This 740-page door-stop will last most people through a week of sun-baking at a beach resort during their Christmas holidays, or many weeks of evening reading before then.
It is a fast-moving tale which skips across continents and plots, and drops in marvels of military technology without missing a beat.
Ex-Navy Seal John Clark has been made head of a new, covert international anti-terrorist team called Rainbow. His junior colleague and protege Domingo 'Ding' Chavez - now married to Clark's daughter and expecting their first child - becomes strike team leader under Clark's command.
The action lights up almost from page one. Even as the new American-led team heads for England, where Hereford is to become its new home base, terrorists - oblivious to the commandos among their passengers - attempt to hijack the commercial flight.
Mid-air heroics kick-start Rainbow Six, providing a springboard for Tom Clancy to launch a series of terrorist incidents which span Europe, then the globe.
Organisations of the 1970s, such as the Baader-Meinhof and Action Directe gangs, resurface. Carlos the Jackal fretfully paces his French prison cell as his former brothers-in-arms wage war to free him.
Political ideologues from the days of East Germany-based terrorist attacks are called out of retirement and radical IRA members launch their own assaults on Rainbow Six. And amid all this, as is often the case with a Clancy tale, another plot is unfolding - a deeper and more horrifying plan hatched by a handful of top medical minds and backed by a private fortune. The deadly virus they have created is waiting to be released.