Chapter By Chapter> Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mirror Image chapter 21

Chapter by Chapter features me reading one chapter (or possibly multiple chapter for this one) of the selected book at the time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.

I wasn’t about to do a story about an evil Op-Center and trying to restore the Soviet Union on Christmas week. It seemed wrong…and in 2024 a bit too close to current situations I wasn’t planning on when I chose this book. We’re coming up on a New Year, but it’s time to get back to this old book.

Last time we killed off another potentially interesting character. That worries me. While the series cast seems to be doing better in this book than the first one, it was the side characters that I actually found myself rooting for while shaking my head at the cast that were going to be part of the later novels. So killing off two perfectly good one-book characters makes me a bit disappointed, and I can only hope the regular cast steps up from the previous book. There are still concerns, and admittedly I am carrying the baggage from the original Op-Center, but there have been some minor improvements. We’re going back to them so hopefully this trend continues.

Chapter 21: Monday, 12:30 AM, Washington, DC

Well, most of this chapter was a wash.

Not all of it. Something interesting happens near the end. From what little I know about Tom Clancy media, from novels to video games, is that it’s made for the people who like all the backstage technical stuff. For example. the first half of the chapter is the legal people, Coffey and Mackall mostly, going over everything from the wills for the Striker team to getting the permissions they need to allow Striker to successfully complete their mission while not causing an international incident with their allies. If you aren’t into that stuff, and I’m not, this is going to be rather boring.

The second half switches over to Bob Herbert and starts out the same way. We see him watching different monitors with different satellite surveillance feeds, going over the day-to-day of Polish soldiers to see if they appear concerned by Russian operations. I personally don’t care about the daily Polish army schedule, but Clancy’s usual audience might. That doesn’t mean my issues with the first book wasn’t that it wasn’t made for me, though that is clearly a factor on a personal level. On a critical level, the presentation here works better than the first book, so the writer (the internet still says Jeff Rovin) is showing some improvement here.

Before the chapter ends, however, the story gets going. Bob is called down to the radio room, monitoring signals from around the world. Their translating computer has noticed some extra movement in Russia, with supplies one would attribute to a combat situation and the lines to get it there, going to a base near the Ukrainian border because Dogin would totally be a Putin fan, or possibly vice versa. While I question a translation program today working as fast as they clam “UTHER” does (Universal Translation And Heuristic Enharmonic Reporter–and Google spellcheck is convinced those are all real words), and clearly someone wanted that acronym, it means the good guys are now aware of the troop movement. They know something is up…but will they be able to stop it?

This chapter is for a certain group of the Clancy fanbase and I am not part of that group. From a critics perspective it’s all done well, with only the legal stuff not really being all that interesting and feeling like padding, but personally I just wasn’t very excited in this chapter. It plays to its crowd and I’m not against that.

Next time it’s a short chapter that’s barely long enough to stand on its own given the page count of the chapters surrounding it. It’s back to Commie Op-Center I think. 1/3rd through the book is too early for the villains to start failing, but maybe we’ll see more seeds of that failure?