Tom Clancy's new thriller, Dead or Alive, is his fifteenth novel since he exploded on to the bestseller lists. In recent years, his equally sprawling book, film and game empire has come to rely increasingly on "collaborators", one of whom — Grant Blackwood, a veteran of Clive Cussler's similar operation — is credited here.

This novel panders to popular fantasy (in this case, revenge) and, simultaneously, plays against it with insights into the real world of military and intelligence operations. It's a fruitful tension that lends his books a quirky, appealing unpredictability.

Clancy fans may regard Dead or Alive as rather like one of those NBA "dream teams" they throw together for the Olympics; win, lose or draw — it is fun to see them all on the court. This time, the best characters from all Clancy's previous novels are on the case, including Jack Ryan and his son, Jack Ryan Jr; and the ace intelligence analyst Mary Pat Foley.

Their quarry is the "Emir", an Osama Bin Laden-like terrorist in hiding after a series of horrific attacks on the United States by his Al Qaida-like network. The elder Ryan, a one-time naval intelligence and CIA analyst, now is the retired president — don't ask about the series of improbabilities that thrust him into that job — and the rest of the cast works for a secret black operations agency, the Campus, that he created.

It is a self-funding (translation: no congressional or executive oversight) group with a secret charter to hunt down and kill anyone it deems a terrorist or terrorist collaborator. It operates on its own and its personnel were provided by then-president Ryan.

The Campus is a kind of crypto-fascist dream run by preternaturally wise heroes and without legal restraints or personal compunction. It hardly matters, because they know who the bad guys are and just when and where to shoot. In this instance, a series of electronic intercepts and incremental intelligence coups revive the hunt for the Emir, ongoing since 9/11.

He is plotting a new operation but just how broad its scope and how nefarious its implications are unfolds only at the end of the break-neck narrative. One of the conceits with which the plot is playing is how things might proceed if the Emir were not hiding in Pakistan's tribal hinterlands but somewhere in plain sight. His actual location seems at first almost satirically preposterous and then marvellously appropriate — a trait of Clancy's better plot devices.

Dead or Alive is infused with not only the strategic and tactical settings of the "war on terror" but also a healthy dose of "tea party" politics. The president who has succeeded Ryan is a wimpy, mean-spirited aristocratic lefty with nothing better to do than mindlessly assert civilian control over the military. His ineffectual advisers are introduced with the names of their Ivy League alma maters. Seldom has a good education been presented as such a morally, intellectually crippling handicap. On the other hand, Clancy's research into contem-porary military and intelligence practices often spins his stories in unexpectedly realistic directions. When one of the redoubtable Mary Pat Foley's colleagues makes a remark about the efficacy of waterboarding, it sets off an internal reverie on how torture is "of little use in the real world" because it doesn't "produce reliable and verifiable information".

On the other hand, none of that keeps Mary Pat's comrades from treating a "high-value asset" whom they capture with ingenious sadism. Going back to his first novel, Clancy's bread and butter has been the details of military technologies and hardware and there is plenty of that in Dead or Alive. If one of Clancy's operatives has a handgun, it is described down to the make and laser sight. For fans of the genre, Dead or Alive will provide a long weekend's pleasure.

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