📚🇺🇸 True Faith and Allegiance by Mark Greaney

Not a Book Report

I enjoy reflecting on the movies, TV, books and other media that I consume. I’m notoriously sentimental. This series documents the books that I read. These aren’t reviews or recommendations. Just a list. For me. Mostly so that I can page through what I read, where I was, and when.

Why did I read it?

I picked up a Tom Clancy book in the Stockholm Central train station a couple months ago and it made me remember how fun these can be. So I rewound in the series by about a decade and picked up at Book 10 in the run. I have been spending a lot of time wading through some complex, but interesting, challenges at the office - all good problems, but the kinds of things that leave me beat at the end of the day and ready to jump into a novel about spies and special forces for 30 minutes before I fall asleep.

What is it?

Category	Value
Title	True Faith and Allegiance
Author	Mark Greaney
Year Published	2016
Format	Kindle
Pages	750
ASIN	B01CZCW4XG

Publisher Summary

It begins with a family dinner in Princeton, New Jersey. After months at sea, U.S. Navy Commander Scott Hagan, captain of the USS James Greer, is on leave when he is attacked by an armed man in a crowded restaurant. Hagan is shot, but he manages to fight off the attacker. Though severely wounded, the gunman reveals he is a Russian whose brother was killed when his submarine was destroyed by Commander Hagan’s ship.

Hagan demands to know how the would-be assassin knew his exact location, but the man dies before he says more.

In the international arrivals section of Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport, a Canadian businessman puts his fingerprint on a reader while chatting pleasantly with the customs official. Seconds later he is shuffled off to interrogation. He is actually an American CIA operative who has made this trip into Iran more than a dozen times, but now the Iranians have his fingerprints and know who he is. He is now a prisoner of the Iranians.

As more deadly events involving American military and intelligence personnel follow, all over the globe, it becomes clear that there has been some kind of massive information breach and that a wide array of America’s most dangerous enemies have made a weapon of the stolen data. With U.S. intelligence agencies potentially compromised, it’s up to John Clark and the rest of The Campus to track the leak to its source.

Their investigation uncovers an unholy threat that has wormed its way into the heart of our nation. A danger that has set a clock ticking and can be stopped by only one man…President Jack Ryan.

How did I read it?

Category	Value
Date Started	December 28, 2023
Date Finished	January 5, 2024
Places Read	Lisbon, Sintra

Notes - No Spoilers

• I always appreciate Easter eggs in the Tom Clancy universe - this month’s book saw a call out to Olivia/Sally and the Irish Republican terrorism events.
• I do appreciate the interludes to the war inside of Syria and Iraq; they could have felt ham-fisted but they didn’t here.
• Are we going to call the President’s son parachuting out of the private jet to the cottage to surprise the terrorists a “jumping the shark” moment? Are those possible in this already wild universe?
• This is the last (at least for now) entry into the series from Mark Greaney. I started the next one, with new author Marc Cameron, and am really not having any fun. I’m tempted to jump over to Mark Greaney’s own series, The Grey Man.