"My" troops don’t even need to hear the words. Even as I was issuing the order, the first of the two infantry mortars on the bow deck of the Able boat coughs, echoed by both tubes on the Baker boat. The whine of the Riverine’s engine is too loud for me to hear the projectiles in flight, but I certainly do hear them detonate. Perfectly timed airbursts, about twenty meters above the river, maybe fifty meters off-shore, between us and the guns. Way too far out to damage armored auto-turrets, of course, even if the warheads had been straight high-explosive, which they weren’t. Instead, when they went boom, they sent up a big floating cloud of drek that glittered and twinkled in the watery afternoon light.