Without Remorse

In 1970, John Kelly lives on a boat on the Chesapeake Bay. He is a widower, a Vietnam veteran and a former Navy SEAL. When he shelters Pam, a young woman running from her abusive pimp, both of their lives steady for a short while.

The drug dealers Pam was fleeing then murder her. Kelly responds with a private campaign of revenge against the ring operating in Baltimore. A Baltimore police lieutenant, meanwhile, begins closing in on the man behind the killings.

A second thread pulls Kelly toward a far larger operation. American airmen are held in a secret prison camp in North Vietnam. Peace talks are under way in Paris, and Washington has reasons to leave the prisoners where they are.

Kelly's old Navy contacts lead a small team planning a covert rescue, and they ask him to help bring the airmen out.

This military and crime thriller, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1993, shows how Kelly becomes John Clark, the CIA operative who appears in Clancy's Jack Ryan novels. It leans on procedural detail and Cold War politics, with a hero who answers violence with violence. The question is whether one man's vengeance and a secret mission can both be carried through.