Under Fire, Grant Blackwood
Jack Ryan Jr., son of Jack Ryan, the President of the United States, is in Teheran working for The Campus, an organization that reports directly to the President. While there, he meets up with an old high school friend, Seth Gregory, who is supposedly working for Shell Oil. From out of nowhere, he is suddenly visited by two men, one from Britain and one obviously from the United States. They are obviously engaged in covert operations. They are aware of who he is, but still they present him with veiled threats if he doesn’t cooperate with them in their investigation of his friend. They refuse to tell him why they are investigating him, however, but they do intimate that he has been compromised and money has disappeared as well.
During their lunch, Seth had verbally told him his address, which was odd, and even odder, he had surreptitiously left him his apartment key beside his coffee cup. Although warned not to investigate on his own, he has no intention of helping these men until he can find out if the men are legitimate and if Seth is really in trouble. He sets out to find his secret apartment, the one these men did not know about.
Then, Seth disappears, and Jack gets more involved with unsavory characters and an Iranian woman named Ysabel, who is a close friend of Seth’s. Together they try and find Seth, fearful that he is in danger. The two of them develop a very close working and romantic relationship.
At the same time as this is taking place, there is an alternative narrative taking place involving Russia and Dagestan. From Wikipedia, I learned that “it is a federal subject of Russia, located in the North Caucasus region. Its capital and largest city is Makhachkala, located at the center of Dagestan on the Caspian Sea.” Seth is organizing a coup of that small country so that Russia cannot gain further control as they already had in the Ukraine and Odessa.
This Tom Clancy story is read well by the narrator, but it is very confusing and convoluted. It contains so many unknown and unrecognizable foreign words that I highly recommend the print version of the book, instead. The plot seemed contrived and the twists and turns were too frequent without being fully engaging. There is romance, kidnapping, murder, conspiracy and betrayal, but it never comes together of a piece and sometimes, sorry to say, it did seem utterly ridiculous.