Books: Son Of Megatech THE CARDINAL OF THE KREMLIN

Take a look at your fellow prisoners next time you are stranded at O'Hare International Airport, waiting in numb misery for Groundloop Airlines to postpone your red-eye to Washington National. At least half the frequent sufferers -- blue-suited business plodders of both sexes -- will carry a megatech spy paperback. Not a detective story or a gothic bodice ripper but a 500-page thunderation about missile subs, perhaps, or rocket attacks on space stations.

No one blots out the realities of baggage deprivation and child-size seats like Tom Clancy, the minstrel of the military-industrial complex. Clancy's first thriller was a nuclear submarine...