Mike Martin is an officer in the British SAS.
At 38 years of age when the first recorded adventure takes place, he holds the rank of Major and has seen more than enough action to be considered a hardened veteran. He is still young enough, though, to think twice about passing some of the hard assignments handed him to juniors under his command. Martin is used to doing things himself and he likes it that way. It isn't really that he thinks he can do things better than his subordinates - it is just that it is not his natural inclination to pass the hard stuff to someone else. He is used to being the man to do it and it has become a habit.
And the hard stuff is what the SAS gets. All the time. If the job is handed them it is usually because the people doing the handing cannot imagine any other group being able to pull it off. They usually cannot imagine anyone, even the SAS, getting it done but then doing the impossible is what the SAS is there for and since they routinely do it, there you are.
Martin is the elder son of a British accountant working for an oil company in Iraq at the time he met and soon married a beautiful Indian stewardess. While Martin's younger brother would take after the father, short and stocky and ginger-haired, Martin possessed the genes of his mother and was "black-haired, dark-eyed, and olive-skinned" making operating in the Middle East seem almost natural for more than one friend of his parents remarked that he looked more like an Arab than he did a Brit.
An eager but quite young eighteen-year old man just out of school when he applied for service with the British military, was accepted and soon became part of the vaunted Paratrooper Regiment which is where he has served off and on for the past 19 years when not assigned to the SAS.