content: Like his other Clark book, _Without Remorse_, _Rainbow Six_ falls short of the high standards Clancy set with his Jack Ryan novels. _Executive Orders_ kept me up night after night with its 900 pages, small type and tiny margins. But with _Rainbow Six_, I felt rushed along through the plot. The detailed subplots and technical minutiae which characterize Clancy's best stuff are in shorter supply than I had hoped.As usual, characters are one-dimensional cardboard cutouts -- fine for Clancy's usual shoot-'em-up fare, but less satisfactory when he tries (as in _Without Remorse_) to handle complex moral issues. I still think Cardinal is the only one of Clancy's characters which might be accepted into the cast of a John Le Carre novel.However, the saying still holds: when Clancy's good, he's superb; when he's bad, he's still pretty darn good. The ending saved this one from 3 stars -- as elegant as anything involving that much destruction could be.