November 21, 1970. John Kelly was in Vietnam at the time as a member of the (fictional) 3rd Special Operations Group (SOG). He would most likely have been a member of ST1 or ST2 who was working as part of MACV-SOG in the Phoenix Program. He has been home from Vietnam and out of the Navy long enough to have married and started his own business performing commercial maritime demolition. Due to the mentioning of Frank Robinson as a current player for the Baltimore Orioles, the upper cap is 1971.

The first scene in the book, the demolition of an oil-drilling rig dammaged irreparably by Hurricane Camille in August 14–28, 1969, also dates the story.

The epilogue—the release of Zaharias and other prisoners from the Hanoi Hilton—is dated February 12, 1973. The event is verifiable, although the name "Robin Zacharias" will not be on the actual list of prisoners.

At about the same time as Kelly demolishes the oil-drilling rig, Col. Robin Zacharias, a devout Mormon and United States Air Force pilot, is shot down during a bombing mission over North Vietnam. He is captured and taken to a secret prison camp, all of whose prisoners are of high rank and have been reported dead by the North Vietnamese government. Among the prisoners are some who possess highly-classified knowledge, beyond the scope of the Vietnam conflict.:Zacharias, for example, had helped develop SAC War Plans, choosing targets, routes, and methods. He is interrogated by Col Nikolai Yevgenievich Grishanov, or Kolya—a PVO Strany pilot, with a similar military background, who is also a colonel in the KGB. Kolya, the friendly Russian, gets much farther with kindness (and a little vodka) than the despicable camp commander (Major Vinh) had gotten with privation and abuse. Eventually, Grishanov asks Zacharias how he would defend the Rodina against the evil Chinese; Robin tells him to use "defense in depth," and explains how, then realizes that he has helped a Russian to defend his country against Robin's own country.Grishanov, the only person allowed to question the high-value prisoners in this camp, comes to value them as human beings more than as repositories of information, and he tries to improve their conditions: no abuse, better food, even a doctor. Vinh vetoes the idea. Eventually, someone up the chain of command decides that these prisoners are not worth keeping and that they can be quietly killed, with plausible deniability. About this time a U.S pilotless drone photographs Zacharias, and an admiral recognizes his face. Three admirals develop a plan to send some special operations warriors into North Vietnam and spring the prisoners.

Characters

The Protagonist

John Kelly, a former Navy SEAL, lives in seclusion in a concrete bunker on Battery Island, which he leases from the General Services Administration—a deal arranged by a grateful admiral whose son Kelly had brought back from behind enemy lines—which is equipped with a standard-issue machine shop and a recompression chamber, like any naval base. (It had once been a minor naval base, mostly used as a target for gunnery practice. The officers who supervised the practice had to have a safe pace to work, hence the bunker.It had later been used as a base for crash boats from nearby Patuxent Naval Air Station, until helicopters made crash boats obsolete.After that, it was declared "surplus property," and was not used until Dutch Maxwell offered it to Kelly. He and his wife, Tish, had made it into a home, but after her death it has devolved somewhat.)

He usually works as a professional diver. He has trained police divers in Baltimore, and he has recently blown up an oil-drilling platform damaged by a hurricane. (He carefully sets off small charges before the main blast, as a test and to scare away the fish. This detail illuminates his complex character: he kills, always efficiently and sometimes cruelly, but he always avoids killing the innocent, even fish.

The Admirals

On Memorial Day, we meet three admirals at Arlington National Cemetary.

• James Greer, whose son had been killed in Vietnam and was buried there. The grief of losing a son had ended his marriage. Greer goes on to become John Kelly's and Jack Ryan's mentor at CIA.
• Casimir Podulski, a Medal of Honor awardee, whose family and country had been erased in World War II, and whose son had been killed over Vietnam, leaving no remains to bury at Arlington. He becomes the foremost advocate and planner of the Boxwood Green rescue mission—and one of its few casualties. He dies of a heart attack after the mission fails and, although he is entitled to burial at Arlington, his friends bury him at sea, in Chesapeake Bay, near the Naval Academy.
• Winslow Holland Maxwell, whose son Kelly had rescued from North Vietnam, costing him minor wounds and a nearly-lethal infection, had given Kelly the 0Navy Cross and a promotion but had been unable to swing the 0Medal of Honor—"not for saving an admiral's son: you know the politics." The mission ends his naval career.

The Criminals

Incidentally, Clancy introduces various drug dealers:

1. Tony Piaggi, a restauranteur and Mafia "made man" with East-Coast connections, who can distribute large quantities of heroin. His restaurant—usually—serves crabcakes.
2. Angelo Verano, who hopes to get "made" but will fall short, thereby providing a test case for a new method of disposing of bodies and raising crabs.
3. Henry Tucker, who has developed a new way to smuggle prime South-East-Asian heroin into the U.S.—inside the bodies of U.S. casualties—by bribing the civilian morticians at each end of the body-shipping pipeline, in Vietnam and at Pope Air Force Base. Tucker is black and ambitious: he'd like to get "made." (He won't: only Italians can become insiders.)
4. Billy (Grayson), a vicious little thug who enjoys murder more han sex.
5. Rick (Farmer), Billy's less-vicious and less-ambitious assistant.

The Cops

• Emmet Ryan, Baltimore Police detective and father of Jack Ryan
• Tom Douglas, Baltimore homicide detective, comes in to investigate the "Fountain Murder" (Pam Madden). He goes inte Kelly's hospital room and shows pictures, which provoke a nonlinear response from Kelly and Sam Rosen.
• Mark Charon, a Baltimore narcotics detective, operates by maintaining confidential informants in the drug trade.

He satisfies the department's needs by arresting the rivals of his informants name for him:they are always ready to turn in a competitor, in return for police protection. He is an effective Mafia mole inside the police department, well able to tell his friends when an investigation is getting close to them and often able to provide the names and locations of inconvenient witnesses. Charon is probably named after the boatman of Hades, who ferried souls over the River Styx. (Clancy does not use numerous classical allusions, but he did go to Jesuit schools, so he has been exposed.)

Plot

Kelly, a former Navy SEAL, is devastated when his pregnant wife is killed in a car accident.

He lives in seclusion in a concrete bunker on Battery Island, which he leases from the General Services Administration—a deal arranged by a grateful admiral whose son Kelly had brought back from behind enemy lines—which is equipped with a standard-issue machine shop and a recompression chamber, like any naval base. (It had once been a minor naval base, mostly used as a target for gunnery practice. The officers who supervised the practice had to have a safe pace to work, hence the bunker.It had later been used as a base for crash boats from nearby Patuxent Naval Air Station, until helicopters made crash boats obsolete.After that, it was declared "surplus property," and was not used until Dutch Maxwell offered it to Kelly. He and his wife, Tish, had made it into a home, but after her death it has devolved somewhat.) Kelly occasionally works as a professional diver. He has trained police divers in Baltimore, and he has recently blown up an oil-drilling platform damaged by a hurricane. (He carefully sets off small charges before the main blast, as a test and to scare away the fish. This detail illuminates his complex character: he kills, always efficiently and sometimes cruelly, but he always avoids killing the innocent, even fish.

Six months aafter his wife's death, Kelly meets a girl named Pamela, who has escaped from prostitution and a "mule" (courier) position in a drug-smuggling ring run by Henry Tucker, Billy, and Rick, and becomes romantically involved with her. Kelly soon discovers, by accident, that she is addicted to barbiturates

The dafter he meets Pam, Kelly befriends two doctors——Sam and Sarah Rosen—both professors at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Sam of Orthopedic Surgery and Sarah of Pharmacology, when they have trouble with their new motorboat. It has run into a sandbar that was not on the chart, scraping off two propellors that had corroded paper-thin in salt water. Dr Kelly's diagnosis: old charts, depleted "zincs." Treatment: new charts, new propellors; new zinc anodes. (The zinc anodes protect bronze and brass parts, like propellors, from corrosion by electrolysis: the sacrificial anode is attached to one pole of a battery, and the propellors and other valuable parts are attached to the other pole, ensuring that the zinc anodes corrode first. Periodicaly, one replaces depleded zincs and polishes the uncorroded "screws" (propellors) and rudder. As for the sandbars: currents, storms, and tides move them around, so marine charts are revised annually. Good sailors buy them and study them, and they sail around sandbars, not over them.

With the help of Sam and Sarah Rosen, Kelly helps Pam recover from her addiction. He promises the Rosens to bring Pam in to Hopkins so that she can get a proper physical exam and start becroming healthy. Pam agrees to a quiet talk with Frank Allen, a Baltimore police detective Kelly knows, so that the criminals she had escaped from can be investigated. While waiting for the meeting with Ryan, Kelly decides to reconnoiter the drug operation that Pamela was involved. Soon after, Pamela is recognized by a former associate, and they are attacked. Kelly is critically wounded, and his girlfriend is captured, raped, tortured, and murdered.

From this point on, Kelly takes charge, both in a private war against the drug business that killed the girl he loved, and in a military operation to free dozens of secretly held POWs. Kelly is gradually recruited to help plan the POW-rescue mission and serve as a forward observer.

He begins his private war with a visit to New Orleans, where he tracks down Pierre Lamarcx, the pimp who had first seduced Pam and "turned her out" as a prostitute: Kelly finds Lamarck in a fancy bar, lures him into an alley, then relieves him of his money and pathetic small-caliber pistol, then calmly shoots him: when Lamarck asks why he is killing him, Kelly replies, "Practice." Kelly next sets up a safe house in a Baltimore suburb and a shooting blind in an abandoned house in the drug-dealers' "turf." He kills several minor drug dealers and eventually learns the location of Billy, a senior lieutenant in the drug ring who killed Pamela. He captures Billy and tortures him in his recompression chamber to get further information about the drug ring. He dumps Billy naked on the grounds of a private school, where he soon dies. After the body is found, identification is difficult—he had no arrest or military record and has never been fingerprinted, as he had told Kelly under torture—and the autopsy finds the cause of death to be an unusual kind of barotrauma: Twenty-something Billy has died of a CVA caused by a piece of bone marrow that had blocked a carotid artery. This indicates a pressure differential of at least three atmospheres, so the pathologist concludes that this unidentified body died in a bizarre diving accident, although no diving gear is found near him. The pathologist and police are unable to imagine what really happened: recompression chambers are quite rare and generally owned only by large hospitals or the Navy.

Kelly twice determines the location of the drug ring's new lab

1. a derelict ship near his own island, used once for "cutting" heroin and abandoned after Kelly raids it, killing several thugs and releasing Xantha, whom they had planned to kill
2. a warehouse in a sleepy industrial district, which the smugglers plan to use aslong as their source (and the war) holds out. He sets up a sniper post in a nearby building, and lays siege to it, killing the leader of the drug ring, his Mafia connection, and two Mafia hoods. A corrupt Baltimore police officer was also killed at the scene by one of the Mafia members—his one-time allies.

This book also begins Clark's involvement with Sandra O'Toole, who nurses Clark (as Kelly) back to health after the failed scouting attempt on Pamela's drug operation. She also assists Dr. Sarah Rosen in healing another girl, Doris, whom Kelly had freed during his private war, though the girl is later murdered, due to the treachery of Mark Charon, the Mafia mole in the Baltimore Police Department.

The end of the book documents how Kelly, using a boating accident, effectively kills off his John Kelly persona, who was wanted for the murder of over a dozen drugrunners, including those responsible for Pamela and Doris's deaths. Now known as John Clark—his CIA identity, by the end of the book he has married Sandra O'Toole, paving the way for her role in future books, such as Rainbow Six.

Without Remorse is a prequel to the Jack Ryan books, featuring Jack's father in a supporting role, as a Baltimore police officer. Jack Ryan himself appears briefly and is mentioned several times as a young adult about to join the U.S. Marine Corps.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

Template:Future film Paramount Pictures pictures bought the film rights to Without Remorse soon after the novel was released. There were several attempts to start work on the film, but it was always dropped soon after, along with attempts to adapt Clancy's hit novel Rainbow Six into a film. The film version had been put on the fast track in mid-2006. With the final script near completion, director John Singleton had signed on to direct the film, and Brandon Routh has been cast as John Kelly.

The film was intended for a late 2007/ early 2008 release however, Paramount has recently put Without Remorse into turnaround, and Singleton, who signed a 5-picture release deal with Paramount when he signed on to Without Remorse, will most likely leave the picture now, along with Routh.

Trivia

Tom Clancy received US$14 million to write Without Remorse, which is the largest amount of money ever paid for a book advance.