Jack Steele is a reporter.
A photojournalist, to be more specific; an investigator who reports the news or interesting stories with both his words and the pictures he takes at the same time. Steele is pretty good at it and has been working for the London Daily Standard for several years. As we meet him in the first recorded adventure, he was well into a six-month stint in Russia. He is quite a long ways from his normal haunt in Moscow, being just outside the Far East city of Khabarousk looking for clues into the disappearance of three UN officials near Vladivostok. The time frame for his activities in the second half of the 1980's which means that the Soviet Union was still in effect and the Communists controlled Russia.
Steele is no stranger to putting his life on the line although doing so while working on a story is considerably different and far less expected than when he served years before in the British Army as a tank commander in Iraq during the first Gulf War. Steele loves his job and he loves the excitement and the chance to travel the world. He has been married for just a couple of years to Sandy though that relationship was already in trouble and his six-month gig several thousand miles away was not helping. Throw in the fact that her father, a wealthy man who knew what was best for his daughter and had decided Steele, being British and not American, was not "the right man for the job" of being her husband.
Steele's membership in this compendium comes because he is finding his various assignments are putting him in the middle of some pretty tense situations involving international intrigue and plots for assassination or military actions and even though his objectives are to report what was happening and not particularly to stop or even hinder any of these matters, he finds that there are a lot of people who would prefer he not do his job as well as he is insisting.