Chapter By Chapter> Tom Clancy’s Op-Center> Mirror Image chapter 25

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 tried doing this with WordPress’s “block editor” since it’s trying to phase out the classic one, which doesn’t work on this site but oddly does for The Clutter Reports as far as going directly to it without a pre-created link. I still have to learn how to format the way I like there. I only mention it to pad out the intro.

Last time, we saw that father and son don’t get along, as Paul’s Russian counterpart doesn’t have as much love from his kid as Paul did from his two. If you recall, when he had to rush back to Op-Center his kids, not even knowing about the details of the bombing if they knew about the bombing at all, were totally on his side, encouraging him to go stop the bad guys. Orlov’s son, on the other hand, is one of the bad guys even if he isn’t fully aware of Dogin’s plans. He’d probably be all in on it given what we learned.

Tonight’s chapter is a short one, at four pages. That barely works for me but I could use the time and the next chapter is average length, so let us head to the skies and check in on Striker. I hope their flight goes better than the Ruskies’ flight.

Chapter 25: Monday, 2:53 PM, over the Atlantic, northwest of Madrid

Credit where it’s due: this chapter couldn’t have been any longer than it is. We’re basically given a description of the plane, Squires complaining about the food, and he and the new girl debating coffee until Rogers calls to tell them about the British agent they’ll be taking on. To Rogers’ credit, while he does mention the misgivings about her inclusion (jurisdiction, not because she’s a girl…remember that she trained the agent we started this book with and Rogers admits her credentials are good) he doesn’t do anything to make her seem like a burden on the team, or that Squires has to work around her or anything that would lead to misgivings of his own except that line. My guess is Rogers was trying to admit his concerns in case Squires had any before assuring him everything would be okay. We’ll see if that worked or not.

So why the coffee discussion? A bit of flavor, I think. We didn’t really get to know the Striker team in the last book since the focus was the mission and Rogers forcing himself on for one last mission. Here we learn a bit about Squires and Sondra, learning that she had a Nigerian accent, why she prefers Wuthering Heights, the book she’s reading on the trip, to romance novels, and Squires using her book choices to explain the reason her coffee is bad is that she’s not using the right coffee, also suggesting push-ups will do more to wake her up after a long study night.  This only exists for a bit of bonding. Sondra’s predecessor died in the Korean incident, and we see another character standing in for a currently wounded soldier still recovering from that incident. We can see that nobody has any issues with “the girl” in this unit. So what we have is a chapter added for flavor and to get closer to characters we’re still mostly new to. That was okay for a short chapter, and we do have confirmation that they know about their guest coming along, and that the tourist plan is scrapped, with info on the new MO waiting for them. We also saw Squires preparing for arrival in Helsinki. So it’s not a bad addition, adding to the connection to this world, but with all the pages in this paperback I can see some readers wondering why they bothered. I’m okay with it.

Next time we check back in with Commie Op-Center and try not to use the block editor until I know how to do what I want with it to maintain my preferred formatting.