Spooky 8: The Final Mission

Spooky 8: The Final Mission

A shocking but true chronicle of governmental cover-up and murder discusses the undercover black operations of a covert team called Spooky 8, which, on a routine mission in Colombia meets with a suspicious and deadly ambush. 35,000 first printing. For readers who believe truth is stranger than fiction, Bob King's tell-all book about the U.S. government's covert operations is an eye-opener. "In a world inundated with deception, media disinformation, cover stories, and lies, it's impossible to know exactly what the truth really means," writes King. "All I know for sure is that a very dark side of our government is in control." King tells how his ragtag team of blue-collar commandos, known as "Spooky 8," was frequently assembled to perform sensitive operations for the U.S. government in Central and South America. King takes a novelistic approach to his story (which purports to be rooted in fact), creating tough characters and macho dialogue. He shares Tom Clancy's love of technical detail and describes the unusual tools used by black-op professionals, such as high-powered amphetamines that "allowed us to work at 150 percent for three or four days without sleep." (The side effects: "At the end of the mission, your body shut down so hard, you might sleep for a couple of days.") The plot revolves around a government conspiracy to eliminate Spooky 8's members on what is supposed to be a simple mission of setting up surveillance equipment in the Colombian jungle. Apparently King and his buddies know too many secrets, and somebody high up wants them eliminated. Fans of Richard Marcinko's Rogue Warrior won't want to miss Spooky 8 . --John J. Miller A passably intriguing and allegedly true yarn of US covert operations, government betrayal, and good-looking babes. King (``David Chance'' in the story, but both are pseudonyms) is leader of a special operations team (hence ``Spooky'') that carries out the dirty work of assassination and sabotage the US government wants done but wants no one to know about. Chance and the Spooky 8 team he assembles spend much of the 1970s and '80s in Latin America killing people and blowing things up and generally having a good time. The team is a suitable ethnic mix, ... la WWII flicks, and all its members are men's men: expert killers with ``cast iron balls.'' All goes well until, on a mission into the Colombian jungle in 1992 supposedly to install some monitoring equipment, they are ambushed. Two members of the team are killed, and the rest desperately make their way back to the US. What happened? Was it just a mission gone bad, or were they targeted for death by their own government because they knew too much? To make a long story short, Chancewith the help of a series of women who apparently are attracted to thoroughly unlikable mendiscovers the latter to be true and also that there is a mole, a traitor in their midst. The team regathers, captures the mole, and blows his head off. With enough top secret information in their hands, the team is also able to blackmail the shadowy government organizations for whom they work into rescinding their death sentence against the team. This is all decent enough pulp fiction; the writing is in a style that is sometimes unwittingly good: ``I was so scared my sweat hurt.'' But is it all true? The author claims so, but nothing in the way of concrete evidence is ever presented. Will appeal to the conspiracy-minded and Rambo fans. As an expos of dark secrets, however, this falls short. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Bob King was born and raised in Wenatchee, Washington. After graduating from high school, he enlisted in the army and eventually reached the rank of sergeant. Serving in Vietnam in 1973, King experienced his first encounter with the military's "black operations" as an unwitting participant in Operation Dragon Flower. In 1975, he was picked to be the leader of one of the government's most covert operative teams, SPOOKY 8. While directing missions for the next 17 years, he also maintained a civilian identity, first working as a police officer in Oklahoma and as a Reserve Deputy Sheriff and Bomb Technician in Washington State. This is his first book.