Wry Martinis (13 page)

Not long afterward,
Time
printed a story on Reagan in which he mentioned that he’d read the book. He pronounced it “the perfect yarn.”

The folks at the Naval Institute Press may have been new at publishing novels, but they weren’t dumb. They ran the presidential imprimatur in huge type in a
New York Times
ad. “That quote,” says Clancy, “put us on the national [best-seller] list. And we’ve been there ever since.”

Red October
peaked at number two on the hardcover list. “It would have been number one if it hadn’t been for Stephen King, the dirty guy,” says Clancy, attempting a scowl. “If he’d waited one more week before bringing out
Skeleton Crew
, I would have been number one. Well, who ever said the world was fair?”

The book was helped by the fact that it was a curiosity in the publishing world. That it came out of left field, from a company that publishes naval textbooks, “made people sit up and notice it,” says Daisy Maryles, the executive editor of the industry’s bible,
Publishers Weekly.
“It was unusual, and that made it easier to promote; there was an automatic angle. Obviously, it helped that behind all this there was a good book. But there was a serendipity to it all.”

And so it was that in March 1985, the insurance agent from Owings found himself being invited to the White House—three times in two weeks.

“The first [time] was meeting the president in the Oval Office,” Clancy says. “That was the day Chernenko was buried.” (So
that’s
why he declined to attend.) “Henry Kissinger was there. We had lunch in the Roosevelt Room with some relatively important folks: Secretary Lehman, Senator [Mark] Hatfield, General Brent Scowcroft, Nancy Reynolds, of course. The president told me he liked the book and asked me what the next one was about, and I told him. He asked me, ‘Who wins?’ And I said, ‘The good guys.’

“It was a great experience,” Clancy says with a smile, “and the next week we were back for the welcoming ceremony and the state dinner for the president of Argentina. So that was quite a week.” He adds, “I’m glad I voted for the guy.”

Clancy shakes his head. “If I had his charm, I’d be the richest insurance hustler in the world. I’d just stand there on the corner and say, ‘Bring me your insurance.’ And they would!

“It’s like walking into a spotlight. The only thing that’s missing in the Oval Office is a burning bush.”

Though it’s not a political book,
Red October
has a strong anti-Communist point of view that’s somewhat atypical of the genre, where normally there isn’t much moral difference between the Soviet Union and America.

The anticommunism was not part of any thought-out marketing strategy. The NIP’s editorial board didn’t sit around a table wondering what political tone the book should have. At the same time, the NIP, by its nature, isn’t the sort of outfit that would set out to make the boys in the Kremlin seem to be honest guys who are just trying to keep their heads above water.

Red October
hit because it
is
a darn good yarn. But it is a fair guess that Jimmy Carter might not have found it so, and that the book might not have fallen on such a sympathetic audience in Jimmy Carter’s America.

Clancy looks surprised when he’s asked what influences his view of the Soviet Union. “The truth,” he says. He is skeptical about people who get arrested while demonstrating outside the South African embassy when, as he sees it, no one seems to care that the Soviets are committing genocide in Afghanistan, doing things like dropping mines specifically designed to kill and maim children.

“Everything in the book is drawn from a real incident, one way or another,” he says. The commander of
Red October
decides to defect after his wife dies while being operated on for a burst appendix by a drunken physician. Clancy got the appendix idea from hearing an American doctor talk on a radio show about an incident in which an American tourist in Russia died from the same thing.

“In the real world, that just doesn’t happen. But it did there. Soviet medicine is a joke. The Soviet Union is the only industrialized country in the world where life expectancy is decreasing. Very few things in that book are completely made up.”

Clancy went on to do the things best-selling authors do—although live television made him nervous: “It’s actually the nearest thing to death.” He preferred Larry King’s late-night radio call-in show.

He sold the paperback rights to
Red October
for $50,000. Putnam signed him to write another novel for an advance of $325,000. (His advance for
Red October
was $5,000.) The producer of the movie The
Omen
optioned
Red October.

Clancy became a free-lance expert, giving speeches “at every place you can shake a stick at.” Now when high-ranking KGB officers defect, CBS calls him to appear on morning television. On one trip to the studio, he was relieved to find someone there who knew more about defecting Soviets than himself—William Stevenson, the author of
The Man Called Intrepid.

“Success,” Clancy says as if he was talking about an amusing nuisance, “has complicated my life enormously.” Yes, we can see that.

He seems surprised to find himself in such demand. “The transition from insurance agent to best-seller author is kind of like being cured of leprosy,” he says. “All of a sudden everybody wants to meet you and talk to you and ask your opinion on things. And hell, I’m the same guy I was two or three years ago. I was just as smart then as I am now—or just as dumb, depending on your point of view. So all it’s done, really, is open doors for me to a remarkable degree. If I want to ride on a submarine, it’s just a matter of picking up the phone.”

The navy has adopted Clancy. For someone with Coke-bottle-thick glasses whose only previous experience in the military was army ROTC during college, it’s pure Walter Mitty. Last summer he spent a week on a Perry-class fast frigate doing research for his next book,
Red Storm Rising.
(“World War III at sea,” as he tersely describes it.)

“They put me in officer country. I got treated like an officer, and I’m just a dumb landlubber. In many ways, that’s embarrassing.” He found himself in great demand aboard the FFG-7, with admirals wanting to know how he wrote
Red October
—and, of course, where he got his information.

“They treated me like some kind of damn hero, and I’m not. I’m just a writer. All I do is write about the stuff they really do. They’re the heroes, not me. They’re the guys who go out there and work eighteen-hour days under fairly unpalatable situations.

“The crew age on any ship is twenty-one, twenty-two. These are kids, and they’re awfully good at what they do. And nobody appreciates it. All the crap you see in the media is about the toilet seats and the wrenches and the gadgets that don’t work. And that’s not what it’s about. It’s about people, and they’re good people. Especially sub drivers. I don’t know how they do it.” We think we see his eyes misting up behind the glasses. “I’m a hopeless romantic,” he adds.

So far the only subs Clancy has been on were securely tied to the dock—which is fine by him. “The first [submarine] I was on was the USS
Whale.
Before we went into the forward torpedo room, they took us into the auxiliary machine space, and I looked around—90 percent of the space is occupied by the machines themselves—and I thought, ‘My God, what if you’re in there and the lights go out and you hear water coming in?’ What do you do, other than say, ‘Get me out of this one, God. I’ll never chase women again.’

“At that point I decided, no, I do not want to do this for a living. No thanks. It’s a special breed of cat, and I’m not that kind of cat.”

Aboard the British nuclear ballistic-missile submarine HMS
Resolution
he got a chance to hoist a few beers in the control room. “They showed me around the missile control room,” he remembers. “That’s one thing I really got right”—a reference to the scene in
Red October
where his hero finds himself in the “boom boom room” of the Russian sub.

The phone rings, and Clancy picks it up. He listens, puts the call on hold and says to his secretary across the room, “It’s a guy who wants a car quote. You wanna wing it?” She takes the call, and we return to best-sellerdom.

“I wrote the kind of book I like to read,” he says, lighting another cigarette. “I like thrillers. I read Forsyth, Richard Cox, A. J. Quinnell, Jack Higgins. I didn’t think politics, I didn’t think philosophy; I just wrote the kind of book I like to read.

“My two objectives were, first, to have fun; I wrote the book entirely for fun. I never really thought about the money. The other thing I wanted to do was portray the people and machinery we have out there as accurately as I could. And I’ve succeeded. I’ve had too many people tell me that I hit it pretty much on the head. I’ve had sub skippers tell me, ‘I gave this book to my wife and said, “Here’s the stuff I can’t tell you.” ’ And that’s very satisfying.”

Clancy is writing his second book with a coauthor, Larry Bond, his son’s godfather and the creator of Harpoon, a naval-strategy game that sells in hobby stores for $9.95. Clancy says it was his best source for
Red October.
“It explains how weapons and sensors work. It’s played with miniatures. Mainly you do it on pencil and paper.”

Though reviewers praised Clancy for his extraordinary facility in explaining Cold War technology, he almost dismisses it. “Everybody makes a big deal about the technical stuff. When I was researching the book, actually, that was the easy part. Simple. The hard part was getting into their heads. What kind of guy goes to sea in a ship that’s supposed to sink?”

He reaches into an American Tourister briefcase and pulls out about three pounds of
Red Storm Rising
manuscript. He’s working on a Macintosh now, and told his paperback publisher he didn’t have the time to do a promotion tour, what with a February book deadline, a move into a new house, and the expected arrival of a new baby. (Anticipating a question we do not ask, he says, “Yes, if it’s a boy we’ll call him Red.”) After that he’s planning three more novels in which Jack Ryan, the hero of
Red October
, will figure. He says he has “only just gotten to the point where I understand the guy.” After some hesitation, he also admits that Ryan is in part modeled after himself.

Given how busy Clancy has become, is it safe to assume that his secretary will be winging it a lot this fall? Will he even stay in the insurance business?

He ponders this. “Probably. Almost certainly. It’s a family business. I’m not going to walk away from it. I’ve got over one thousand clients. A lot of them are my friends; I’m not going to walk away from them.” Besides, he adds, “That’s where I get a lot of my stories.”

Leaving the office to pick up the mail at the post office, he remembers a poster he saw in one of the subs he visited. It showed a gigantic, flaming orange mushroom cloud. Beneath it the caption read: “Twenty-Four Missiles Away. Target Destroyed. It’s Miller Time …”

—
Regardie’s
, 1986

Senator Jack Ryan stared at the papers on his desk. They were from the Government Printing Office, on North Capitol Street, between G and H Streets, and bore the characteristic “eagle” watermark. Ryan decided that the eagle was more like a turkey these days. This document made Ryan’s stomach juices churn, and he yearned for a cigarette, but the pantywaists who made the laws had outlawed smoking, along with school prayer, so he would have to wait until he got to the cloakroom, where he liked to blow smoke in the faces of the women senators. Ryan liked women. His mother was a woman, and his wife was one, too, but it was madness that they were allowed to serve in combat or in the Senate.

The document was a second-degree amendment to a first-degree amendment closing the last military base in the United States. It mandated the confiscation of every last one of the two hundred million privately owned guns in the United States, even assault weapons used for shooting deer. He had filibustered against it for seventy-six hours. He
was tired. He thought of Vietnam. Not that he had ever been to Vietnam, but he knew lots of people who had. Now another battle loomed, and Ryan had to summon every joule of energy in his weary musculature if it was to be won.

He cleared his throat and shouted, “Mr. President!”

All heads turned. A murmur of groans went up in the chamber. He was used to it. Ryan had been a thorn in their side for the past six years, and they could not wait for him to retire at the end of this term. He was not seeking reelection. He was going to become a novelist and write manly sagas about big guns that could vaporize the human heart in milliseconds. Who needed
this
?