John Carney is 42, modest, articulate and passionate. He served six years in the

Yorkshire Regiment and did two tours in Northern Ireland. He was a team leader in Iraq with Aegis Defence Services, the multi-million pound private security firm set up by Colonel Tim Spicer. He has operated a close protection service in Iraq since 2011 and currently organises de-radicalisation programmes on the Syrian/Turkish border. To protect his family, the name John Carney is a pseudonym. Names of his family and colleagues have been changed. Thanks to a lifetime habit of note-taking, the events described are real and accurate.

Clifford Thurlow has lived all over the world and has worked as a gem stone dealer, a foreign correspondent for TheObserver in Athens and as one of the team translating works from Tibetan into English for the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, where he wrote his first book, Stories from Beyond the Clouds, an anthology of Tibetan folk stories.

The winner of the London Arts Board New Millennium Prize for short fiction, he is best known as a ghostwriter, his most recent books being: Making A Killing, the inside story of a hired gun in Iraq, and Escape from Baghdad with Captain James Ashcroft; Fatwa, Living with a Death Threat, for Jacky Trevane, and Today I'm Alice for Alice Jamieson. Thurlow has published novels, short fiction, travel and has written for most national newspapers. He lives in both Chelsea and Cadaques, Spain, with the travel writer Iris Gioia.