The SMAW, which she had learned stood for Shoulder-mounted Multi-purpose Assault Weapon, came with a little rifle built into the side of the tube. You weren't supposed to hurt anybody with the rifle. It was just for lining up the real shot. Sarah squeezed the trigger and a cloud of splinters jumped off the flatbed. One of the machine gunners looked down, his head turning comically fast.
'Rocket,' she announced, and depressed the firing bar at the same time she touched the trigger mechanism. The magneto at the back of the SMAW clicked and super-hot plasma jumped out the back of the tube and through the far crew door, which she had remembered to open first. There was no recoil whatsoever, though the rocket launcher vibrated so much her hands went numb.
When she had chosen the SMAW from the arsenal on Governors Island she had rationalized that she was fighting liches, not just ghouls, and so she needed something bigger than just a sidearm. She hadn't considered at the time that she might be aiming her rockets at living people.
She had no choice. Those machine guns had to be taken out, and quickly. They could chew up the Jayhawk in seconds. She had no choice. She kept telling herself that.
Her rocket looked to her like a perfectly straight silver line drawn between the helicopter and the converted railroad car. When it reached the wooden surface of the flatbed it expanded in a cloud of brown and grey smoke. What looked like two hundred pounds of red jelly splattered across the flatbed and painted the side of the yurt, coated the dead men turning the flywheels near the front of the car. The dead men didn't stop.
The other machine gunner, the one she hadn't aimed for, was down on the deck, clutching his ears. He was coated in red jelly too. Sarah couldn't find any sign that her target, either the machine gun itself or the man who had been standing next to it, had ever even existed. Except for all that jelly.
She wanted to vomit, she very much intended to lean out the crew door of the Jayhawk and heave her guts out. Instead she rolled back inside and got out of the way of her replacements.
Three mummies stepped into the rectangular crew door opening and pulled open the telescoping tubes of their M72 Light Antitank Weapons. In perfect unison the mummies lifted the tubes to their cheeks, selected targets, and let fly. Their rockets popped out of their tubes with a hollow sound, fah-wuhp, fah-wuhp, fah-wuhp and twisted in mid-air as stabilizing fins popped out of their casings. Lying on a ballistic blanket on the floor of the helicopter Sarah couldn't see where the rockets went. Each M72 held only one 66 mm rocket: as one the mummies dropped their tubes out of the crew door and then stepped back to let the third wave move into place.
The solid fuel in the rockets combusted entirely before the rockets left their tubes. The exhaust gases thus produced could reach fourteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Sarah thought Ayaan had been right. She'd told Sarah many times that if you focused on the numbers and statistics and technical details it helped you not think about what you were doing to human bodies.
Red jelly... Sarah shivered and pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head.
She moved forward to stand in the hatch to the crew compartment where her father sat next to Osman. Gary crouched on the floor behind her father's seat. He looked different somehow but she couldn't place it. Maybe he had grown some. Yes, his legs looked longer. Maybe her father was subconsciously working on him even in that moment. 'Make a wide circle but let me see what we achieved,' she told Osman, who simply nodded.
Through the crew door she studied the column of people living and dead. She saw that half the flatbed looked damaged and parts of it were definitely on fire. It was still moving. It should stop at any moment as the Tsarevich gave the signal to halt the column and take cover. That was basic military tactics'the longer he stayed out in the open the longer she could dominate the engagement from the sky.