Red Rabbit

Red Rabbit is a spy thriller by the American writer Tom Clancy, published on 5 August 2002. It is a prequel that sits after the events of Patriot Games and early in the career of the CIA analyst Jack Ryan, and it went straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

The plot turns on a letter. In 1982 the Pope privately writes to the Polish government saying he will resign and return home unless the repression of opposition movements in Poland is stopped, and the letter is passed to Moscow. The head of Soviet state security, Yuri Andropov, is enraged by it and decides to have the Pope assassinated, on the calculation that the killing will revive communism in Eastern Europe, where its authority is visibly weakening. The book takes its title from the officer who learns what is being planned, and it follows two stories at once: the assassin, known only by a code number, moving towards his target, and the effort to get the officer out of the Soviet Union with what he knows. Jack Ryan, still an analyst rather than an operator, is part of that effort.

Clancy built the novel around the attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II in 1981, and it belongs to the same sequence of books as The Hunt for Red October.