After a Samair jet had to land in a small South-American airport the company chartered a Dakota to take some passengers over the Andes to Santillana.  Pilot Tim O'Hara is only just above the mountains with his handful of passengers when his co-pilot forces him to land on a strip of land not worth the name "airstrip".  He manages the landing, but only just: 2 people don't survive it, one of them the hijacking co-pilot, a third will die hours later.  O'Hara and the shaken passengers get down from the mountain to the valley, only to notice the true reason for their hijacking: a small army is welcoming them with bullets.  They want one of the passengers, a politician who may become a threat to both the governing corrupt president and to the ambitious communists.  They cannot afford the other passengers to stay behind as witnesses either.

Nobody in the group has any fighting skills, but the combination of a history-professor and a technically skilled man produce some remarkable medieval weapons, and their usage is both surprising and accurate enough to successfully slow down the attacking team, but they do understand it's only a matter of time before the machineguns will win from the crossbows.  So a trio decides to try to cross the mountains, while the rest will do their best to keep off the armed gang long enough for help to arrive...

If I tell you they made crossbows and other things and used those to hold off an group armed with guns I'm sure you wouldn't buy it.  If Desmond Bagley tells you the same he manages to make it very plausible.  The same goes for the descriptions of the planes and the flight actions (and there's more than just the opening scene!), or the story of the men crossing an Andes mountain without proper material.  Many authors use their research to drop names throughout their books, Bagley uses it to just make the best damn story possible.  He turns just anoter adventure story into a fast-paced hard-to-put-down novel filled with unexpected turns, yet without any deus ex machina to fill some holes, cause there are none.

Sure, it's no Literature with capital L - but it doesn't try to be either.  High Citadel is entertainment, it's a couple of evenings with longer reading than planned, it's living among a few people in the Andes during a stressful exciting few days, it's a book that grabs you and makes you care about the character, it's a book that leaves a desire for more of the same.  You're warned :-)