This is fiction, but one of the strands that led to the book's tale began in Malta, a far cry from the frontier between Iran and Iraq and also from the German city of Lubeck.

In the past days we have been remembering the 30th anniversary of the killing, outside The Diplomat Hotel on the Sliema seafront, of the historic leader of Hamas, Fathi Shqaqi.

It is now widely accepted he was gunned down in an elaborate plot by Mossad.

Being a fictional narrative, the book selectively includes certain details while omitting others.

People, who had been at the risk of assassination for months or years, become careless. Thus, when he was away from his base he would consider himself untouchable and he would go to posh restaurants and spend.

He would get his mistress from Sidon in Lebanon, fly her to Malta and sleep with her in a hotel on the Sliema seafront.

The man was not a fighter but a strategist, one of the principal architects of the hidden tunnels on the Lebanese border that would later be applied to Gaza with such devastating effect.

He would have left the girl in bed. She would have screwed him until he'd wondered if he was going to get a coronary. Then he would have pushed her off, showered and walked to the Internet cafe, spoke to a colleague in Tunis and another in Rome, and walked back to the hotel.

Meanwhile an aircraft loitered outside the Maltese air space and the controller in the air stayed in communication with the slight young man who stood near the taxi stand in front of the hotel, like any hopeful stud waiting for his girl.

At the end of the esplanade a motorcycle engine was ticking over, the rider helmeted with a second helmet on his lap.

Along the coast, two or three kilometres away, a high-powered launch was moored. Further out to sea, on the edge of the radar horizon, a merchant ship registered in the port of Haifa, was on course for a rendezvous.

The man, the target, drew near. He was careless enough not to see the young man, wearing a nondescript grey T-shirt, lightweight windcheater and faded jeans, ease away from the lamp-post and wave to somebody down the road, behind his target, who did not look over his shoulder so did not see that no one was there. Carelessness kills.

Two shots to the head, one through an eye socket and one into the brain via the canal behind the ear as the target stiffened, went rigid, then sagged to the ground.

The target was in death spasms. Tourists and hotel staff ran up, then stood, petrified, as the blood came close to their feet. The young man was gone, and the motorcycle, stolen three days earlier, powered away. In the marina a launch revved its engines. A message had been sent.

This Malta angle occupies a very small part of the story. I have given it in full because of the Malta angle.

The protagonists are two British secret agents, who we are only allowed to know as Foxy and Badger, who are sent on a secret mission to a marshy area on the frontier between Iran and Iraq.

This is a mission that cannot lead back to the British government, hence the title of the book.

Posing as bird lovers they are supposed to be in search of the famed African Sacred Ibis.

In reality, however, they are sent to watch over a very senior military officer of the Iranian army who had been ferocious in his treatment of prisoners.

This high official is living together with his family here in the back of the beyond.

To watch him, Foxy and Badger have to share a sleeping bag and share the hours, making no noise at all, most of the time submerged in water and mud.

Then the target, codenamed The Engineer, is faced with an unexpected crisis. This time the problem is his sick wife. No other surgeon in the whole country seems able to cure her and her only hope is to be operated on by a leading surgeon who had once been one of Iran's top surgeon until he moved to Germany and became German in every sense.

But the Mossad found out and set out to nab him. The two British spies are meanwhile found out and thus a race develops to see who will deliver the vengeance.