Book Review – Tom Clancy’s “Without Remorse”
To the CIA he was known as John Clark, a highly skilled former Navy SEAL who could think on his feet and deliver results.
Before being part of the CIA, John Clark was John Terrence Kelly, a former Navy soldier who used his underwater demolition skills to earn a living. One day fate would place a young, drug-addicted woman in his path, and that would lead to the ending of John Kelly’s civilian life.
This is his story.
Without Remorse, a thriller written by Tom Clancy, begins in November of 1970.
John Kelly has been hired to help destroy an oil rig that was heavily damaged from Hurricane Camille in August of 1969. It was more cost efficient to sink the structure and have it form an artificial reef versus hauling it out of the water and repairing it. The underwater demolition is successful and that job goes well.
Unfortunately for John Kelly, that same day his young wife, Patricia, is driving through town when an out-of-control semi-truck smashes into her car, killing her on impact. What makes her death even more devastating is that she was pregnant with the couple’s first child.
That same month, Air Force Colonel Robin Zacharias is piloting his F-105G Thunderchief strike aircraft over North Vietnam during a Wild Weasel mission. It’s a dangerous game where pilots actively engage the deadly SAM missiles that have shot down so many American aircraft. A freak missile shot destroys his aircraft and Zacharias is forced to parachute into enemy territory. He’s quickly captured and taken away as a prisoner.
Fast forward to May of next year.
John Kelly is driving through Baltimore when he spots a young woman on the side of the road. She’s clearly in need of help, and John decides that he could use the companionship. He stops his jeep and allows the twenty-year-old woman to join him. She’s glad to be on the road, just as long as it takes her out of town.
John’s companion is Pamela Madden, a rather skinny young lady who could use a good home along with some decent meals. She gladly joins him onto his boat, a cruiser named Springer, and goes along on an excursion to his island home in Chesapeake Bay. It also turns out that Pam is very affectionate towards her new friend, and the two of them quickly develop an intimate and close relationship.
A storm rapidly approaches as they’re cruising the water, and John Kelly is forced to anchor the boat for the night near a sandbar. The next morning John answers the distress call to two boaters in need of rescue. Their boat is damaged and John gives them a tow to his island home so he can further analyze the damage to their boat.
The two boaters turn out to be Dr. Sam Rosen and his wife, Sarah. Sarah is a pharmacologist and works with her husband at John Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. It turns out that Sam is a better doctor than he is a sailor. His propeller blades are damaged and it won’t be until the next day before replacement parts can arrive at John’s island home.
While John and Sam are unloading the boat, they discover that Pam’s bag contains drugs. She’s a drug addict. Sarah uses her skills and helps Pam recover from her addiction problem over the next couple of days. She’s also fed some meals, gets a lot of rest, and she begins exercising with John.
After Sam and Sarah depart for home, Pam tells John more of her life story. It turns out that she left home years ago and hopped from one city to the next, from New Orleans to Baltimore. She reluctantly became a prostitute and her handlers got her addicted to drugs so they could better control her. Her handler in Baltimore, a sadistic man named Billy, also took a liking to beating her on a regular basis. It was just by chance that she finally escaped from Billy when she spotted John Kelly driving his jeep down the street. He took a chance by giving her a ride, and now the two of them are a close couple.
Soon they depart back to Baltimore. John Kelly has arranged for Pam to speak with a police officer and give him all of her information about the drug business. Before that happens, John takes Pam with him as they drive the shadier streets of Baltimore to see just how the drug business works. It’s an eye-opening experience for John. He’s faced the enemy over in Vietnam, but as far as the war on drugs, it’s a completely new experience.
Just by chance Pam is spotted by Billy. John is able to drive his jeep through the city and lose Billy in a construction zone. But that’s not the end. Billy’s men find John’s jeep and ambush it. John Kelly is heavily wounded and Pam is abducted. She’ll later be found dead with a body covered in bruise marks and other evidence of torture.
John is rushed to John Hopkins where his surgeon just by chance happens to be Sam Rosen. He repairs the shotgun damage and John eventually makes a full recovery. For John it’s a recovery fueled with the desire for revenge.
While John Kelly is recovering, an Air Force target drone on a reconnaissance mission happens to overfly a secret POW camp in North Vietnam. Standing in the middle of the camp and looking up at the drone’s camera is none other than Colonel Zacharias, a person who was claimed as dead by North Vietnam. It turns out that this is a secret camp designed to Soviet specifications to extract information from high-value prisoners. The North Vietnamese soldiers run the camp, but the Soviet intelligence officer who interrogates the prisoners is Colonel Nikolai “Kolya” Grishanov.
Information about the secret camp is rushed back to Langley, Virginia and the CIA. One of the admirals in charge is Admiral James Greer, a decorated Navy veteran who has lost a son in the war. A secret camp with prisoners reported to be dead means that once the Soviets no longer have any need for the prisoners, then they’re all going to be killed. The U.S. cannot officially expose information about the camp as the U.S. and North Vietnam are trying to come to terms in a peace agreement. Such a discovery will most likely end those talks as the North Vietnamese will be proven to be liars.
It’s quickly decided that a rescue mission needs to be created so that the soldiers can be returned home. The problem is that nobody really knows that area of the country. Nobody, that is, except for a soldier who carried out a daring rescue mission deep into enemy territory, a rescue mission that nearly cost him his own life. That soldier was John Kelly.
By the time that John Kelly is invited to Langley to speak with Admiral Greer and CIA operative Robert Ritter, he’s fully recovered and gathering intelligence about Pam’s killers. It won’t be long until he’s able to begin his revenge.
John volunteers to assist the CIA, and he’s sent down to Eglin Air Force Base in northern Florida to help create a rescue mission. Once he’s finished at the base, John heads back to New Orleans to catch a flight back to Baltimore. Before leaving the city, he spots a pimp and follows him into a local bar. It might have even been the pimp that controlled Pam when she was here not too long ago. After confirming his target, John discretely gets the pimp into a side alley. There he executes the man and learns how to proceed when he returns to Baltimore.
Back in Baltimore, John Kelly disguises himself as a bum and secretly roams the streets in certain areas. He does his reconnaissance, selects his targets, and begins killing the city’s drug dealers. With each killing he gets a step closer to finding the location of Billy and his companions.
As the body count continues to grow, John eventually locates Billy. He kills one of Billy’s companions, rescues a woman who was being tormented by the man, and he takes Billy hostage. John quickly takes the woman, another drug addict prostitute, this one named Doris, to the home of Sandy O’Toole, the nurse who helped John recover from his nearly fatal shotgun wounds. Sandy’s husband was killed in Vietnam and she currently lives alone. She takes in Doris and has Sarah Rosen help her take care of the girl, just as Sarah helped John take care of Pam.
John takes Billy to his island home where he tortures him in a special atmospheric pressure device. The device is normally used to train divers on the effects of being underwater for too long at certain depths. When divers rise too quickly, the oxygen bubbles in their bloodstream can expand and cause terribly painful and horrific effects. Using the tank-like device, John is able to reproduce those same effects on Billy to make him suffer and reveal all he knows about his companions and the drug trade. Billy isn’t killed by the effects of the machine, but by the time that John is finished he’ll only have a few days at most to live.
Meanwhile, operation SENDER GREEN is made official. A team of highly skilled Recon Marines are selected for the task, and they train for the POW rescue mission at a compound within the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia. The only problem is that the team is going to need somebody on the ground acting as eyes and guiding them there. Ideally, that would be somebody who already has detailed knowledge of that part of North Vietnam. Knowing that he’s the best one for the job, John Kelly agrees to lead the mission. He’ll be the first one in and the last one out.
Before SENDER GREEN begins, Robert Ritter has to brief Roger MacKenzie, Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, about the mission. MacKenzie’s executive assistant, Wally Hicks, an anti-war activist, overhears most of the details before being asked to step out of the meeting. After Ritter leaves, Hicks contacts his friend Peter Henderson, a senate aide and fellow anti-war activist, and tells him about the classified operation.
While overseas in London, England, Peter Henderson makes contact with a Soviet official. That Soviet convinces Peter to work with him so their two countries can exchange information behind the scenes in a peaceful manner. He has another Soviet spy meet with Peter in Washington, D.C. where Peter reveals information about SENDER GREEN.
The operatives make their way to their ship off the coast of North Vietnam. Everything looks good and John Kelly (CIA code name of “Clark,” known to everybody there as Mr. Clark) makes his insertion into North Vietnam. He makes it to the POW camp and alerts the Marines that the mission is a GO. A naval cruiser uses its artillery to blast North Vietnamese anti-aircraft artillery sites and radar stations, and helicopters carry the Recon Marines into North Vietnam.
Before the Marines arrive, John notices several trucks arrive and about a hundred soldiers immediately fortifying the POW camp. It’s an ambush! They’ve been alerted to SENDER GREEN. John calls off the mission and escapes from the approaching soldiers. Before a rescue chopper grabs him, John encounters a car fleeing the scene. He shoots the driver and front passenger, who just happens to the the POW camp’s commander. In the back seat is none other than Soviet Colonel Grishanov. Thinking fast, John captures Grishanov and takes him back to the ship off the coast.
It was a powerful move.
After interrogating the Soviet colonel and reading his paperwork, Robert Ritter contacts the Soviet embassy in Washington and strikes a deal with them. If the American prisoners are safely transported to the Hanoi Hilton with the rest of the American prisoners of war, then Grishanov will be returned to Russia. The Soviets agree and the exchange is made.
To flush out the mole, Ritter feeds false information to the few people that he told about the information. The evidence points to Wally Hicks, and John Clark, now a member of the CIA, is sent to eliminate him. Wally is from a prestigious family and knows that the U.S. won’t try him as a traitor since SENDER GREEN was a black operation. Instead, John Kelly “convinces” Wally to inject himself with a very powerful narcotic. Wally is a known drug user, and this makes it look like he accidentally overdosed and foolishly killed himself.
While John was in Vietnam, Sandy and Sarah helped Doris recover from her injuries and addiction. She’s then given a ride back home to Pittsburgh and reunited with her father. She then goes through counselling and a pastor convinces his police officer son to report Doris’ criminal friends to the Baltimore police department. Unfortunately, somebody in the Baltimore PD is an informant to the drug ring. Instead of helping bring Doris’ captors to justice, a hit squad from Philadelphia murders Doris and her father.
Back in Baltimore, John continues with his personal quest of eliminating the drug ring that Billy worked for. There are more girls who need to be rescued before they’re all killed like Pam and Doris. Doris’ murder fuels John in his personal quest.
John continues ambushing and killing the drug dealers, and more girls are freed. He eventually tracks the leaders to a building where they make a final stand along with the crooked Baltimore cop. The drug dealers kill the cop, but John kills the dealers. That part of his mission is now finished.
Before carrying out the final part of his revenge, John Kelly visits Admiral Greer and Robert Ritter. He admits to conducting the murders against the drug dealers as proclaimed in the newspapers. This actually amuses Ritter and helps solidify John Kelly’s status as a new field agent in the CIA, especially since the CIA was being considered in the war against drugs.
As John Kelly has been carrying out his revenge, the Baltimore police department eventually figures out that it’s John Kelly who is responsible for all the killings. The only problem for them is that they don’t have any solid evidence, only a motive and a lot of coincidences. When Baltimore Police Department homicide Lieutenant Emmet Ryan (father of John Patrick Ryan) finally confronts John Kelly at his boat dock, John asks him for an hour before turning himself in. Ryan agrees since John has really been helping his city by eliminating many of the street’s evil people.
John uses his boat to cruise to a certain point in the ocean. He’s quickly pursued by the Coast Guard. He’s almost caught until John makes a daring move in front of a freighter ship and capsizes his boat. While the Coast Guard searches for his remains, John uses an air tank to swim underwater and make a secret rendezvous with Admiral Greer who was out in a sailboat.
While John Kelly was “killed” in the boating accident, John Clark secretly begins a new life in the CIA.
Without Remorse ends in 1973 with John Clark, now married to Sandy and expecting the birth of their first child, watching a news coverage as American POWs are being released from Vietnam. Although SENDER GREEN was a failure, the captured Americans still lived to be released from captivity and reunited with their families.
So is Without Remorse a good book?
Absolutely yes!
Not only is this a fantastic military thriller, but Without Remorse can be considered as a blueprint when it comes to revenge stories.
John Kelly’s tactics are simple yet brutally effective, and when combined with his determination to avenge the death of Pam, the man is literally a vicious killing machine. As determined as he is to stalk and kill the drug dealers associated with Billy’s drug ring, he’s just as quick to help innocent people in times of need. Not only does he save an innocent woman from a bloody mugging, but he also saves many girls that were held captive in the drug and prostitution ring.
Although Without Remorse was published in 1993 and was Tom Clancy’s seventh book, this story is a prequel and actually occurs first in the Jack Ryan universe. Some people consider this book to be one of Clancy’s best. Here the storylines are fairly simple and you won’t get lost in overly technical details or a thousand sub-plots. Although somewhat lengthy (my paperback edition is 750 pages with tiny print), Without Remorse is fairly easy to follow and you’ll have many late nights where, like John Kelly’s obsession with revenge, you’ll be urging yourself to keep reading to see what happens next.
Do you have to be a military fanatic to enjoy Without Remorse?
Not really.
It will definitely help if you have at least some knowledge about military ships, aircraft, and combat tactics, but even novice military fans can still enjoy this story.
Without Remorse is absolutely a must read for fans of military and political thrillers along with police investigations and good, old fashioned revenge. You cannot go wrong with Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse!
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This article was originally published at www.chamberofreviews.com on October 28, 2013.