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Zusatztext Praise for Tom Clancy Commander in Chief “In the best tradition of Clancy...Fans of military action thrillers will be well satisfied.”— Publishers Weekly Praise for Tom Clancy “He constantly taps the current world situation for its imminent dangers and spins them into an engrossing tale.”— The New York Times Book Review “A brilliant describer of events.”— The Washington Post “No one can equal his talent for making military electronics and engineering intelligible and exciting...He remains the best!”— Houston Chronicle Informationen zum Autor Mark Greaney Klappentext This electrifying thriller in Tom Clancy's #1 New York Times bestselling series has President Jack Ryan and his allies facing a treacherous foe threatening to unleash chaos around the globe... When the desperate Russian president launches an all-out covert violent offensive into order to push the world into chaos and regain the power his once-mighty country has lost! it's up to U.S. President Jack Ryan and all of his allies to stop the madman's grand plan of global conflict and conquest. 1 The Independence was a ship, but its job was not to sail from here to there. Instead, it remained stationary at anchor in the port of Klaipeúda, on Lithuania's Baltic coast, and it just sat there, connected to a long jetty with mounting and mooring devices, steel connecting bridges, and a massive pipeline link. The supertanker had sailed into port to much fanfare a year earlier because everyone knew it was going to be a game changer for the Lithuanians. And although now it was, essentially, a fixed object bobbing in the water and no longer much of a ship, it had achieved its mission. Independence was its name, but this was also its objective. It was a floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) storage and regasification unit, the first of its kind. Lithuania had been dependent on Russia for its gas and electricity needs for decades. On a whim determined by the political winds of the region, Russia could either raise the price of gas or reduce the flow. They had done this multiple times over the past few years, and as tensions between the Baltic nations and Russia grew, Lithuania's dependence on its neighbor's goodwill became a clear and present danger to its national security. An LNG import facility stood to change this. With the Independence and the pipeline from the port, LNG shipments from Norway now could be delivered by tanker, off-loaded onto the regasification facility, and turned into the natural gas necessary for the nation. This way, if the Russians once again turned off their gas pipelines, or once again raised the prices to extortionist rates, Lithuania and its allied neighbors needed only to exercise their option to turn on the safety valve provided by the Independence. The process for regasification is highly technical and precise, but surprisingly simple to understand. In order to transport a large volume of gas, it needs to be converted into liquid, thus condensing it by a factor of six hundred. This is accomplished by dropping the temperature of the gas to -160 degrees. The liquefied form of the commodity is transported at this temperature in specially designed tankers, in this case from Norway to Lithuania. Here the LNG is pumped into the storage tanks of the Independence, where the regasification system superheats the liquid with propane and seawater, returning it to its gas form. The gas is then pumped into tubes that off-load it through the port of Klaipeúda and then along an eighteen-kilometer pipeline to the metering facility. From there it goes directly to Lithuanian homes, where it provides much-needed heat for the long Baltic winters. The $330 million project was already serving its purpose from an economic standpoint. ...
