That was before he was sent to Kosovo. He stepped off the plane and realized it was, in fact, possible for Hell to freeze over. The war in Kosovo, supposedly over for ten years, seemed to have been preserved under a thick layer of ice.

There were still bomb craters and rubble in the streets where the U.N. peacekeepers patrolled. Armed bandits still hijacked cars at night. The Russian Mafiya smuggled guns and drugs. All the while, the Serbian army waited at the border, pacing like an angry dog behind a fence.

Wayne had been at a window in an abandoned building behind his M24 sniper rifle for six hours now. The boredom he could handle—but the cold was killing him. He wasn’t even allowed to use chemical hand warmers; his sergeant said the bad guys had thermal imaging capability.

They didn’t look that sharp, Wayne thought. He checked them again through his scope, careful not to touch his skin to the freezing metal.

They waited in the courtyard of the bombed-out apartments, sixteen stories down from his position. Bunch of big, unibrow, Cro-Magnon SOBs, their hairlines almost meeting their beards. All wearing trench coats. The cold didn’t seem to bother them at all.

They were called the Vukodlak, which was supposed to be Serbian for the Wolf Pack, or something. He hadn’t been paying attention to that part of the briefing.

They looked as bored as Wayne felt. He wondered, not for the first time, why his Army Ranger unit was babysitting a bunch of former death-squad thugs. Surely the locals could handle this.

Hell, Wayne could end it right now, all by himself. The Wolf Pack was a little over a hundred yards away—point-blank range for any sniper. He could kill each man on the ground before they knew what was happening. He’d done it before.

Back home in Casper, Wyoming, Wayne was the quiet kid in the back of the class. He wasn’t unpopular, he was just there. Sort of taking up space, drifting along in life.

Then 9/11 hit, and everyone in his family assumed he’d put off college and enlist, because they were at war now, and that’s what kids do in a war, right? They join the army. He put his community college application away, unfinished, and signed up at a recruiting station in a mini-mall.

He was surprised to find his talent for fading into the background becoming useful for the first time. He was selected for Sniper School, then joined the Rangers.

He never thought he’d get used to the blood and death—much less delivering it. He found he could simply focus on the quiet place in himself. That was where he pulled the trigger, and that was where he stacked the bodies. Sometimes he worried about what would happen when he got home—if the bodies would all spill out into the rest of him, or if the quiet place would just sit there, untouched, and he’d go on as normal as ever, for the rest of his life.

He wasn’t sure which was worse, actually. He tried not to think about it too much.

He kept his shit together. He survived. By the end of his first tour, the other guys in his unit looked at him like a veteran. They depended on him.

He was no longer just a placeholder. In fact, he was kind of a badass. After three years, he thought he’d seen it all.

Which is why he was annoyed, but not surprised, when his unit was pulled off the active hunt for an al-Qaeda cell and sent to this winter wonderland. The army had its own way of doing things. Orders were orders.

Wayne’s CO had been more tight-lipped than usual, but the rumors made their way down.

When Kosovo declared independence, that didn’t go over too well with the Serb neighbors. A bunch of Serbian nationals walked past the shack that served as a border checkpoint, and immediately began rioting in front of the U.S. Embassy. Some buildings got torched, and in the confusion, someone lost something important. Something big. It turned up with the Wolf Pack, who offered it to the highest bidder. The U.S. wanted it back.

Above all, the whole thing had to be kept quiet. The Rangers were good at quiet.

After they got to Kosovo, they spent a day and a half tracking the Serbs. But when they found the Wolf Pack, they were told to stay back and wait.

All the sergeant said was, move in, set up a ring, and make sure none of the Serbs left it. Questions were met with the kind of silence that implied a court-martial in the near future.

The CO got a message from way up the chain of command. A flight came in from Ansbach in Germany, and he sent a couple of Rangers to the airfield. They came back with a duffel full of cash.

Wayne figured it out then. The U.S. might not negotiate with terrorists, but it would sure as hell bribe them. He had seen plenty of it first-hand in Iraq, with CIA spooks giving away stacks of hundred-dollar bills stuffed in the aptly named Halliburton briefcases. Just one of those stacks could have bought his parents a new house. But the funds were ear-marked for the people busy shooting at their son.

The only other thing they brought back from the plane was what the army called a “transfer case.” But everyone knew what it was: a casket, used to take the bodies of dead soldiers home.

It gave Wayne the creeps. He was glad to take his sniper position and get away from it.

Wayne decided he hated this James Bond crap.

But orders were orders.

The sun dipped behind the empty buildings. It would be full dark in a matter of minutes. Wayne began to worry about his toes falling off, like loose ice cubes inside his boots.

Then his radio crackled to life. “Stand ready,” the CO told the unit. “We’re going to open the package.”

The sun vanished completely behind the horizon. The dark came down like a sudden rain.

Wayne switched his scope to night-vision and checked on the Wolf Pack again—and nearly jumped back. One of the Serbs was staring right up into the window. As if he could see him there.

Impossible. He was totally concealed. The Serb would have to be able to see in the dark. He looked back through the scope.

The Serb was still staring. Had to be a coincidence. People stare at things, look around aimlessly, when they’re bored. It didn’t mean anything.

Then the man made a gun with his thumb and forefinger, and pointed it directly at Wayne. And winked.

Wayne’s finger twitched involuntarily on the trigger, because every instinct he had screamed to kill the man.

Despite the cold, Wayne started to sweat.

The man moved out of the range of the scope. Wayne dialed back the magnification quickly, to get a view of the whole courtyard.

Another man was being dragged by two of the Serbs. He was dressed in all-black Special Forces fatigues, without insignia—the kind the spooks loved to wear, even in broad daylight in the desert, when the temperature got above 120 degrees. Then they bitched about how the dust and sand got all over the neat creases in their clothes.

Some covert ops cowboy, and they’d have to bail his ass out. Still, Wayne wondered—where did he come from? They had the area staked out a mile in every direction, and he’d never seen the guy arrive. Sure, he could have missed it . . . but there would have been some radio chatter. Something.

He shoved the thoughts away, along with the cold and the fear that had seized him a moment before. It all vanished as he went through his pre-shoot rituals. The world narrowed to the field of focus through his scope. It was comforting.

The Serbs kicked the operative to the ground. Wayne winced—that looked like it hurt—but the man didn’t. He didn’t even seem bothered. Or scared.

He was dragged up, and then kicked down again—made to kneel before the leader of the Wolf Pack. The Alpha Male, Wayne guessed. The biggest guy in the group, a wildly bearded man at least six-five, packed with muscle. He looked like he could eat everyone else in the courtyard for lunch.

Wayne heard a burst of Serbian through his earpiece. The spook was wired with his own radio, broadcasting on the Rangers’ channel.

The operative’s mike picked up the sound of the Alpha’s laughter, and Wayne felt cold again.

“Please don’t attempt to speak in my language,” the Alpha Male said. “It’s insulting.” Crisp, clear English.

The man shrugged. “Fine,” he said. Wayne was impressed. This guy didn’t sound the least bit scared. “You’re the Vukodlak, then?”

“We are. But you do not appear to have what I want.”

“I need to confirm that you have the object.”

“Why don’t you ask your soldiers? They’ve been here all day.”

That’s when the Alpha pointed up into the air—directly at Wayne, then at the positions of his fellow Rangers, all around the apartments.

Impossible, Wayne thought. Totally frigging impossible . . .

He clicked his radio on. “Sarge, we’re made—” Panic in his voice, despite his best effort.

“Shut up,” the sergeant snapped back. “Maintain radio silence.”

Because of this exchange, Wayne only caught the tail end of what the Alpha Male said.

“—your big plan? They would come running to your rescue? We will be chewing on their hearts before they pull their triggers.”

The Serb turned back toward Wayne. This time there was no doubt. The Serb stared right at him. And smiled, with perfect teeth that glowed in the night-vision scope.

It took everything Wayne had not to get up and run.

More laughter. All the Serbs were practically howling now.

The operative spoke after the tumult died down.

“You’ll get the cash, as we agreed, once I have the item.” He sounded bored.

Brass balls, Wayne thought.

The Alpha considered this for a moment. Apparently he wanted the cash. He nodded, and two of his thugs went into a tent.

They emerged a second later with a metal box, marked with U.S. Army stencils. Wayne couldn’t read them with the scope, but it looked like the sort of thing you didn’t want to open.

The Alpha opened it.

For a moment, a light bloomed in Wayne’s scope. It played hell with the optics, like the night-vision didn’t know how to adjust for it. Then it cast an eerie glow around the courtyard.

Oh, Christ, Wayne thought. They have a nuke. The secrecy all made sense now. The army would do anything to keep a nuke out of the hands of terrorists. Even send a whole Ranger unit into an ambush.

He could see the weird glow reflect on the operative. He looked too young to be out in the field alone. His features were perfectly calm—way too calm. Maybe they had doped him up, so he didn’t know he was going to be a sacrificial lamb.

Wayne peered intently inside the box. It seemed too small to hold a nuclear weapon, but he heard they could fit those things inside suitcases now. Maybe this was just the next generation. The glow made it hard to see, but he could have sworn the eerie light was coming from something shaped like a human hand. . . .

Whatever it was, the operative nodded, and the Serbs closed the lid. The glow switched off like a lamp, and the scope’s optics went back to normal.

The operative looked at the Alpha Male. “Some things shouldn’t be touched,” he said.

The scorn in the Alpha’s voice came through Wayne’s earpiece. “Then you should have been more careful with it.”

“You’re right.” The operative stood. “Drop it,” he said into his radio.

Across the courtyard from Wayne, about ten stories down, there was movement in one of the blown-out windows. He saw a guy from his unit toss the black duffel bag.

It landed a few feet from the Serbs. One went over to it, pawed it open, and examined the contents.

He displayed the open bag to the Alpha, showing the stacks of cash.

The Alpha frowned. “We really prefer euros,” he said.

“You get what I have.”

The operative picked up the box by its handle, and turned to go.

Wayne couldn’t believe it. It couldn’t be that simple.

Of course it couldn’t. The Serbs closed ranks, blocking the man’s path out of the courtyard.

“I don’t think so,” the Alpha said, with his perfect enunciation.

The operative didn’t turn around to face him. His shoulders sagged for a moment, as if he was very tired. Then he straightened up again.

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I promised my boys some sport. American soldiers ought to be able to hold out longer than our usual game.”

The Serbs were closer to the man now. Moving in. Wayne didn’t know why he was so close to panic again. This made no sense. None of them had pulled a weapon. They didn’t seem to have any guns. They were covered by an armed force in a superior position. They should be the ones who were afraid.

And yet, they seemed ready to tear the operative apart with their bare hands.

“Walk away now,” the operative said. His voice was stern, like he was being firm with an unruly child.

The Alpha snarled. “You don’t order me around,” he said. “Your teeth aren’t sharp enough.”

“Perhaps not,” the operative admitted. Quick as a blink, he whirled and brought out a knife. It reflected silver in the moonlight. “But this is. Walk away now, and you get to live.”

The Alpha took a step back. He seemed more frightened of the knife—a simple KA-BAR, from what Wayne could see—than of all the heavy artillery around him.

He still shook his head. “Only one of us gets to leave here alive tonight.”

“You’re right,” the operative said. He put the box down.

Then they were on him.

In spite of himself, Wayne shouted, “Jesus Christ!” and prepared to fire.

The CO’s voice came loud and clear over the channel. “Hold your fire!” he screamed. “Do not fire! Damn it, do not fire!”

It was insane. The Serbs were going to kill the man. They were like rabid dogs: growling, snarling, flecks of foam at their mouths.

Then the first Serb went flying out of the mob. He landed hard on a pile of rubble, his head nearly cut off by a jagged slash at his throat. Dead.

And then another, launched out of the pack like he had been fired from a cannon. He clutched a bloody stump where his hand used to be.

There were several more already on the ground, like broken dolls. Wayne could see the operative now—barely. He was a blur inside the trench coats, stopping only when he sliced one of them. Then another Serb would fall over.

Wayne noticed the Alpha Male standing back, watching. He didn’t look pleased, but made no move to help his crew.

The operative ducked, and kicked, and a Serb howled with pain, holding his knee where the lower leg flopped uselessly, shattered. The howling stopped, the operative’s knife blurring away from the Serb’s throat, blood floating in the air in its wake.

The Alpha Male turned, the bag of cash in his hand. He was going to leave.

The operative saw this. But he was still dealing with the other Serbs, who didn’t know or didn’t care that their leader was about to abandon them. They threw themselves back into the scrum, even if they were missing limbs. As if they felt no pain.

The Alpha Male began to walk. He was going to get away.

The hell he was.

Wayne flipped his scope to focus solely on the Alpha.

He aimed, breathed out smoothly and pulled the trigger.

The sound of the M24 was a polite cough.

It was a beautiful shot. It should have split the Alpha’s head right at the temple.

Except the Alpha Male wasn’t there anymore.

Impossible. A hundred yards, a bullet traveling at twenty-eight hundred feet per second . . . he would have had to move before the noise of the shot could reach his ears. Faster than the speed of sound.

Frantically, Wayne scanned the courtyard, trying to reacquire the Alpha.

He didn’t have to look far. The Serb leader stood just a few feet away. Scowling. At Wayne.

He looked seriously pissed.

Before Wayne could fire another shot—before he could even think about it—the Alpha was gone again.

Dimly, he realized his sergeant was shouting at him over his earpiece: “—You fucking idiot, Denton, move, move, get out of there—”

He noticed the operative was dealing with the last two members of the Wolf Pack. The only survivors. But the operative spared a glance up at the window. He looked almost as pissed as the Alpha had.

Wayne stood, began to stow his gear. His legs were like wood. His movements were clumsy and slow.

Then he heard something in the stairwell. Something coming.

His mind shut down. He didn’t care anymore that it was impossible. That no one could climb thirty-two flights of stairs in less than thirty seconds.

All he knew was the Alpha Male was coming for him.

He lurched toward the door, his legs rubbery, his rifle in one hand, the rest of his gear on the floor.

The door shattered open before he got there, flying off its hinges.

The Alpha Male stood in the doorway. His wild beard had grown, joining the fur at his chest, on his head. His shape was twisted under the long coat, his arms and legs longer than anything human. He opened his mouth, and that’s when Wayne realized he was looking into a snout, filled with the sharp, jagged teeth of a dog.

No. Not a dog.

Sometimes, during firefights in Iraq, everything would slow down. Wayne would remember things. Like how an insurgent’s headband had the same colors as a football team he used to play against in high school.

This time, it was something more immediate. He remembered what Vukodlak meant.

It didn’t mean “wolf pack.” It meant “werewolves.” It was the Serbian word for werewolves.

He smelled the blood and meat on the breath of the Alpha, and realized it wasn’t just a nickname.

He raised the rifle, and heard, rather than felt, his fingers break as the Alpha tore the gun away.

He was on his back, throat exposed, before he even knew how he’d gotten there.

The long teeth were above his neck, and he felt saliva dripping from the Alpha’s mouth, smelled the feral stink of its excitement.

He was going to die.

There was a scrabbling noise, then movement at the window. Cold air rushed past Wayne, and the weight of the monster left him.

The Alpha was knocked across the room, slamming into the crumbling plaster wall.

Somehow, the operative was there, between the nightmare thing and Wayne.

He’d covered sixteen stories almost as quickly as the Alpha—only he hadn’t used the stairs.

Struggling to find words, Wayne pointed at the gun, trying to tell the man to use it.

The operative ignored him. The Alpha got to his feet—Wayne noticed, for the first time, they were bent at an angle, like a dog’s hind legs. He hesitated, growling, a long string of drool hanging from his muzzle.

He spoke, his words rough and high-pitched at the same time. Exactly like a dog that’s learned to talk, Wayne thought.

“My pack,” was all he said.

The operative smiled. “You should have kept your boys on a leash.”

The operative still had the knife, gleaming bright where it wasn’t covered in blood.

The Alpha Male looked at it, a challenge in his eyes.

The operative nodded, and flung his weapon down. The knife thudded into the floor.

The Alpha Male released a howl that became a scream as he leaped, growling and snapping, eyes burning with rage.

The operative didn’t move.

For a second, all Wayne could see was the Alpha Male’s muzzle, his bright white snarl.

But somehow, the operative caught the werewolf by the neck, in midair. He held the thing there like it was a bad puppy. The Alpha thrashed and howled.

Then the operative reached with his other hand, grabbed the Alpha’s lower jaw, right between those snapping teeth—and tore it clean off.

Shock and pain filled the Alpha’s eyes, and it tried to howl again. But the noise was drowned by the sudden rush of blood pouring down its throat.

The operative stood, holding the Alpha off the ground, until there was no more movement.

He dropped the body to the floor. Went back to his knife and pulled it from the floor, then turned and sank it into the creature’s chest.

The doglike rear legs kicked once, and didn’t move again. Wayne stared at the operative. The black fatigues were covered with blood, and torn, but the man didn’t have a mark on him.

He glared at Wayne. The soldier suddenly realized he was alone with something infinitely more frightening than the Serbs.

Wayne considered leaping out the window. It had to be preferable to whatever else was coming.

Maybe the operative realized this, because the anger on his face faded.

He picked up the M24, and handed it, stock-first, back to Wayne.

Wayne took it, fumbled and nearly dropped it. That was when he remembered the fingers of his right hand were broken.

“You were ordered not to shoot for a reason,” the operative said, his voice cold. “It just makes them angry.”

Wayne finally found his voice. “That was—” He stopped, looked at the corpse in the room with them.

It was a man again. Missing his lower jaw and half his face, yes, but recognizably human.

“That’s not possible,” Wayne said. “No way that just happened. That can’t be real.”

“That’s right,” he said. “It never happened. Because if what you saw was real, you would never go home. You understand me?”

Wayne nodded.

“Good,” the operative said. He turned to leave.

Wayne knew he should have stayed quiet. But the question escaped him before he could stop it, or even think about it.

“What are you?” he asked quietly.

He wasn’t sure the operative heard him. But then the man stopped at the door and turned back.

He grinned in an unfunny way. “I’m on your side,” he said. “That’s all you need to know.”

It took the other Rangers a half-hour to pile the dead bodies in the center of the courtyard. They poured gasoline. The corpses burned faster than Wayne had ever seen before.

The operative had the metal box under his arm while he watched. The unit medic was splinting Wayne’s fingers when the CO approached.

The CO had his hand out for the box. “I’ll take that now,” he said, in his usual, don’t-fuck-with-me tone of voice.

The operative made no move to let go. “No,” he said. Simply, quietly. No room for argument.

“My orders—”

“You shouldn’t have lost it in the first place.”

The CO looked uncomfortable. “Look,” he said. “I don’t want to fight with you . . .”

The operative glanced at the pile of burning bodies, then back at the CO.

“That’s right,” he said. “You don’t.”

The CO wasn’t used to having anyone question his orders. But he wasn’t stupid. He walked off, catching Wayne’s eye as he went. Wayne looked away quickly.

The operative kept the box.

Debriefing was quick, and the CO and the sergeant both made the same point as the operative: this mission never happened. None of the Rangers saw anything. Forget you were ever in Kosovo.

They were on a plane back to Iraq before morning. The box—and the casket, Wayne noticed—went back in another plane, headed for God knows where.

Wayne was more than happy to forget it. He would work at it every day for the rest of his life, in fact.

But there was one thing that stuck with him, that woke him up in a cold sweat until the day he died, no matter how much he tried to push it away.

He’d never forget what he saw when the operative grinned. Only the man—of course, he wasn’t actually a man, but it made Wayne feel better to call him that—hadn’t been grinning.

He was showing the long, curved fangs in his mouth, right where his eyeteeth should have been.

And he still had the jawbone in one hand.