Spooky 8: The Final Mission

From the very beginning, King assumes a defensive position: ""I expect a considerable effort will be made to discredit my past, challenge my veracity, or even attack my mental state to make sure few will take this story and what it represents seriously."" What this book represents will surely disturb many readers--but not for the reasons King thinks it will. Though he wants us to be shocked by the fact that the U.S. government is willing to betray its covert operatives, what will trouble them is King's own attitude toward events. The book bears obvious similarities to Richard Marcinko's Rogue Warrior series, but readers know that Marcinko's team--in both his fiction and nonfiction--is under the command of the U.S. Navy and that its existence is therefore a matter of record. By contrast, King writes that his team, Spooky 8, which he joined in 1975, was a covert team designed to work the ""dark, classified side of black operations"" and that he never knew who was running the show. In an epithet-filled style thick with self-conscious bravado, King describes a Spooky 8 mission gone wrong. In 1992, the team was dispatched to Colombia to set up surveillance equipment to monitor the drug trade. It was ambushed and lost three members. The ""final mission"" of the subtitle refers to how King and his fellow survivors deduced who betrayed them, kidnapped the culprit and killed him, with King pulling the trigger (""BBLLLAAAMMM! `That's for Santana'""). One team member collected the spent shell casings to make a necklace. The prospect that King is telling the truth may distress readers more than the prospect that he is fabricating events. Those events are related with a modicum of suspense in adrenalized prose laced with sometimes laughable dialogue. But even if everything that King says happened actually did occur, his telling is so devoid of meaningful moral reflection that it will satisfy only those willing to entertain the most lurid and violent revenge fantasies. Photos not seen by PW. Film rights to Hughes Brothers' Underworld Productions. (July)