Spy Camp

Spy Camp is the 2013 sequel to the first book in the Spy School series. It features an ordinary middle school student recruited to a secret CIA Academy that trains future spies. The series is written by Stuart Gibbs, a middle-grade author with several other successful series, such as FunJungle, MoonBase Alpha, and Charlie Thorne. Spy Camp was a nominee for the 2014 Texas Bluebonnet Award, but other texts in the series have received more nominations, such as the 2013 Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery. Gibbs’s series has been well-received by critics and young readers.

Plot Summary

Ben Ripley is a 12-year-old boy and student at the CIA’s Academy of Espionage. After an action-packed first semester in which Ben received death threats and prevented an assassination attempt on multiple high-ranking intelligence personnel, Ben looks forward to a summer at home being a normal kid. Unfortunately, he discovers the Academy has a mandatory summer semester at a wilderness training facility. At first, Ben is upset, but he quickly sees the benefit because he’ll get to visit a summer camp and spend time with his friends and his crush, Erica Hale. Ben also receives a threat from SPYDER, the enemy agency he’d foiled in Spy School. He takes the threat to Erica, who helped him with his mission in the previous semester. Erica locates a small grain of some substance on the letter and says she will have it tested. She promises to help Ben.  

Ben has one weekend to spend with his family and friends at home. At an amusement park with his best friend, Mike Brezinski, Ben plays a zombie shooting game and attracts a crowd because he has gotten so good using shooting simulators at spy school. Murray Hill, the SPYDER mole that Ben identified in the previous semester, turns up and distracts Ben. Murray is supposed to be in prison. Ben chases him but isn’t able to catch him. The CIA agents assigned to protect Ben don’t believe he saw Murray; one calls the prison, and the facility confirms Murray is still in custody.

At the spy camp, things get worse. Another student finds an envelope intended for Ben in a footlocker and opens it, discovering a contract for employment with SPYDER inside. The contract is attached to a letter telling Ben he has 24 hours to sign the contract or be killed. Ben’s friends are shocked but also excited to be involved in a real spy problem.

The camp’s administrator, Woodchuck, promises to take Ben out into the wilderness for a week to teach him survival skills and protect him from SPYDER. Before they leave, Alexander Hale parachutes into the camp in a tuxedo. Alexander is a widely admired spy and Erica’s father. He is also a fraud who has exaggerated his accomplishments and takes credit for the actions of others. Ben feels dismayed the CIA sent him someone incompetent to protect him.

Woodchuck arranges for his and Ben’s escape to be part of a field trip for the campers. As the camp’s bus travels into the mountains, SPYDER attacks. Ben wants to surrender to SPYDER to save the lives of the others, but Alexander grabs him, and they run away. Erica saves the students on the bus by stealing the attackers’ grenade launcher and then joins Alexander and Ben in escaping. They jump into a river to get away from the SPYDER agents. When they wash up on shore, Erica forces her father to agree that she will oversee the operation. He reluctantly agrees but later tries to take over again once she helps him out of the water. Erica is very angry at her father for reasons Ben does not understand. She dismisses and disparages Alexander, calling him useless and a fraud. They are attacked by bears; Alexander tries to run away and has to be saved by Erica.

Erica has studied maps of the area and leads them to an old fire watch tower, where they use the ham radio to try to contact the CIA. Their transmission is intercepted by SPYDER, who demands that Ben be turned over to their agents in six hours. They have several of Ben’s friends as hostages and threaten to kill them if Erica does not deliver Ben. Erica lies and says they lost Ben, then negotiates for 48 hours to turn him over. She rushes Alexander and Ben out of the tower after the call ends; the tower is hit by a missile moments after they return to the woods. The fire attracts the attention of rescue crews, whom Erica flags down. She warns Ben and Alexander not to mention anything about the CIA, but Alexander doesn’t comply. Erica convinces the helicopter pilots her father was hit in the head by flying debris and is delusional, which is easier for the pilot to believe than Alexander’s story about the CIA. They load Alexander into an ambulance and take him to the hospital for treatment.

In the ambulance, Erica knocks Alexander out with a sedative. She and Ben steal him from the hospital and take him to a local motel, where they tie him to a chair with duct tape. Erica leaves to do surveillance on the detention facility where Murray is being kept. While she’s gone, Ben convinces Alexander to tell him why Erica is so angry with him; Alexander confesses that he’d blamed a serious mistake—losing a briefcase full of important documents in a McDonald’s bathroom—on Erica and that the CIA put a black mark on her record, diminishing her chances of a field assignment after graduation. Ben confronts Alexander about his habit of taking credit for other people’s accomplishments. At first, Alexander protests, but after Erica announces her return, he stops protesting and agrees that she is in charge of the mission from then on.

In the morning, the trio visits the detention center. They discover that it has very little security and could easily be escaped. They are taken to the visitation room to meet with Murray but discover that the student being held as Murray Hill is someone else entirely. He explains that he’d been pulled out of juvenile detention and given $100,000 to pretend to be Murray for his five-year sentence. SPYDER attacks; the trio flees and soon finds clues guiding them to an escape. These turn out to be left by Cyrus Hale, Alexander’s father and Erica’s grandfather. He helps them escape and leads them to a getaway car. Together, Cyrus and Erica develop a plan to surprise SPYDER at the location where the hostages are being held.

When they arrive at the site, they discover a Civil War reenactment battle taking place. They outfit themselves in reenactor uniforms and use the cover to surveil the SPYDER farmhouse. Cyrus goes to do closer surveillance. While he’s gone, Ben puts together several clues and realizes that SPYDER is not actually after him—they used him to lure Erica into danger and, subsequently, Cyrus out of retirement. Erica tries to warn Cyrus not to go into the farmhouse, but he does not listen to her and is captured. Erica goes to rescue him and the hostages. She calls on Ben for a diversion, which he creates by firing a cannon full of gunpowder at one of SPYDER’s vehicles. Erica rescues the hostages, but Ben sees her get captured by someone whose appearance obviously startles her.

The rescued hostages and Ben agree they must go after Erica and Cyrus and stop the SPYDER plot. The other students believe Alexander’s reputation and ask Ben to get him to be their leader. Alexander is stunned and in shock, as well as discouraged by the harsh words of his father and daughter. Ben builds Alexander’s confidence back up and gets him to pretend to be the famous Alexander Hale everyone knows about because it will help the other students feel ready to go on the mission.

The group locates the SPYDER camp by accessing the analysis of the speck of coal Erica found on the first SPYDER letter. They outfit themselves at a local Walmart and enter the coal mine, taking out the SPYDER guards and infiltrating the SPYDER base. They determine that SPYDER has a missile and intends to attack Camp David, the President’s country estate, where he is currently hosting several European leaders. Ben remembers that Cyrus had said the GPS system wasn’t that accurate; Alexander confirms that Cyrus convinced the government to program the wrong coordinates for several high-target locations into the system, such as the Pentagon and the White House. They figure out that SPYDER would have wanted Erica, too, to have leverage over Cyrus, who wouldn’t otherwise surrender the information without a threat to someone he cares about.

The others leave to rescue Cyrus and Erica, and Ben is left alone to stop the missile launch. Despite being afraid, Ben locates the missile controls, which are being watched by Murray Hill. Murray seems impressed that Ben figured everything out but says he can’t stop the missile launch. He tells Ben that his boss has a gun to Ben’s head; Ben thinks this is a distraction, but it turns out to be true. Ben guesses that Murray’s boss is Joshua Hallal, another Academy student whom everyone believes is dead. He has figured out that Joshua was another SPYDER mole and faked his death. He says he knows this because the look on Erica’s face had been one not only of surprise but also of betrayal, and he thinks she would only have trusted Joshua enough to feel any betrayal.

Ben stops the missile launch by unplugging the control system. There’s an explosion. Murray and Joshua run for their lives; Ben follows them and manages to tackle and capture Murray at the entrance to the mine. He and one of his friends, Jawa, follow Joshua into the woods. Joshua escapes in an old mining cart, but as Ben and Jawa helplessly watch him escape, the missiles in the mine explode, and Joshua’s escape cart plummets downwards into the woods and fire. The others find them watching from beside a cliff. Cyrus says he’s honored to have served with all of them, including Alexander. Erica and Ben have a moment alone; he confesses that he just unplugged the missile system, and she laughs appreciatively, which makes Ben very happy. She asks him for help getting back through the woods because the SPYDER agents beat her up.