After a severe earthquake devestates much of Turkey, the United States government loses contact with a remote mountain outpost that was busy keeping tabs on a secret Russian project just over the border. The earthquake couldn't have hit at a worse time, as the folks up at the outpost seem to have discovered something extremely important. Special agent Sam Durell is gievn a simple mission: get to the base, find out if anyone is alive, and return with the tapes containing the reconnaissance info. One agent has already disappeared trying to pull off the same mission.

Helping Sam along the way is a gruff Turkish military officer. Since much of the country's infrastructure was wiped out by the quake, there is no easy route to the base, and the Turkish government can't provide Sam much assistance, what with them being busy trying to salvage their wrecked country and all. Since this is a spy novel from the 1960s, it's not too many pages before Durell runs into a beautiful woman who is, predictably enough, much more than she appears to be. And it's just a few more pages before Durell and his small band run into two more people, a crazy-ass missionary and his sexy daughter. Once again, it's a spy novel, so noen of them are what they appear to be. The missionary, who is pretending to smuggle priceless artifacts out of the country is actually smuggling dope, and his daughter isn't even his daughter. She's just along for the ride, hoping to get the hell out of the country where she'd goen to find fame and fortune and instead found herself part of the white slave trade.

Just in case the whole gang of deceitful people with their own secret agendas wasn't enough crap for Sam to deal with, Mother Nature decides to through in frequent aftershocks, flooding, landslides, and other things the average person has to deal with in a day at the office.

Durell and his rag tag band of followers make it to a village where they can rest up, make plans, spy on each other, and generally act suspicious. Sam hikes up to the base to find what officials had feared: the place is an absolute wreck. Most of the soldiers manning the outpost were killed during the quake, and the guy in command is an incompetent desk jockey who was just there for an inspection. He can't handle anything, and spends most of his command getting drunk and bossing people around in the most absurd ways. The only person with half a brain left in their head is some grunt who informs Durell that the tapes he's looking for left the base with a professor and headed down the mountain to the town. Hmm, guess Sam should have checked that out before he made the hike!

Back down in the village, Sam locates the professor among the wounded, and does so at precisely the moment the professor is getting murdered. The guy just never gets a break. Things pretty much go nonstop from here as Sam finds then loses the tapes, runs into the missing agent, and tries to find out who among those in his party is working with the Russians to make sure the tapes are destroyed. It all ends up with them on a doomed flight over the ocean and a final showdown with the Commie agents aboard a Russian fishing boat.

Assignment Ankara is a damn fun book. It has almost no sleaze or sex in it, though there is a little just to keep things moving along. The entire thing is pretty much nonstop action and espionage that is smartly written and keeps you guessing as to who the traitors are. I like the Sam Durell novels because they concentrate less on sex and more on action and intrigue, making them a welcome breath of fresh air in a genre that is very often paint-by-numbers. Sam is an interesting character who tends to screw up and depend on luck less than his fellow greatest spies in the world. The story is well-constructed and, like I said, keeps you guessing with lots of false clues. Most of the characters, while not the deepest literary creations ever to parade across the page, are engaging and well done within the limits of the genre in which they exist.

If you are looking for the sleaze of a Nick Carter book, you're out of luck. But if you want a ton of well-paced and well-plotted action, you really can't go wrong with this book or just about any other Sam Durell novel.

Labels: Espionage