The Last Frontier by Alistair Maclean

The Hungarian Uprising against the communist government and rule from Moscow took place in October 1956, so MacLean was writing this spy story set in Hungary just a few years after it was brutally crushed, while the memory was still fresh, while the harsh repressions, imprisonments, tortures and executions were recent events. It was his first foray into writing an espionage thriller as opposed to war stories, with mixed results.

As usual the hero has a bland, everyman sort of name – Michael Reynolds – and is an unspecified age, maybe mid-30s. He is a highly-trained British special agent, smuggled into Hungary to retrieve an idealistic British rocket scientist who has defected in the naive belief that the Soviets will use his knowledge to bring about world peace. Things go wrong from the start, and our hero is thrown into a series of tense and dangerous situations.