ORIGINAL: FOARP
Haven't read it so can't say. Stopped reading Clancy after slogging all the way through the Bear and the Dragon (all 1,100 pages) only to find he'd crammed all the fighting into the last bit of the novel and it was all resolved by a Deux Ex Machina-style ending.
Try "Red Rabbit". The good guys fear that there could be an attempt against Pope John Paul II. After 1,000+ pages, the great plot twist arrives: there is an attempt against Pope John Paul II.
The book opens with the Sun rising in the West (really!), "TV video" of the attempt (most famously it was not a special occurrence in the Pope public life, so the Italian television was covering the event with a couple of cameras - none near where the attempt took place) and, even if we are in 1981, there is a veteran of the Falklands campaign.
The rest are streams of consciousness - no, make that "floods" - by Andropov, a KGB spy with a religious crisis, and Jack Ryan doing absolutely nothing (hint: you already know that the Pope will be shot).
I don't know how I managed to read it. I remember that it was a difficult period in my life, so, maybe, my brain was finding solace in the empty nothingness.
"Yes darling, I served in the Navy for eight years. I was a cook..."
"Oh dad... so you were a God-damned cook?"
(My 10 years old daughter after watching "The Hunt for Red October")