Danny Rook is a radio operator.
He will also be described after a time as a mercenary. And someone who finds himself in the most unusual positions at what turn out to be incredibly important turning points in human history. At times this uncanny placement seems totally impossible and implausible but ... we was told at the beginning of these many adventures: "Studying history, we sometimes come to a point where the provable facts run out and then pick up again on the other side. The genre of Secret History - which is fiction, after all - invites readers to think about the previously untold story and perhaps to wonder whether it could be true. In the end, who can disprove a story that has never been recorded in the media or archive records, when all the other details appear to be established facts...?"
That is the feature of this series that makes it so interesting - Rook is very important to backstory but he really is usually just where he is, getting involved in what he does, by accident. Keep in mind that at no point is this a comedy nor is Rook prone to trouble. He is just often in the wrong place at the really wrong time but luckily for him and for us readers, he is very intelligent, wonderfully diligent, and blessedly lucky.
Rook is British by nationality and Rhodesian by upbringing; his father, Charles Rook, owned a farm in the southern part of that African nation (now Zimbabwe). He has just finished high school and is expecting to head to London to enter university when he is told by his father that an opportunity to work at a South African newspaper was there, a chance to earn money to help the cost of living in England. Rook, a young man used to the outdoors and with an interest in electronics and radio, was not keen to the idea but knew it made financial sense. What he had no way of knowing was that that job would present other changes and he would be caught in just the first of several waves of change.