Chapter Text
He carefully put the laptop down and turned to face Mycroft.
“Missing?”
John had made a deal with the army in order to pay for going to university and medical school. Not long after he had finished he had been sent to Afghanistan, where there was a shortage of medical personnel. That had been almost three years ago. They had exchanged emails and phone calls whenever they could, but they hadn't seen each other since John left.
“The five other men in his squad were found dead this morning after a routine patrol in Kandahar, but there was no sign of him.”
Sherlock's face was blank and disbelieving, but only for s second as it quickly turned to rage.
“How could you let this happen?! You were supposed to be looking after him!”
“Sherlock,” Mycroft's face looked as calm as usual to the untrained eye, but Sherlock could see the pity in his eyes and it only served to make him angrier. “You know very well that he asked not to be treated differently. I had to respect his requ-”
“Get out. Go back to your office and don't come back until you find him. I want all the information on the attack, as well as information about the surrounding area and enemy actions.”
“I can't-”
“Yes you can. Now is not the time Mycroft.”
He watched with a stony glare as his brother turned and left the flat.
A few hours later, and Sherlock was sat in front of the information that he had requested. He has pictures of the scene of the attack. There are five men, thankfully none of them John, spreadeagled on the patchy grass, covered in blood, bits of gore and brains splattered on the ground around them, as well as their fellow soldiers.
As he looks at the picture he tries very hard not to think about what Mycroft had told him as he had handed him the pictures.
“We're doing everything we can, Sherlock. I'm doing everything we can; but I need to make sure that you know that just because they haven't found his body... it's no guarantee that he's still alive, and if he is, and we do get him back... he probably won't be in the state that you remember him...”
Mycroft had left after that, without another word. Sherlock had known that what Mycroft had said was true. He had known it before the words ever left his mouth, but he had still hated him for saying it.
But he decided to reject the idea. A few days ago, he had received his last email from John, where the doctor had told him that he would be coming home a couple of months early, making it just a few more weeks until they saw each other. That email was still open on his laptop now. He had reread it countless times that morning.
John never lied to him. If he said he was coming home early, then he was coming home early. This was definitely one thing that John wouldn't let anything stop him from. They hadn't seen each other for the better part of three years. It was important.
From the pictures alone he could see that it had been an ambush. Three of the five had been shot in the head, the other two in the head. They were all lying within ten feet of one another, and in a relatively straight line. That was how soldiers always walked on patrol in case of IEDs, following in one another's footsteps for safety. The fact that they were still in the same positions meant that they had had no time to run.
Someone had been waiting for them. The only irregularity in the line was between the fourth and fifth persons, where the gap was larger, closer to twenty feet. Where John was, his brain supplied. There was still a blood patch on the floor though, but not much. Flesh wound, or just taken away quickly?
He tried his best to distance his emotions from the case. It was getting hard to concentrate as he imagined John in pain, lying in the sandy grass, bleeding out as someone dragged him away, to somewhere dark and cold where there was no chance of help finding him...
“No.” he told himself firmly. That wouldn't do anything to help John. Think.
Out of all of them, only John had been taken. Why? They wouldn't have bothered if he had of been dead like the others. Which meant that either he was the only one who had survived the attack, or he had been the one that they had been after. From the wounds on the others, they would have been killed almost instantly, so that they had no chance to fight back. Why wouldn't they have been able to do the same to John if he had been taken unawares?
What with it being a planned attack, the fact remained that they must have been after something. John was the only thing that was missing.
'Okay,' He thought to himself, applying a new nicotine patch to join the other two already clinging to his left forearm. 'So they were after John.'
There were only three reasons they would have been after John;
John had information that they needed.
They were in need of a medic.
They wanted to use John, specifically John against someone.
The first one was obviously incorrect. John was a doctor. Relatively low military rank, obviously not even the highest ranking in the squad that he had been in at the time. There was nothing that he would have known that no-one else would. No, there was no reason for him to be specifically targeted for that.
The second was more plausible. The Taliban needed medics too, and if they had any of their own, they were probably not as well trained as those in the British army. John would have been wearing the white band on his arm with the red cross, clearly marking him as a medic, but it still didn't seem quite right.
He could see from the attached map that the nearest cover was too far away for Taliban weapons to shoot that accurately, even with twenty twenty vision and hands as steady as a dead man, and chance? Five times? No. it had to have been a high powered rifle of some kind.
Which left only the third option. John had been taken to get to someone personal in his life. Who? No-one local to that area could possibly have known personal details of John's life. The weapons used as well meant that either someone else had done it or at least had given the Taliban weapons in exchange for them finding him.
More to the point, who did John know that could be influential in Afghanistan? Mycroft? They didn't know each other that well, and as much as he knew that Mycroft like John, and he did, even if he never showed it and he was fairly sure that John hadn't realised it, he would never be prepared to compromise his job for anyone, perhaps not even Sherlock.
He texted Mycroft any areas on the maps that looked like likely places to take him, but in reality this was more Mycroft's area than his, and anything that he had seen Mycroft had probably known since he had first received the information.
There wasn't anything else that he could readily see from the pictures.
An hour later and he was still sat on the sofa staring at the pictures, willing them to tell him where John was when his phone began to ring.
Idly he picked it up without looking and answered in a bitter tone of voice. “Sherlock Holmes.”
“Sherlock. It's Lestrade. I need you to come down and look at a body for me.”
“I can't.”
“What do you mean you can't? Yesterday you sent me thirty seven messages to tell me that you were bored and you wanted a case!”
“Something's come up. Look, just tell me what you can over the phone and I'll help if I can.”
Lestrade humphed down the phone, obviously annoyed at Sherlock's sudden one eighty, but took a deep breath and began to fill him in anyway.
“Okay, we're at a warehouse by the side of the river, industrial area... there's one body. Male, probably early thirties... dark blond hair, average height, average build... cause of death looks like a gunshot wound to the shoulder. What's that?” his voice grew slightly fainter for a second, obviously talking to someone else for a moment as Sherlock heard other murmurings.
'For God's sake,' he thought as he rubbed his forehead. He was trying to help the man and he wasn't even paying attention to the phone call.
“Okay, we've just got an ID in the Vic... he's called... John Watson."