...or maybe it was never great to begin with. I'm trying to identify when Tom Clancy jumped the shark, and it's clear that Rainbow Six is post-shark-jump Clancy - too many pages of "look at how good and handsome the good guys with good guns are" and copious amounts of references to previous Clancy books sprinkled in there for flavor. Perhaps The Hunt for Red October was lightning in a bottle - whatever the magic was has since been lost.

This is a pre-9/11 book about terrorism fighters who, as the book reminds you over and over again, are fantastically talented and athletic and smart and love kids and have loyal wives and fly around the world making bad guys' heads explode. And the bad guys are the evil commies and socialists and especially the environmentalists who manufacture an epidemic and produce a fake vaccine to kill off humani... yuck, this book really hasn't aged well has it?

Maybe reading this book in 1998 merely signaled poor taste. Now, reading it makes you feel like a QAnon believer. Clancy could have left this book up to his ghostwriters and it wouldn't have come up any worse.