Steve Savage is a part-time agent for British Intelligence.
A freelance photo-journalist with considerable experience all over the world, he is also a trained martial arts expert who is also quite good with weapons but does prefer his hands and feet. The small news-gathering agency for which he works also works at times for Britain's Intelligence Service. Savage has on occasioned mixed the two professions.
Born in the slums bordering the docks in London, Savage got his first taste of wanderlust as a young teenager and, at age 15, snuck onto a freighter to see the world.
Savage learned quickly how harsh it can be. When discovered as a stowaway, he was given a choice of succumbing to the advances of the captain or being flogged. He chose the latter and for the next six weeks he was beaten once or twice a week. Then as they neared land, he fought back, broke a bottle over the man’s head and jumped ship to avoid arrest. That put him in Hong Kong.
In China, alone and starving, he was eventually allowed to help clean around a martial arts school in exchange for rice and a mat. After a year, he began to train and for six years he learned and then taught others. When again the wanderlust took hold, he headed to Saigon where he lucked into a temporary job as a cameraman for a desperate newsman and a new career was discovered.
Savage is in his late 20’s when the series starts. A tall, athletic man with prematurely steel-gray hair, his “storm-cloud gray eyes surveyed the world with what seemed casual amusement, apparently noticing little – in reality missing nothing significant.”
Now he travels to the most dangerous of places, reporting and filming the news, and sometimes helping out the SIS.