Free Clear by Fire by Joshua Hood

of the peace. Afterward, he promised to make it up to her.
    Six months later, when he got back, they went on their Hawaiian honeymoon, but he could never fit the dream wedding into the unit’s schedule. The fights started, which surprised them both because they’d never really fought—before the war.
    Mason didn’t mind sleeping on the couch because, honestly, he didn’t sleep much anymore. He promised if she could just hold out a little longer they would be a real family outside the military.
    The next deployment to Iraq came four months after the first, and when he came home this time, it was to an empty house and a Post-it note that read, “I can’t do this.” Every room in the empty house smelled like her, but drinking seemed to help. After signing the divorce papers and putting the house on the market, Mason tried to move on.
    He volunteered for the next deployment because he didn’t want to stay in the States and figured that at least Iraq would be familiar, but he was wrong about that too. The country he’d left a few months before had imploded along the fractured lines of sectarian violence. The once-annoying insurgency had grown into a violent beast that roamed the cities and streets devouring soldiers and civilians alike.
    His wife had been his foundation. She was the light that brought him through the darkness, but now she was gone and he was lost. Worse than being lost, Mason realized that he was a cliché. He was a “Dear John” whose girl had been stolen while he was away. When he slept he dreamed about her fucking some other guy whose hands and mouth touched places he would never see again. His war wasn’t in Iraq; it was in the sweaty, twisted sheets of some other man’s bed, and it was killing him.
    One day he just stopped giving a fuck. Combat was the only thingthat got him out of his head. What others called “heroic actions in the line of duty,” he called a way out.
    Stopping to light a cigarette, he casually scanned the faces milling around him. Nothing stuck out, but he knew better than to ignore his instincts. Making his way up the street, he could see the Internet café perched two blocks north.
    On top of the café’s roof was an ancient satellite dish whose exposed cables ran to a crudely patched hole in the wall. Inside, a dark-skinned Arab sat behind a small desk covered in cigarette ash and empty cans of Wild Tiger energy drink. Without looking up from the grimy television set, he peeled a cracked square of plastic from a stack and slid it to the American.
    Mason looked at the faded number six written on the plastic and walked back through the dense haze of cigarette smoke until he found the assigned terminal. He passed the desk, continuing to the rear of the shop, where he located the exit, before returning to the computer. Taking a seat, he checked his watch and logged in.
    The space was jammed with computer terminals and the people sitting in front of them spanned every nationality in the region. Arabs, Africans, and Asians sat side by side, blowing smoke into the air, while chatting over Internet phones in their native languages. It was a chaotic homogenization of culture and technology that was unique to North Africa.
    Mason scanned the room as he waited for the computer to boot up. The connection was slow. He’d already been at the computer for a minute.
    Being on the run was impossible without a network, and while Mason had been taught to kill in the military, he had learned to survive from his mentor, Ahmed. Like him, the Libyan was a fugitive, and a deep friendship had grown between them. Over the years Mason had been able to repay the man for saving his life, but he never forgot the debt he owed.
    The Internet provided a level of ambiguity, but e-mail accountscould be hacked and traced, so he still had to be careful. Obscure chat rooms provided a way to hide in plain sight by using simple codes, and Ahmed had set up a list of such sites, which they rotated to avoid