Free Target Response by William W. Johnstone, J. A. Johnstone

his pocket started squawking. Krentz hauled it into the light. Excited shouts came crackling from it.
    “What the devil?” Thurlow said.
    “I don’t know what it is, I can’t make it out.” Krentz depressed the TRANSMIT button and in the local language demanded to know what was going on. The excited-sounding squawking continued unabated. “Bloody kaffirs! Don’t know enough to stop transmitting all at once—”
    The radio was of a type that allowed only one user on the transceiver to transmit at a time. Until the present speaker took his finger off the transmit button, the circuit would be monopolized and no other transmission could get through.
    Popping sounds crackled somewhere upstream on the Kondo. The sound carried far over open water.
    “What’s that? Shooting?” Thurlow asked.
    The others in the boat stirred, coming to wakefulness. Sesto took his feet down from the top of the instrument board, placing them on the deck flooring. Hamid swung his swivel chair around toward the bow and began busying himself readying the machine gun. T’gai stood up, hands balled into fists.
    Sergeant Ajani rose, opening pop eyes whose corneas were as yellow as old ivory. Pleased by the prospect of action, he smiled, showing a mouthful of crooked teeth.
    The boat’s occupants looked upriver toward where the shooting was sounding. A shriek sounded through the transceiver before being abruptly cut off. “Aaaaiiieeee—!”
    The scream was accompanied by the release of a TRANSMIT button, clearing the circuit. Krentz took advantage of it to jump in and send his message, shouting for all other units to shut up so that he could arrange for an orderly succession of reports from the various handset users.
    Commotion showed in the camp on the point of the southeast shore of the Rada, with antlike blurs of troopers running to and fro, backlit by campfires.
    Flames flared into being on the Rada near the shore.
    “What’s that?” Thurlow demanded.
    Krentz peered into the dimness to see better. “Something is burning—”
    A dull crumping sound was followed by a vivid orange and red flash.
    “My God, one of the patrol boats blew up!” Krentz said.
    Pieces of burning wreckage floated on dark water. A puff of smoke telescoped outward from the blasted vessel, growing, climbing skyward.
    Searchlight beams crisscrossed upriver, scissoring as several boats tore back and forth across the Rada, searching for the cause of the commotion. Shafts of white light skimmed over land and water.
    The base camp was in an uproar, figures running about shouting wildly to no purpose except to menace each other.
    A sputtering sound neared as a patrol boat broke loose from the pack and plowed downstream away from the others.
    “It’s one of ours—why doesn’t the idiot turn on his light?” Krentz wondered aloud.
    Sesto started the engines. They labored roughly for an instant, coughing, choking, sputtering, then suddenly came alive with a dual, full-throated rumble of power.
    Hamid manned the aft machine gun, unlimbering it, unsnarling the cartridge belt so it would unwind freely from the ammunition box within which it lay coiled.
    T’gai took up a stance at the stern machine gun and set about readying it for action.
    Its searchlight dark, a square-bowed, flat-bottomed patrol boat came zipping downstream like a rock skimmed across the surface of the water. It cut a dirty-white wake across black water as it swung toward the gunboat to approach it at right angles to its starboard side. It came head-on at full throttle.
    “My God, they’re going to ram us!” Thurlow cried, backing away from the starboard side.
    Krentz was excited. “This is what we’ve been waiting for! The breakout!”
    “What?!—”
    “Action at last, Ward! Now we can make an end here!”
    The flat-bottomed boat closed fast, arrowing toward the starboard beam amidships.
    Hamid was unable to get his forward machine gun into play; the line of fire on the attacker was too acute