"We are ready for them now," General Bo said. "We will be no more ready if we know the exact hour of their arrival."
"The men are tense."
"Good. Tension will keep their blood warm."
"Do you think the tales are true, General? That the New Khan has come into the world?"
"I do not know and I do not care," Bo spat. "I am a military man and I understand this much: that no legend can stand before the steel bite of tanks, or withstand the blast of cannon. What the counterrevolutionaries learned at Tiananmen, these barbarian Mongols will relearn on this very spot."
The captain nodded solemnly. He swallowed.
And so they waited. Eyes scanned the horizon through held glasses. Night fell. No Mongols came. No line of horsemen troubled the southern horizon.
Captain Shen Ching, shivering in the interminable wait, slunk off to relieve himself against the battle-gray fender of a T55 tank.
His yellow urine turned red on the way to its destination as a long-nailed fist exploded his kidneys within his belly. His body was shoved under the tank.
A driver, tired of breathing the exhaust of his own body, popped the hatch on his tank, preferring to taste the bitter wind than suffer any longer.
A swish-chuck of a sound rang in his dead ears. His head rolled off his neck after the sword had sliced it away. Mongol boots kicked the glassy-eyed head under the tank. The body was pushed down. And so Boldbator entered the first tank undetected.
He slithered back through the driver's cockpit into the turret itself. Two men huddled there. They also died-one with a Mongol sword in his entrails, the other fighting to keep his neck from being snapped by the strong arm around it.
The arm proved stronger than his neck, which broke under a twisting wrench.
Casting the second limp body away, Boldbator reached up and undogged the turret by hand. He put on the broken-necked PLA soldier's helmet before he eased his upper body out into the bracing north wind.
He looked carefully to the left. Two helmeted heads showed through the two turret hatches. He nodded toward them twice.
They nodded back, also twice.
To the right, there was but one shadowy helmeted head. It soon became two. Then three.
He cast his eyes about. In the darkness, a wispy form moved about, taking solitary pickets unawares, and conquering them with swift blows to head and body. Each conquered Chinese body was dragged under sheltering tanks or armored personnel carriers.
Boldbator grunted his appreciation. The Master of Sinanju sowed death wherever he walked.
They waited. Other turret lids clanged open. Other figures appeared. In the darkness, their padded jackets were indistinguishable from the heavy overcoats of the Chinese infantrymen.
An hour passed. The tension of the assembled Fist Platoon lessened as the men, massed behind the tanks, mistook the emerging tank crews as a signal to relax.
Then the first line of horses appeared.
General Bo spotted them. He barked a guttural order.
And in response, the occupants of the tanks fired up their engines. Boldbator slipped into his tank. He crawled toward the driver's pit, knowing that in the other tanks his comrades were doing the same.
He started his engine. The low, throaty rumble was matched by echoing surges on either side.
The order came to move out, to meet the oncoming Mongol charge head-on.
Boldbator grinned. And threw the engine into reverse.
General Bo at first thought it was the fault of a nervous tank driver. A tank backed up, crushing a jeep. The jeep's complement leapt to safety-all except the driver, who screamed incoherently at the remorseless steel treads chewing his frail flesh to rags.
Then other tanks backed up. And the foot soldiers of the vaunted Fist Platoon broke and ran in retreat from their own armor.
General Bo shouted over the din, demanding order.
Instead, he got a shock as a T-55 abruptly tractored around and came toward him. Its lights blazed in his face. And in the backglow, no longer shadowed by a helmet, was a wide bronze face. A Mongolian face, grinning with the lust of battle.
It was a ferocious expression that generation upon generation of Chinese soldiers had learned to fear.
And now it was coming at him, housed by a bulletproof monster of gray steel.
General Bo reached for his sidearm and brought it to bear on that taunting visage.
The bullet left the barrel with a spiteful crack.
The wide Mongol face disappeared. General Bo looked past the puff of gunsmoke his weapon had created.
The face came back up like a devil from a box.
The tank came on.
General Bo broke and ran. All around him his Fist Platoon scurried like chickens before a fox. They were dying like chickens, too. Treads gnashed and pulverized them.
And what the tanks didn't get, the horsemen did.
They came out of the south like thunder, joining with the PLA forces with flashing swords and the occasional cracking sidearm. But as Chinese soldiers fell, their AK-47's were scooped up by leaning horsemen, who never broke stride as they claimed the spoils of battle.
Soon the bursts of AK-47 fire were coming from horseback. The tanks were abandoned as the last clot of the ruptured Fist Platoon were thinned into sobbing men trying to escape with their lives.
Heads were liberated from running torsos. Arms fell from shoulders under clean downward strokes.
And like a dervish weaving a tapestry with threads of blood, among them moved the Master of Sinanju, his fingernails, like a thousand tiny daggers, seeking vital organs and arteries.
And then the roar of battle abated. The horsemen regrouped at the command of their leader.
General Bo crawled out from under a T-55, his arms raised in surrender.
"I am your prisoner," he said in shame.
A lone Mongol rode up to him. "Are you ignorant of your own history?" he demanded. "Mongols do not take prisoners," and he relieved General Bo Wanding of his head with an unexpected backhand sweep of his sword.
Then, their work done, the border of Outer Mongolia lay open to them and they rode into it, masters of the everlasting horizon.