The Cardinal of the Kremlin shows Tom Clancy at the top of his form -- the phenomenal new novel by the author of Red Storm Rising.

Tom Clancy has taken us on a hunt for a renegade submarine, into an astonishing scenario for World War III, and to the frontlines of terrorism.  Now he looks to the skies and one of the most remarkable technological competitions of our time -- the race to develop "Star Wars."

In a rolling sea off the coast of South America, a target disappears in a puff of green light.  In the Soviet hills of Dushanbe near the Afghanistan border, an otherworldly array of pillars and domes rises into the night.  To the two greatest nations on earth, no contest is more urgent than the race to build the first Star Wars missile defense system, and no one knows that more than the two men charged with assessing the Soviets' capabilities: Colonel Mikhail Filitov of the Soviet Union, an old-line warrior distrusted by the army's new inner circle of technocrats, and CIA analyst Jack Ryan, hero of the Red October affair. 

Each must use all his craft to arrive at the truth, but Filitov gets there first -- and that's when all hell breaks loose.  Because Filitov, code-named Cardinal, is America's highest agent in the Kremlin, and he is about to be betrayed to the KGB.  His rescue could spell the difference between peace and war, and it is up to Jack Ryan to accomplish it -- if he can -- as, in a breathtaking sequence of hunter and hunted, Filitov's life, and Ryan's and that of the world itself literally hang in the balance.

With the exceptional realism and authenticity that have become his hallmark, Clancy puts us again on the cutting edge of modern technology, and humanizes it, taking us deep inside not only the machines but the men, and constructing a story of unrelenting suspense.  In its review of Red Storm Rising, the San Francisco Chronicle said simply, "Tom Clancy is the best there is. . . He is a master," and that fact has never shown more clearly than in the pure excitement of The Cardinal of the Kremlin.