The Brain Scavengers
by Paul Edwards (Manning Lee Stokes)
Pyramid, 1973
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John Eagle is a White man raised by Apaches who answered Mr. Merlin's classified ad for a secret agent. His mission is to eventually go to Siberia and blow it up. Half the book follows Russian scientists around and generally lounges around, but the basic idea is that Russia is kidnapping Western scientists and keeping them in an underground base.
The action half of the book isn't much of an improvement. Some decent snowbound survivalist adventure, but the action scenes weren't much and Eagle largely just waltzes in and out of the base without much trouble. Instead of firearms he has a gas gun and bow and arrow, neither of which seem to perform much better than a silenced pistol.
I guess Stokes felt obligated to squeeze in a sex scene somewhere, and he does so in the worst way possible. A scientist he's "rescuing" seems to panic, so he uses the time honored Apache method of making a woman submit by raping her. It was a titch more "dubious consent" as they say in the romance novels, but it ain't great. Eagle isn't exactly the most heroic of characters, reminding his allies that they're expendable or outright threatening to murder them.
The book felt a bit of early Nick Carter Killmaster, which Stokes also wrote for, with some added superficially outré elements that didn't amount to much.
From Amazon https://amzn.to/45Qg9xI
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