Plot
In London, Jack Ryan saves the Prince and Princess of Wales, along with their infant firstborn son, from an Irish terrorist group called Ulster Liberation Army (ULA) during a kidnapping attempt on the Mall. Sean Miller, a ULA terrorist captured by Ryan, is sentenced to life imprisonment for killing the royal driver. However, he is freed by ULA members while being transported to prison. The ULA later goes after Ryan and his family, partially as an act of revenge, but primarily because they seek to reduce American support for the rival Provisional Irish Republican Army. The assassin sent to kill Ryan is intercepted before he manages to complete his task, but his expectant wife, Cathy, and daughter, Sally, are injured when Miller causes their car to crash on a freeway. They are flown by helicopter to the University of Maryland Medical Center.
After the attack on his family, Jack accepts an offer from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to start working as an analyst at the agency's headquarters. Later, the Prince and Princess of Wales come to visit Ryan in America. This gives the ULA another opportunity to conduct another operation—they plan to kill Ryan and his family and kidnap the Royal Family. The attack ultimately fails: after a firefight and a flight, Ryan, his friend Robby Jackson, and the Prince, with the help of Marines and sailors from the U.S. Naval Academy and local police, manage to apprehend and subdue the terrorists. The ultimate fate of the terrorists is not stated in the book. Ryan arrives at Bethesda after the final arrest to be with Cathy for the birth of their son, who will be godparented by Robby Jackson and his wife, as well as the Prince and Princess of Wales.
In Clancy's later novel The Sum of All Fears, it is mentioned in passing that Miller and his colleagues were sentenced to death and executed for their crimes. Jack Ryan, Jr., the son born at the novel's close, follows his father into the CIA, and becomes a central character in Clancy's first post-President-Ryan novel, The Teeth of the Tiger.
Read more about this topic: Patriot Games
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)