There was a university somewhere in the Midwest, Jack had once heard on the radio, which had an instrument package designed to go inside a tornado. Each spring, graduate students and a professor or two staked out a likely swath of land, and on spotting a tornado, tried to set the instrument package, called "Toto"-what else?-directly in the path of the onrushing storm. So far they had been unsuccessful. Perhaps they'd just picked the wrong place, Ryan thought, looking out the window to the leafless trees in Lafayette Park. The office of the President's National Security Advisor was surely cyclonic enough for anyone's taste, and, unfortunately, much easier for people to enter. "You know," Ryan said, leaning back in his chair, "it was supposed to be a lot simpler than this." And I thought it would be, he didn't add. "The world had rules before," Scott Adler pointed out. "Now it doesn't." "How's the President been doing, Scott?" "You really want the truth?" Adler asked, meaning, We are in the White House, remember? and wondering if there really were tape machines cover- ing this room. "We screwed up the Korean situation, but we lucked out. Thank God we didn't screw up Yugoslavia that badly, because there just isn't any luck to be had in that place. We haven't been handling Russia very well. The whole continent of Africa's a dog's breakfast. About the only thing we've done right lately was the trade treaty-" "And that doesn't include Japan and China," Ryan finished for him. "Hey, you and I fixed the Middle East, remember? That's working out fairly nicely."
Born April 12, 1947 was an American novelist. He is best known for his technically detailed espionage and military-science storylines set during and after the Cold War. Seventeen of his novels have been bestsellers and more than 100 million copies of his books have been sold. His name was also used on screenplays written by ghostwriters, nonfiction books on military subjects occasionally with co-authors, and video games. He was a part-owner of his hometown Major League Baseball team, the Baltimore Orioles, and vice-chairman of their community activities and public affairs committees. Originally an insurance agent, his literary career began in 1984 when he sold his first military thriller novel The Hunt for Red October for $5,000 published by the small academic Naval Institute Press of Annapolis, Maryland. His works The Hunt for Red October (1984), Patriot Games (1987), Clear and Present Danger (1989), and The Sum of All Fears (1991) have been turned into commercially successful films. Tom Clancy's works also inspired games such as the Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, The Division, and Splinter Cell series. Since Clancy's death in 2013, the Jack Ryan series has been continued by his family estate through a series of authors. Clancy died of heart failure on October 1, 2013.
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