I’m singing an old song in American – give me land lots of land, and starry skies above – taught years ago by a US Army staff sergeant. I sing out loud past low homes and black burnt vehicles and being daytime and hot I’m in a driving daze and when I get to: I want to gaze at the moon til I lose my senses, I check the rear vision mirror and notice the round cloud just above the plain and, stomach lurching, I want to be somewhere else.

Seems to hang on the horizon, in the flat dry country before the mountains, a pixilated air-mass. Visible in the truck’s rear side mirror, much darker than the dusty brown of the afternoon haze. The dark thumbprint is catching up fast so it’s not insects.

I’m revving down the arrow straight highway towards Jarouk at 140kph and bugs can’t do that speed. Bugs are slow. Locusts can crank it to 30 kph at most. I crank because I want to get to Jarouk before nightfall in this misbegotten place, with its dust-in-the-mouth, dust-up-the-nose. I hate flat open stretches and now on my tail is a malevolent cloud, and my panic surges.

It’s a drone swarm, a cloud of little thorn balls, the size of kids’ four-sided jacks, whirling in a geometrical menace. Severe armour piercing tungsten blades, paired to a magnetron jet in the centre of the cloud. Looking to shear something, tear strips through targets, merciful heaven not me, I hope.

I stop clenching my hands and teeth.

The truck hurtles as I instinctively accelerate, there’s no swerving off road here with ditches and wreckage every 20 metres so I centre my fear and assay the swarm’s trajectory. I know I’m not a target.  To use a drone swarm on one individual is a hundred times overkill, but am I in its merciless path?

No. Calm down, idiot.

“I’m not the target,” I tell myself, in the hot truck cabin, “Why would those Stryethon geniuses and their algorithms waste their thorn balls on me when the weapon can destroy a much more substantial enemy?” The cloud is not coming up the arrow straight road, but to one side.  I persuade my adrenaline to dial down.

Decades ago, my country grew verdant crops, along the great rivers, but the water has dwindled along with the rain. Those rivers are ditches now. Then, I was a soldier, when armies were armies and I sang with Americans to learn their language. Now I’m older with a family, delivering goods, making the most feeble crust to live, tho’ I own my truck, my lifesaver, my joy.

I watch the right-hand edge of the swarm slowly pass me to the left of the highway, a metre above the ground. I see thousands of thorn balls locked in a crystalline shape, each individual ball a few centimeters from the one above, below, to the side, speeding about 10k faster than me, tiny darts in formation to cause death and mince-meat up the line.

I slow the truck down some, toe-teasing the brake pedal, and the swarm passes more quickly. A mumuration of murder, controlled by a handset, a pilot, a navi-butcher, either human or machine, somewhere else. Long way else.

Me? If the military wanted the death of a deliveryman in a truck full of food cartons, a single rocket would delete my puny life in a short-lived rosebud of fire and smoke but why waste a costly rocket on a delivery truck? 

No, my friend, drone swarms of this magnitude – it’s a 10 metre high swarm that covers half an acre, maybe, are launched for a more widespread purpose. To destroy missile batteries and troops while preserving the dwindled water supply for advancing forces and not poison it with explosive run off, depleted uranium, and spilled fuel.

When the swarm has passed I stop the truck and swallow a couple of glugs from the canister – water, not arak – if you don’t mind. I’m unsure what I will witness further along the highway, but it may not be pleasant.

Way, way on the horizon, I see another cloud heading north. I stop, wind down the window and my old army binoculars pick it for yet another drone swarm. Up in the sky are a couple of dots … too high for birds. Electric planes or high-level drones keeping watch.

Gone are the days of armies. We opportunistic traders can now move somewhat more easily through the landscape. No mines, no bomb craters, check-points or broken bridges. Just new permutations of death invented by the companies, hither and thither, to lop and chop, tested on my poor, ruined nation. Do aggressors and defenders win or lose now? I don’t even know. Merchants of death just use us to demonstrate their military hardware to sell to richer nations, for deterrence, on the other side of the globe.

I can’t return to the song. Mouth’s too dry and heart’s too jangled, and when I think these thoughts, my heart is broken all over again. My poor ruined nation. The swarm is now well ahead.

The road veers east for another 80ks and at dusk I reach Jarouk and the bustle of the town, untouched by the cloud which was travelling straight north. I park behind Old Ahmed’s food store in the dirt lane and we unload the flour and the cans of vegetables and load boxes of empty bottles to return to the supplier, and crates filled with olive jars. I tell him about the passing swarm and that I’m still recovering.

“There’s fighting up at the border, that’s all I know,” says Ahmed, guardedly.

“Possibly,” I reply. Ahmed wants to believe there’s a war. He’s scared loose talk will bring the militia, but that’s yesterday’s algorithm.

“Bukkra fil mishmish,” I say to him. Tomorrow there will be apricots – an old saying my Grandad taught me. An old saying that sounds nice but that I can’t believe.

“Come. For a drink,” he says with a smile.

Ahmed’s messy office where receipts and invoices are piled in paper dunes on his expansive desk. Ahmed was never a hardline believer, and this time there is strong, clean arak. We click glasses and I look into his old eyes.

“I remember your father doing this delivery run in a British Bedford,” he says with a smile. “He was a good man.”

I shrug. “If you can’t carry on the family business what is there?”

Every time I make a delivery, Ahmed and I exchange such words. It’s true – acknowledging our history makes us happy. First Grandad, then Father, then me, driving up the highway, bringing supplies. Back then, Father’s wars were more in your face – more cluttered – car bombs, mines, soldiers everywhere. Jets.

“Where are you staying?”

“Mouba’s of course.”

“Cheap, but clean,” he nods approvingly.

“I go back tomorrow. A day’s drive.” But Ahmed knows that.

At 2am, I’m roused from my sweat damp sheets with a knock, and I think o shit, militia, but again I rationalise – it’s a soft hesitant knock. The militia are never hesitant. I wrap the sheet round my body and shuffle to the door. From my darkened room I peer through the door crack and there is a man in loose clothing, with a scarf and a knapsack.

“Salaam, friend, sorry to wake you. My name is Arkan. Ahmed said you may be driving this morning.” He is tense and speaks with a Kurdish accent.

“Back to the city. You want a lift?”

“I am happy to pay you to take me to Jarbal.”

“That’s north.”

“It’s only the next town, about 50 kilometers. I have money. My wife and child are there. I need to get them out before more of those new weapons come – I must take them back to my apartment in the city. I don’t have transport.”

“Arkan you say? Show me ID.”

He shows me his pass, and sure enough, the pic matches his face, and it says he’s from Jarbal.

“50 US dollars,” I say, “for the pickup and return to the city.”

It’s risky, but that’s good money.

“Please, $30 is the most I have,” he fishes out a skinny money-roll from his knapsack, most notes are shopworn, but regulation green.

“Ok. We leave in half an hour. Find me some coffee and we meet at my truck.”

Arkan disappears down the corridor.

I know, I know. I should not be so soft and yet greedy at the same time. Soft and greedy makes mistakes. Outside, Arkan is there with two bitter coffees and the child of the vendor from over the road, who whips the cups from our hands as we finish drinking, and scurries off. Arkan hands me a small flat-bread too and I chew it up and fill the fuel tank with a jerrycan. The bread fixes the queasiness in my gut.

Pre-dawn washes over the eastern horizon, so it’s safe to drive. The satellites and drones owned by the armament companies will ignore us. A simple delivery truck – just a beetle on the sand scurrying forward among the ruin. The satellites will have ticked us yesterday, and ticked our destination, a shop. The only mixed store in the town. I can’t imagine how Jarouk exists except there’s an underground reservoir, and some farms that still operate, just. Jarbal is but a clutch of small houses – I know it also when I ran deliveries through Mosul to the Turkish border in the old days. I’d sometimes pick up their date crop on the way home. Jarbal’s just a blur of mud houses and a flagpole. A few fields. Poor and simple.

“What do you do Arkan?” I ask.

“I am a clerk in the department of works in the city. I send money to my wife and her family. She is looking after her parents but she must get out now. … oh wow.” High in front of us are trails of smoke through the sky, thirty or forty at altitude and the diamond glint of rockets at the front of each trail in the now fish-pink sky. Arkan looks up under the sun visor at the lethal squadron.

“It’s coming isn’t it?”

“War?”

“War is always here. Always here,” I say.  And then: “I’m not picking up your wife’s parents, am I? I don’t have room.”

“The parents have persuaded my wife to leave and I have insisted too.”

“Good,” I say. I want to be in and out.

“Her parents may not survive,” says Arkan miserably.

“They are of no interest to the North, so they may be ignored.”

Wishful thinking.

We drive in silence.

“My child is only five,” Arkan adds after 20 kilometres of rubble strewn highway.

“Boy?” I ask.

“A boy.”

I understood Arkan’s fear. And he did look stricken, framed in the passenger window his fingers crooked under his beard, like baqsam sticks, eyes popping.

“Almost there my friend,” I said.

But no. We are not where he wants to be. After turning at the pockmarked sign that says Jarbal we see only rubble, torn cars, dead goats, lacerated though. Jarbal no more. Something happened here. A massacre, probably not even registered by the weapon testing programs. Mud houses are reduced to brown mounds on the landscape, like ancient tombs. Jarbal is an unintended consequence, the village in the swarm’s flight path as it heads north to shred a tougher metallic foe.

Arkan gasps, and I said, maybe too snappily, “where was your house?”

“Turn left.”

I veer off the highway and I snake the truck between rubble-mounds.

We get out at the remains of the house. Strips of white washing blow, in hot winds, rags and tatters from a line, the roof collapsed.

We crunch through disintegrated mudbricks but there’s no sign of human casualties.

“They’d have seen that swarm coming. It was still daylight when it passed me. Could the villagers have run anywhere?”

“Maybe the reservoir?” says Arkan. Their precious water source.

We get back into the truck and head down a lumpy road between still viable fields, filled with rows of small wheat plants, ears too low for the blades. Hide and seek wasn’t in our contract. Down the slope there are remains – among the bits of goat, I see a severed hand.

Outside the circumference of swarm havoc, the reservoir lay still, with half a metal cover over it. Arkan leaps out and runs down to the edge and shout “Zandy! Zandy!”, presumably his wife’s nickname, or his boy. The heat was building, even at 8 in the morning.

“Zandy!” Some heads appeared over a mound behind the reservoir. Arkan runs towards them, and then there’s furious discussion. Four or five men, some women and kids. Fingers  point at me. I know what this is about, so I run back up the path for the truck. I start the vehicle.

“I’m going now Arkan.” I bellow. “Bring your family now. It’s not safe.” My hand reaches for my automatic pistol in the glovebox, and I keep it low.

At my shout, I see his face look up. He grabs his wife’s arm and she grabs a child, and he forcibly pushes her up the path. Villagers follow, but not aggressively. They look cowed and beaten, so I push the gun back on its shelf.

“Get in!”

Arkan pushes his child between the seats, into the back, and then helps his wife into the passenger seat. He climbs into the back with the kid.

“Go,” he says miserably. The woman, under her dirty head scarf who’d spent the night awake in the fields, looked drawn and upset.

“Salaam alaikum,” I say.

She just nods at me.

“Her parents were killed by the flying knives. They were too slow.”

“I’m sorry,” I murmur while bumping the vehicle down to the main road. “May they find peace with God.”

She nods another little acknowledgement.

“We can’t stay for the burial.” Arkan says.

“I don’t think so,” I agree, now crunching the van over the concrete lip onto the highway towards the city and pressing the pedal flat.

“The flying knives just kept going,” she finally croaks. “Just came through the village, and went on their way. Like we are of no consequence.”

You aren’t, I thought. Jarbal was an obstacle.

“The flying knives were silent. The goats screamed. We could hear them from my father’s fields. My neighbour ran but was caught by the knives and chopped to pieces in a fountain of blood.” She whimpers. “Will they come back?”

“Not those ones. But there will be other swarms.”

Swarms and swarms. On the way east we see some high-altitude rockets now aimed the other way, glint in the sky. From the Stryeolon forces. Metalschaft Corporation Rockets launched way out in the desert emplacements intercept with silent flashes and explosions as the rockets, bound for the city, are dematerialised. The Metalschaft consultants will be happy, while we are beyond caring.

Arkan’s wife weeps. Arkan comforts his distraught son with a hug. I feel panic, but this is existential. It’s always within me to some level. I’m in soft panic mode now as I’m sure we’re safe for a while, heading south.

My wife says she’s given up on me. “Why do you persist going into the zone of conflict? You’re a fool!” But there are people like Arkan and his wife in these towns. They have to eat and live as do we. She exhorts me to “stay in the city, do local deliveries”. Sometimes I wonder when I go up the northern highway, following my Father, whether she’s right?

I’m an insignificance on a chessboard driving along the lines between the black and white squares. That’s me, my friend. While I stick to the edges, pawns and rooks slide past, covered in blood, moved by the weapons companies as they fight for supremacy. Fuzzy clouds of thornball death too, satellite guided. Company satellites orbit with no morality. This is a large dusty hot chessboard where algorithms in Dallas, Shanghai, Tomsk or Teheran conduct an endless contest.

No chance of “being by myself” in the evening breeze, under starry, starry skies. Those thin-lipped software engineers testing their weapons are right here beside me on the plain.