REACT: CIA BLACK OPS

Moore (The Accidental Pope, 2001, etc.) and co-author Lightfoot offer a sort of Robocop of Black Ops, a composite character who describes in gory detail his starring role in most of the nefarious political assassinations and covert counterterrorism activities of the past 30 years.

The action begins in June 1990, when the operative code-named Nimrod is ordered to report to Dobbins Air Force Base, where he is met by covert operatives from Joint Intelligence National Security Agency (NSA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and CIA, and a mysterious spook known as Mr. Muir. Nimrod’s mission: Go into China near the north Vietnamese border to check on a cache of four SADMs (Special Atomic Demolition Munitions) he had placed there on a 1971 covert mission. One is suspected missing, possibly sold to Saddam Hussein by a member of the earlier mission. Once Nimrod finds the nukes, he’s to recover them or “blow them in place.” Nimrod was recruited by the CIA as a high school student, one of 26 young men chosen in 1966 for REACT, a newly formed unacknowledged stand-alone Black Ops cell within the CIA’s Covert Operations Section “accountable only to itself.” Nimrod is trained to kill, then sent to Vietnam, where he assassinates a Cambodian-Vietnamese warlord and a black-marketeer. In 1969, after Nixon plays the China card, Nimrod spends three months learning Chinese assassination techniques. From then on, he pops up everywhere: smuggling cutting-edge heroin technology from China to Colombia to set up a heroin trade that will serve as a CIA slush fund, then focusing on “Direct Actions”—the assassinations of a who’s-who of real-life figures, including Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, Egypt’s Sadat, four Arab terrorists suspected of bombing the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, and others in counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan, Beirut, and Iraq. In the end, when dispatched to assassinate Saddam, Nimrod finds himself the target.

A preposterous premise—that one man conducted nearly two dozen high-profile black ops—and loads of juicy technical detail: for the Soldier of Fortune crowd.