Chapter By Chapter> Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mirror Image chapters 68-69

Chapter by Chapter features me reading one chapter (or possibly multiple chapters 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.

Our two-chapter section continues. Last time we had one important chapter and one not very important chapter. That’s one of the problems of this series almost two books in. When it’s on point it does a good job. When it’s rambling it gets boring.

I think this leads to how long these two novels have been, feeling a lot like padding to be a bigger novel than it needs to be, and I expect this to happen when I get to the remaining novel in this series I have to go through as well as the NetForce novel I also have from the mind of Tom Clancy. We’ll find out when we get to those, but that’s a long time coming, even with only ten more chapters to go with this book and how many of these reviews will be two chapters in length due to the lack of length in the chapters.

Enough of all that, though. Let’s see if there’s a way to salvage this mission and learn who all the good and bad guys are in this version of Russia.

Chapter 68: Tuesday, 4:54 PM, St. Petersburg

Only two pages? This should have gone on for longer. Peggy knows she’s being followed and weighing her options. No padding, no history we don’t need, just her planning her next move…which includes falling down the stairs. I’m assuming it’s on purpose, a controlled fall for the lady following her, which I’m betting is the same lady who killed Fields-Hutton just because it would be a narrative mistake for it not to be if there’s going to be a lady agent there. Now we have to wait longer for what I’m hoping is a good payoff.

Chapter 69: Tuesday, 11:55 PM, Khabarovsk

I’m starting to think not having someone speaking Russian on this mission beyond the guest secret agent was a bad idea. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it incompetence, certainly not on the level of the first novel, but it is at the very least a serious oversight. Nikita manages to sucker Newmeyer by asking for a cigarette out of his pouch (which also has a lighter given to him by his dad…surprised he kept that considering how little he thinks of the man) and get the pouch into the gears of the train (I do believe he’d use his dad’s gift like that), making it a runaway train. He still isn’t fully aware of what’s going on and why Striker is here. Squires acknowledges to himself that he’s just being a good soldier. As long as the money doesn’t make it to the coup, that should be fine, though the evidence would be nice.

Instead, our boys have barely enough time to rescue themselves and their reluctant passenger when the helicopter (confirming our previous chapter discussion) shows up. Will they get out in time?

I’m not a fan of the way the book breaks up these chapters. For a TV or movie production this might work, but for the prose format it feels like they keep stopping short at the wrong times. That leaves us with two more chapters for next time, and a quick skim to confirm the page counts tells me Peggy is getting a shot at her friend’s killer. Looking forward to seeing how that goes.