The novel opens in a Moscow traffic jam with an RPG round fired at the car of Sergey Golovko, chairman of Russia's foreign intelligence service. Golovko survives — the assassins hit the wrong Mercedes — but the attempt is the first thread in a much larger design, and pulling on it leads back to Beijing.
President Jack Ryan, meanwhile, has extended formal diplomatic recognition to Taiwan, a move that squeezes an already strained Chinese economy. With vast new oil and gold deposits discovered in Siberia, the Politburo accelerates a plan to take Russia's Far East by force. Ryan responds by drawing Moscow toward the West, while CIA officers John Clark and Domingo "Ding" Chavez work with the Russians on the ground and American and Russian forces prepare for a war neither country wanted.
At over a thousand pages, Tom Clancy's longest novel gives as much room to satellite reconnaissance, armored warfare, intelligence tradecraft and Beltway maneuvering as to any one character, following a dozen military and political threads before they converge on the Siberian border.