Son Of Megatech THE CARDINAL OF THE KREMLIN

By John Skow

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 epic, The Hunt for Red October, which was followed by another sturdy heavyweight, Red Storm Rising. He stumbled last year with Patriot Games, a frippery in which his customary hero, the supercool CIA man Jack Ryan, saved a British royal child from kidnaping. The problem was not that Patriot Games was silly, but that it was even sillier than real life.

The Cardinal of the Kremlin, the new Jack Ryan airing, deals admiringly with Star Wars technology and thus (SDI cynics might object) is precisely as silly as real life. Never mind; Clancy is back on track. The reader is shown, in quick, effective takes of a few pages each, a giant Soviet military laser weapon under construction in the mountains of central Asia, the operation of an elaborate chain of U.S. spy drops and cutouts in Moscow, an Afghan guerrilla team shooting down Soviet helicopters with Stinger missiles, tense cookie pushing at a disarmament negotiation, and two separate KGB interrogations, including one involving sensory deprivation techniques that screen out even the relentless quack quack of your stewardess telling you to place seat backs and tray tables in the full upright position.

Clancy's characters, including his solid mahogany hero, are not especially interesting. There is no sex at all, and generally not much human contact beyond the kind that requires a salute or a karate chop. On the other hand, the author has kept up with shifts of attitude in the U.S., and not every Kremlin big shot is portrayed as an evil-empire builder. He has not anticipated the end of the Afghan war, and the Pentagon procurement scandal is not foreshadowed. Complicated weapons systems usually work, and no U.S. military officer or enlisted person is less than true blue. Fair enough. Accepting Clancy's word on such matters for the duration of a flight is less strenuous and far more reassuring than pulling up hard on your seat handles to keep the plane in the air.