Wry Martinis (12 page)

J
ORDAN
, M
ONT
.—The FBI plans to stampede more than four million mad British cows in an effort to force the Montana Freemen to end their standoff, it has been learned. FBI director Louis Freeh declined to comment on reports that British C-130 Hercules cargo planes have been observed dropping large numbers of cows by parachute near the standoff area.

B
EIJING
—China announced today that it plans to conduct “amphibious mad-cow exercises” in the Taiwan Strait. Secretary of State Warren Christopher warned China’s leadership that the U.S. viewed the development “seriously.”

N
EW
Y
ORK
—The Council of Fashion Designers of America said today that it would use British mad cows in runway shows. “Fashion recognizes its responsibility to help,” said C.F.D.A. director Fern Mallis. “The cows are very contemporary, they look great in leather, and their eyes have the look.”

H
OLLYWOOD
—A group of actors and actresses has called on Prime Minister John Major to “stop the slaughter” of British mad cows and “do something positive instead, like vaccinate them or whatever.”

“We feel the government hasn’t done enough,” said Liam Neeson. Neeson said he has felt sympathetic toward British cows ever since the filming of the movie
Rob Roy
, in which he escaped from soldiers by hiding inside the carcass of a large, decomposing Hereford. The group, Creativity United to Denounce the Slaughter (
CUDS
), plans to distribute lapel udders with ribbons.

O
AK
B
ROOK
, I
LL
.—The McDonald’s Corporation announced today its plans to introduce a new line of sandwiches next month called Mad Macs.

—
The New Yorker
, 1996

Homaǵe to Tom Clancy

The office of the O. F. Bowen insurance agency is about a forty-five-minute drive from Washington, in Owings, Maryland, opposite a corn-field and just up the road from the Dash-In food store. The decor is Hartford Drab: gray steel desks, beat-up filing cabinets, wooden chairs, and veneer paneling. Near the door is a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Books and folders with such titles as
Reliance Auto, CAMP Risk Management Series
, and
The World’s Missile Systems
line a bookshelf. Another photo shows President Reagan, in black tie, introducing the owner of the O. F. Bowen agency to President Raul Alfonsín of Argentina.

The phone rings; it’s the William Morris agency in New York.

“Yeah,” says the man behind the steel desk, lighting a cigarette. He is in his early forties and wears very thick, tinted glasses. “Number eight hardcover and three soft. We’re on
both
sides.” He listens, inhales, um-hums. “We may have one more week, then it’ll die. But it’s been one hell of a ride.”

Indeed it has. A year ago no one had ever heard of Thomas L. Clancy, Jr. Then along came
The Hunt For Red October
, his book about the Soviet Union’s hottest new submarine and its captain, who decides to take the sub and defect to the United States. All hell breaks loose, and it falls to a bookish CIA analyst named Jack Ryan to tell the President whether
Red October
is the Trojan horse of World War III or the vehicle for a legitimate high-stakes dash to freedom.

In a business in which the average free-lance writer makes less than five thousand dollars a year, Clancy accomplished the equivalent of hitting a grand-slam home run in his first at bat.

Red October
sold about 330,000 hardcover copies during twenty-nine weeks on
The New York Times’s
best-seller list and moved onto the paperback best-seller list, where it had risen to the number-three slot by December. He sold the book to Hollywood for “pretty serious money” if the cameras actually roll. And he has a six-figure advance for his next book, which will appear simultaneously in thirteen countries. “We missed Greece, but that’s no great loss,” Clancy says.

It should also be noted that Clancy has become Writer of Sea Thrillers to the President of the United States. The job is without portfolio, but it does have its advantages.

There’s a fat note of irony to all this, since Clancy, who started selling insurance fourteen years ago because it was the first “decent” job offer he got, had always wanted to be a writer. But as a level-headed, Jesuit-educated Baltimore boy, the son of a mailman, he knew the truth—that “writers die poor.” So he went to work selling policies and raising a family.

Eventually he and his wife were able to buy the business and make a “decent living.” They insured country things: barns, oats, the odd restaurant, tobacco (while it hung out to cure), and horses. They stayed away from life insurance, says Cheryl Terry, their assistant, “because it’s too morbid.” It was a nice, quiet, no-fireworks kind of life.

In many ways it still is, apparently, since much of what Clancy has to say is about how success has not changed him. Clancy is, in fact, so self-deprecating about his sea thriller and so generous in talking about the talents of others that he often uses the pronoun “we” rather than “I.” While he has the aw-shucks down pretty good, we—I, that is—suspect he is getting more of a kick out of all this than he is letting on.

The saga of
Red October
actually began on a winter morning in 1976, when Clancy was reading his
Washington Post
and saw a story about the
Storozhevoy
incident. The
Storozhevoy
was a Soviet frigate whose crew mutinied and tried to take the ship and defect to Sweden. They got within about thirty miles of Swedish waters before the Soviets stopped them. The mutineers were shot. Clancy clipped the story and filed it away, thinking there might be a book in it.

Seven years later he found himself listening to sea stories being told by one of his clients, a former sub driver (as they call themselves). “All of a
sudden a light bulb went off and I said, ‘Hey, submariners are pretty much the same as fighter pilots. They just do it a little slower.’ ” The Wet Stuff!

He started writing, and by late October 1983 had two chapters to show Marty Callahan, an editor at the Naval Institute Press in Annapolis. Clancy had worked for Callahan once before, writing an article on the MX missile for
Proceedings
, the NIP’s magazine. Other than that, NIP publishes mostly naval textbooks and had never published a novel. But Callahan liked the two chapters and told Clancy to keep going. So he went home and started over at page one.

He wrote in his spare time, sticking a piece of paper into his IBM Selectric whenever he got a chance. He had no outline and didn’t even know how it was going to end. “I let my characters do all the work. Sounds crazy, but it works.”

Clancy thought it was more “fun” to write that way, anyway. “It’s a discovery process for the writer as well as the reader,” he says, “and I think that’s really the enjoyable part of writing—that everything you write is actually new, and you don’t know what’s going to happen until it does.”

He banged out the pulse-quickening last two chapters—almost one hundred manuscript pages—in
two days.
Then, on February 28, just four months after his initial meeting with Callahan, he showed up at the NIP’s offices with a 720-page manuscript.

Clancy says he waited three weeks “to find out if it was worth fooling with, or something to be used for starting a fire.” (We ourselves think he is pulling our leg here.) Finally an NIP editor called and said, in so many words,
don’t
use it to start a fire. He doesn’t remember exactly what she did say.

“It was kind of a euphoric day for me.… It was nice, but I didn’t go out and get drunk that night. I had three kids at the time. That tends to keep you down to earth.”

The NIP’s editors then asked some naval officers for an opinion of the manuscript and, according to Clancy, one of them “really freaked.” He wrote a letter to the Press saying the story was so full of classified stuff that there was no way the firm could publish it.

Clancy chuckles as he pulls out a copy of the letter, which says that
Red October
“is no
Run Silent, Run Deep
” (the classic submarine novel and film of World War II). “He’s right there,” says Clancy. “Ned [Edward L.] Beach is a much better writer than I am.”

Clancy even disclaims the title of writer; he calls himself a storyteller. “I may never make the transition. I’m gonna try. I wrote a fairly decent thriller, okay? It’s not
King Lear.
And it kind of embarrasses me sometimes when people make so much of it.” (We don’t remember anyone calling it
King Lear
, but it is a fine sentiment.)

Nonetheless, the navy was genuinely alarmed by the depth of Clancy’s knowledge of its top, top secrets. All of a sudden Clancy found himself being swarmed over by the Naval Investigative Service and a commander at the Pentagon who wanted to know how he had found out so much about the world of nuclear subs—and from whom.

Clancy obliged the commander by telling him where he’d gotten it all, without mentioning the names of any of the active-duty naval officers who had talked to him. Not that they’d given him classified material, but Clancy didn’t trust the brass to believe that they hadn’t. Finally Clancy said, “Look, if you’ll tell me what sensitive stuff you want removed, I’ll remove it.”

This put the commander in a bit of a pickle. “Well, I can’t tell you,” he answered. “Then I would be confirming some stuff that I can’t confirm.”

“The thing that
really
bent ’em out of shape is I knew what ‘Crazy Ivan’ meant,” Clancy says, referring to the navy’s term for a maneuver used by Russian subs to detect if they’re being followed. “I picked that up from one of my clients. They were really torched that I knew what that meant.”

When Clancy finally met John Lehman, the secretary of the navy, Lehman told him that his first reaction on reading the book had been to say, “Who the hell cleared this?”

Red October
was published in October 1984 and sold twenty thousand copies in the first six weeks. “For a first novel, that’s not bad at all,” Clancy says in a classic bit of understatement; most first novels sell about one-tenth that number, total. By the end of the year it looked as if the book was going to top out at fifty thousand. “Which,” Clancy deadpans, “for a first novel is all right.”

That might have been the end of it, but for a chance series of events.

Jeremiah O’Leary, a
Washington Times
reporter who had served as the National Security Council’s spokesman under Reagan, gave a copy of the book to Nancy Reynolds, a friend of the Reagans and a partner in
the Washington lobbying firm Wexler Reynolds Harrison and Schule. Reynolds was on her way to Buenos Aires, and O’Leary wanted her to pass the book on to the U.S. ambassador there, who is a mutual friend of theirs. Reynolds read it on the plane and was so taken with it that she ordered a case of
Red Octobers
for Christmas presents. One of them ended up under the president’s tree.