Wait For Me || John "Soap" MacTavish x OC (Call Of Duty)

28. Follow the money

Not even thirty minutes later, chasing the sun as it sank below the horizon, Yael watched Johnny leap into a departing helicopter. 

Bound for a private island just a few miles off the coast, at least that's what she'd managed to glean. 

"To follow the money," the sergeant had grinned, but in the depths of his blue eyes, a shadow navigated, something too much like worry for her to miss. 

She tried to ignore it, just as she avoided registering the tense muscles of his jaw beneath the cocky smile she knew so well. 

Yael watched him climb aboard blindly, his gaze locked onto hers so tightly it took her breath away, his powerful arm braced against the internal handle of the fuselage, and a military salute, directed at her, caught impudently on his fingers. 

She couldn't answer.The doctor sighed, but didn't ask if he would return, as Lieutenant Riley slammed the hatch shut in one swift motion and the thud was lost, swallowed up by the heavy beat of the rotors. 

It vibrated inside her at a hundred decibels, and she realized she didn't know what her expression was. Any thought seemed to have been sucked up by that whirlwind of dust and debris, carried high by the cold, earthy wind that swept down from the mountains.

Yael returned to the medical hangar mechanically, the soft thud of her boots on the damp concrete in perfect sync with the heavy beats of her heart. 

Sleep seemed almost impossible that night. 

Partly due to the obvious discomfort of the solitary bunk in the sparse, almost bare quarters, and largely due to the presence of the small radio transmitter abandoned on the aluminum nightstand. 

She could even see it in the dark, an almost imperceptible silhouette, and yet it seemed to weigh on her like a boulder. 

She tossed and turned between the starched sheets, torn between the urge to access Bravo-Seven's radio channel and the strange feeling of not knowing where she belonged. 

In the operating room, she had always been very clear about her role, whether as first or second operator, she knew how to move, what to hope for, what to say. Since she had set foot in that small base near Verdansk, however, she had struggled to recognize herself. 

Near the plastic shell of the radio, she could clearly distinguish the outlines of the semi-automatic pistol stowed in its holster, and again, a pang of nostalgia pierced her unpleasantly at an unspecified point behind her sternum. 

Suddenly, she wondered if she would ever pay the price for that audacity. 

She squeezed her eyelids shut in a childish motion, repeating to herself that it had been her choice, over and over again, until she fell into a light, dreamless sleep. 

It wasn't dawn yet when the distant, muffled noise of a helicopter, which seemed to be flying over an area not too far from the perimeter, abruptly brought her back to reality. She felt herself torn away from something intangible and unknown, from the unpleasant sensation of an unfinished business. 

With her heart pounding in her throat and a trickle of cold sweat running down her back, Yael resigned herself to the idea that going back to sleep was now a vain hope. 

In the diaphanous light that, from the transverse windows, cut obliquely across the concrete of the long corridors, she groped her way, her legs stiff from the cold and fatigue, to the communal showers. 

She got ready calmly, her comings and goings monitored by the two guards who patrolled the deserted runway. In the cold, clear sky there was no trace of that helicopter she had heard, unmistakably, dirtying the night silence, on the other hand, pilot Nikolai's aircraft was under maintenance in the main hangar.