Summary: In which colonel Masterson is unhappy to discover that his bad day can indeed get worse.

Colonel Masterson was not having a good day. In fact, one could say that it was less a bad day then a series of terrible-awful-horrible days bound together by both the passage of time and circumstance.

When Colonel Kirk Masterson had woken up that morning it had not been with the intention of kidnapping an unsuspecting member of the British public, or inadvertently starting a war between the USA and an unknown genius with a chip on their shoulder. But such is life.

Kirk Masterson was a good officer - he had the testimonials to prove it - indeed he was the sort of officer you'd want in a crisis and was known for both his talent with strategy and for keeping a calm head in a crisis.

His mother, may god rest her soul, had wanted him to be an accountant like his father. But the young Kirk, full of blind patriotic vim and vigour and a healthy dose of youthful ignorance, had decided a life in the USAF being shot at for president and country was more appealing than a desk job involving numbers and endless forms. When he'd joined the USAF at the age of 22 - fresh from college and a head filled with glamourous images from Hollywood blockbusters like Top Gun - he had envisioned a glittering military career, full of fast jets, camaraderie, medals and girls. At least some of that had proved true and after 20 years in the military he had never had cause to question, or regret, that decision.

Until now, that is.

His day had started off much the same as most other days and was inconsiderate enough not to warn him – or in any way prepare him – for the events he would shortly be embroiled in. It started with an email, hardly an uncommon occurrence, even if this one was marked urgent and had four exclamation marks after the subject heading. It turned out that the email was just the start. Within half an hour of receiving the email – and before he'd even had a chance to read it – the phone had rung and a message left that he was to see General Trenton immediately. Masterson's reaction to such a summons was, like most people's, to take a deep breath and go find the nearest source of readily available caffeine.

No good day ever starts with a phone call from a general.

His day got worse from there.

It had, at first, seemed like an ordinary routine mission. A briefcase had been temporarily misplaced, a briefcase which unfortunately contained a lot of top-secret documents which should have been stored on an encrypted hard drive, but on this occasion had been printed off by the elderly owner of the said briefcase because he, quote "couldn't get his head around new-fangled technology" and "surely paper was the best security as it couldn't be hacked".

The mission parameters were simple: go to England and assist the secret service team in locating the briefcase. What a relief, he had thought: after all the urgency and build up it was a straightforward mission, one with low probability of failure or loss of life. What could go wrong. In any case, how much trouble could finding one briefcase be, and had said as much to his stressed looking superior officer. It was probably in the owner's bathroom or someplace equally ridiculous. Only five months ago the individual in question had sent his secret service team into a tizzy over his missing wallet, which turned out to be in his other coat, and the month before that there had been a similar fracas over misplaced glasses, which turned out to be the ones he was actually using. The individual clearly had more than a few bats in his belfry and the greater wonder was why a USAF special operations and secret service team were being dispatched when what he needed was a full time minder.

He better understood the General's frazzled expression now, however, because it wasn't any old briefcase and the security team dispatched to locate it weren't any old security team.

It all seemed quite routine at the start and he had actually thought his day might be improving until, that was, the Heads of the CIA and FBI were escorted onto his plane; where they proceeded to take over, make a mess and generally be a massive pain in his – and everyone else's – lives while they got settled.

His day got worse from there. A lesser officer might have allowed nerves to get the better of him at this point, but Colonel Masterson was a USAF officer through and through, and he would not allow his unusual passengers or the unusual situation to get the better of him.

At first all had gone to plan. They had arrived on time at the U.S. run airbase in Lakenheath, the men in black had departed and he expected a call to say the case had been found in short order.

The first clue Colonel Masterson had that things were not going as planned was, when the call finally came in, it was Mr Bloomsbury himself on the other end, and he was not happy. In his usual succinct way, he explained that the briefcase had not been found, but the flat mate of the man who could find it had been, and that the CIA and FBI had decided it would be Masterson's job to get him somewhere safe while they, as the most senior security agents available, negotiated for the briefcase's return.

At 21:23, just under two hours after the phone call, a black SUV had trundled up to the waiting plane and in short order an unconscious male had been loaded into the hastily created VIP suite. The fight plan already been submitted, and within half an hour of the unconscious man's arrival, they were taxiing on the runway and preparing to take off.

There's a phrase his father is very fond of, "those who can't do, get promoted." His father was particularly fond of using it in relation to politicians, managers, and the armed forces, which had been the cause of many arguments between them over the past 20 years since Masterson junior first embarked on his military career. After the events of today, however, Colonel Masterson was starting to think his father might have been on to something after all. How else could you explain the colossal clusterfuck he was currently in the middle of.

All was quiet, until it suddenly wasn't. They were four hours into the return flight when a message came through on their encrypted communications channel, to warn them that there had been a suspected cyber-attack against American banking institutions. Such things, while concerning, were also fairly common and usually swiftly resolved, so apart from a commiserating eye roll with his 2IC Colonel Masterson was not unduly alarmed, and soon his attention had shifted back to what he was meant to be focussing on – reading the dossier on one John Watson MD.

Considering the urgency with which the man had been bundled out of the SUV and into his plane, the profile made for confusing reading. On the surface there was little to explain why the CIA and FBI were so interested in the man. He was a former army doctor, invalided out of his regiment due to injuries sustained while on active duty in Iraq, and was now working as a locum GP in London. He had no known affiliations with terrorist groups, no skeletons in the family closet and nothing at all to suggest he was linked in any way to the disappearance of the briefcase and top-secret documents, which was what had brought them haring across the pond in the first place.

It was all rather odd – and Colonel Masterson disliked odd. In his experience, 'odd' meant trouble – and that was precisely what they were meant to be avoiding on this spec ops mission.

Odd got odder after he went to check on their guest and found him conscious, calm and surprisingly eloquent on both the illegality and immorality of the situation. It was very odd. Colonel Masterson had been expecting a healthy dose of fear, panic driven shouting and anger; instead, he was met with calm resignation and had the strangest sensation that he was being humoured by their captive. John Watson was a puzzle and a frustrating one at that. He also kept mentioning someone – something? – called Sherlock, as if it / they were something the USAF, and by extension the USA, should be concerned by. It was nearly laughable.

Three hours later, and nine into their flight to a top-secret airstrip near Washington DC, no one was laughing anymore.

The cyber attack had just been the start; a shot across their bows as it were. In hindsight that incident was like the small pebbles that herald an avalanche – and now they were drowning, quite literally, in shit. Unheard of terrorist cells gaining access to secret American bases, a diplomatic fracas with the Bulgarian Government, a financial crisis with China, The Dominican Republic out for blood over the damage done to one of their VIP golf resorts, Egyptian militants armed with American weapons they most certainly should not have, and now the new generation of Gamma spy satellites had been unveiled.

It was a nightmare of unimaginable proportions and, if the intelligence coming through from the CIA was to be believed, all down to one man. Sherlock Holmes. And now, just to add even more joy to his life, the heads of the CIA and FBI wanted him – him, Colonel Kirk Masterson – to go and talk to Watson and find out how to stop his maniac flatmate from undoing thirty years of US foreign policy and technological advancement in one day.

The world was ending – and what was worse, they had no idea how it had happened or how to stop it. The only thing they did know was the why.

The why was, at this precise moment in time, munching his way through a thoughtfully provided MRE, and showing his total ingratitude by complaining after every other forkful.

"I did try to warn you," was all a clearly amused Watson would say when Colonel Masterson went to do the CIA and FBI's bidding and question the man, his wide grin morphing into a moue of distaste as he took another bite of the meal before him.

"Warn me?" Masterson demanded, outraged.

Watson grimaced and poked at something in the gloop before him. "Yes," he said, his pleasant tone a stark contrast to the wintry smile on his face. "Both you and those other chaps – the black suited goons who abducted me," he clarified at Masterson's look of befuddlement.

The doctor heaved a heavy sigh and gave up what was left his meal as a bad lot and not worth the indigestion it would likely cause. "I know good advice is usually ignored, but I like you Colonel Masterson, so I'll repeat it again: there is no persuading Sherlock, no convincing him, no cajoling, no enticement that will get him to do something he doesn't want too – take it from someone who lives with him and has tried all these things – and there's certainly no negotiating with him. He will do something if asked… sometimes," the doctor added after a moment, honesty requiring him to add that caveat, "but the man's a free spirit, a maverick, he'll do what he likes, when he likes, and there isn't a hope of changing him."

"Can't you control him?" Masterson asked, voice edging embarrassingly close to pleading, as he wondered how the CIA and FBI would take him repeating that advice.

Watson laughed. "Me, control Sherlock? You must be mad. I'd have a better chance of stopping a hurricane by dancing naked in Trafalgar Square."

The Colonel's eye twitched, the stress headache which had set up shop behind his eyes ramping up another notch.

"No, sorry Colonel, but if you want Sherlock to stop then you're going to have to give him what he wants."

"And what is that?" The Colonel asked with some trepidation.

The doctor looked at the other man consideringly for a long moment, "well, me, I should think." He raised a sardonic eyebrow, far too amused by the situation, "unless, of course, the US has kidnapped some of Sherlock's other associates. Don't tell me you've got big brother Mycroft stashed somewhere on this godforsaken death trap." The doctor chortled, clearly amused at the idea.

At this point Colonel Masterson felt it was entirely understandable that his logical, military mind gave up attempting to understand the incipient insanity and had gone off to explore saner pastures. It was therefore an unpleasant surprise to zone back into the conversation in time to catch the last of the prattling speech that had caused his mind to wander in the first place.

"-and that'll just be the start of, I'm afraid. Sherlock is clearly very upset. The last time he was this upset we lost four toasters, the microwave and all electricity in the W1 postcode, and the time before that he dismantled Moriarty's whole criminal network while sitting dressed only in a sheet in our living room."

"What?" the Colonel croaked, "you live with the man, can't you distract him or something to make him stop."

"You made me miss curry night, he's never going to be that distracted," the doctor looked up at the ceiling, considering the rivets for a moment. "Well, not unless you'd like to create a fiendishly difficult murder for him to solve. It'll have to be a good one though, a proper three pipe problem," he added when it looked like Masterson had temporarily lost the power of speech.

The Colonel's looked at his watch, the red digits blinked back at him: 06:52 GMT. Two days, that was all. 48 awful, dreadful, never to be repeated hours, since this whole debacle started. Two days of this insanity. Watching the cold amusement in his guest's eyes, Masterson had the worrying thought that things were about to get worse. He and his men were in the unenviable position of being stuck between and rock and a hard place. The one person this Sherlock guy might listen to was currently in his care after being illegally extradited, on a plane that was still least an hour away from their destination, and without sufficient fuel to turn around and get back. To make matters worse, the heads of the CIA and FBI were apparently going with the strategic plan to make like ostriches and stick their heads in the sand in the hopes of waiting out the current crisis and, with this in mind, had just issued an embargo preventing Watson being allowed near any and all communication devices, so they couldn't even get the doctor to talk his demented friend down.

"I'd buckle up, if I were you," Watson said, supressed laughter in his voice, as he settled back in his seat, looking for all the world like he was in the middle of a panto rather than a kidnapping, "because this is just a warmup act. Like I told those other men, be careful what you wish for - they wanted Sherlock's attention... well, you've certainly got it now."

A/N so what do you think?