It continues the saga of young Dominic Caruso, who has worked for the FBI and gained exceptional skills in the intelligence sector. He now spends his time working for a secret US intelligence unit that operates completely off the books and is known simply as The Campus.
Caruso is faced with just such a situation in Support And Defend, which opens with a prologue that depicts an incident on a ship off the coast of India. A militant group of the Palestinian political organisation Hamas has infiltrated the ship and targeted the captain for death. The group fulfils their deadly promise and awaits martyrdom as a result of their actions. This event will be tied to others later on.
Caruso eventually returns home to the United States, deeply shaken and seeking revenge for the murder of his friends. His own investigation into these events leads him to one man, Ethan Ross, an operative in the intelligence game working as a mid-level staffer for the National Security Council. Seeking to jumpstart his career, Ross has decided to share top-secret information with members of the media. This includes the names and locations of all US intelligence operatives working around the world. If this information, now located on an electronic device called a “scrape,” were to fall into enemy hands, the results would be devastating.
In true Tom Clancy fashion, Greaney weaves a political firestorm of a thriller that finds Caruso chasing down Ross from the US to the Caribbean and eventually to Geneva, Switzerland. The action is nonstop, and Support And Defend contains all the prerequisite political details Clancy fans have come to expect and enjoy. Kudos to Greaney for keeping the story going while also blazing out his own path. President Jack Ryan is only briefly referred to and the focus is mainly on Dominic Caruso in a tale of vengeance and global intrigue.