Similarly in TCTK Clancy also uses historical facts to enhance his.
plot making it believable. Using a historical fact, Clancy shows how cruel the Communist system is with no respect for the humans but only for political power. The landing of a German teenager, Mathias Rust, inside the Red Square and his prosecution is brilliantly used to illustrate the KGB's way of thinking (pp. 226-7, TCTK). In June 1987 a German teenager landed in the Red Square in Soviet Union. He somehow managed to bypass sophisticated air defence systems and causing several bureaucrats to be fired by the Soviet Politburo (p. 24, "Destination Red Square"). The historical fact gave Tom Clancy the ground to make the Communist bureaucrats' characters more sensitive to treason for the fear of losing their position and therefore their power. Tom Clancy exploits the fear of the Communists to make them harder to infiltrate. The difficulty infiltrating the Soviet government is precisely what the author wanted and makes his plot more interesting by making it more complex.
The historical facts are not the only way in which believable plot is introduced. The use of realistic characters allows the reader to believe in whatever outcome realism will cause. In THRO the astonishment which Ramius feels through his thoughts being revealed by the author are all realistic. They sound like an average person's reactions to a situation.
"They know our name, Ramius was thinking, they know our name! How can this be? They knew where to find us--exactly! How? What can the Americans have? How long has the Los Angeles been trailing us? Decide-you must decide!" (pg. 248, THRO).
Ramius wants to defect from Soviet Union and on one of his missions he disobeys orders. Nobody knew about his decision, not even the Americans to whom he wanted to defect. When Ramius received a message from one of the American submarines and mentions his submarine's name, Red October, he was astonished because Americans were not supposed to know about his wish to defect.
