By the way, none of the content on Shhhh! Digital Media is produced anywhere other than 200 Sherbourne Street Suite 701, Toronto, Ontario, Canada and there are no other writers other than myself, Brian Joseph Johns, who write content for Shhhh! Digital Media.

Chapters

In The Beginning (Started March 12, 2025 3:30 PM EST)

Please be patient with this story as a lot of research is required and is an on going effort as I write this.

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Shhhh! Digital Media

Brian Joseph Johns

Opening Notes:

According to my research of how most special operations unfold, when it comes to chatter between team members (or squads), there is no character building banter between them and the reason for this is because the comms are specifically for relaying timing and mission critical data between squad members. So you'll never hear lines during an active mission by members of such teams like:

"Remember that time we were in that bar in Tangiers, and old Roger stood up and threw his beret at bartender?"

When you see that kind of activity in the movies or read it in the pages of a book, most often this is because the writers need to use every opportunity they can to acquaint you with the operators taking part in such a mission. That's a necessary part of the story telling, because they're people, and if you don't understand that and that they have their hopes and dreams too, then why would you even care, other than the natural propensity of most people to have some degree of compassion towards their fellow humankind.

Soldiers do joke and quite often, but rarely if ever in the midst of an operation. Focus, not levity is most often key to their success, and we're talking about professionals.

Perhaps that speech before their last stand might have such elements of levity, and call upon their love of whatever it is they're protecting, but while they're doing they're thing, there's no small talk, unless they did so in an instance to declare their independence from me and what I'm saying here. When they speak to each other, they own their communications. All of them.

So in a story like this, my use of banter between operators is a means by which I'm letting you know that these people doing these difficult tasks that often happen unbeknownst to us in order to protect and preserve the peace, the world over, have hopes and dreams as much so as any one of us. The difference is, that they often put their lives on the line to ensure that we have ours.

Hence, we owe it to them to remind the world that there's people inside of They Who Stand On Guard.

Brian Joseph Johns

Shhhh! Digital Media Presents:

The Butterfly Dragon: We Who Stand On Guard - Episode 10

In The Beginning

When you're staring down the length of your SMG, through an IR sight at a group of targets during an operation, you get to know quite a bit about those whom you're observing.

For one, I know that one of them is left-handed (whom I'll refer to as Lefty from herein), but trying to keep that hidden, indicating that he was likely disciplined as a child for exhibiting such involuntary behaviour. It wasn't the fault of his parents, who grew up during a time of turmoil and superstition in a region of the world that has not had as much rest as it certainly deserves.

Their situation is much like living near the caldera of an active volcano, when it comes to the peace and politics of the region. It sputters and froths a lot keeping people on edge, but everyone knows that someday the pressure beneath the surface is going to overcome the forces containing it, and its going to blow.

Full tilt.

Living amidst pressure of that kind can take a toll on people, and shape you in ways that would be very difficult for those of us living in the relative lap of luxury comparatively so to fully understand or appreciate. That doesn't mean that we should feel guilty for our fortune, as these times are tough for us all in some way or another. It does mean though, that in our position of relative comfort a great distance from that ever rumbling volcano, that we should consider the state of things and how we got here.

Lefty certainly didn't think anything of the fact that using his left hand where others would use their right should get him into any trouble, but it did, and that changed him enough so that thirty-five years down the road, his condition would be obvious to an operator watching him in the middle of the night through an infra-red sight affixed to his MP5, as Lefty helped a crew of five other men arm the nuclear warheads on a shipment of cruise missiles they had received earlier in the same evening, less than one hundred and sixty kilometers from Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel, which presumably would be one of their targets if ever fired.

Lefty was the driver of the truck of said shipment, and had two labourers with him, one of whom (Trim Beard) had obviously done much labour in his life, and was remarkably fit and well fed for someone who was not overtly a member of any of the militant insurgencies of the region (HAMAS or ISIS for instance).

My guess is that he was all show, and probably very frightened with the prospect of being presented with a Kalashnikov and expected to use it against the threat to their borders and way of life. He instead made up for this fear by taking part in the logistics as a labourer, who had obviously learned much about installing and maintaining such ad-hoc installations recently, given how this particular group had come into possession of a kit whose price tag was likely near fifty million, including the materials unaccounted for which were certainly the key component of the warheads themselves.

Technology was making installations like this more affordable than ever before, and this was the entry level such installation being offered by the very outfit my people were investigating.

The other labourer (Sidekick) was thin and clearly trying very hard to be useful and to make an impression, despite the fact that he struggled with most of the heavy lifting and mechanical aspects that their work entailed on this particular night. He often joked aloud, to which Lefty would react by telling him to shut-up and get to work. If Lefty didn't say anything, then Trim Beard would take advantage in the opening in seniority and have a go at Sidekick, much the same telling him to be quiet and work more and talk less. Definitely a very clear pecking order in their shipping operation and in all, they probably weren't that much different from similar trucking crews in other parts of the world, if you didn't factor in the aspect about them helping to assemble a nuclear capable launch platform.

What was also very apparent, is that Lefty was working for the man who spent most of the time while the site was being assembled speaking on the phone, (whom I'll refer to as Top Dog). With whom he was speaking wasn't one of those critical aspects that had made its way down the pipeline to us in the field at that point. He was very calm and collect despite the danger of that with which he was tampering by installing an ad-hoc nuclear launch platform on his farm. There was resolve in him, and he'd clearly given it much thought and felt no quarter over the risks entailed either towards himself, and the community of which he was a part. A man who would never kill with his own two hands, but would employ machinery to kill thousands of those whose faces he'd never have to see.

Much the same as he, was the man (Tech Head) who had assembled and utilized the mechanical loading mechanism which they'd operated by a hand crank, lowering the missiles down into the magazine, the first cruise missile into the feed tray from where they'd be loaded onto the firing platform once powered with electricity. He was a man who had done much mechanical work before, and certainly seemed to possess an uncanny familiarity with arms and armament. He could probably operate and maintain small arms, including heavy weapons, but was much more of a threat given large armaments of the kind used in mobile or permanent installations. He was focused on his work, and if it hadn't been a launch platform he was assembling, it might have been a grain elevator for one of the farmers, given different circumstances. The same skills, applied to very different tools.

All five of these men could just as easily have been hard at work on any continent and amongst any community, assembling some kind of machinery for their prosperity and livelihood as many people do the world over. Instead, they were constructing the means to a sudden and terrifying end for their neighbours a short distance from them, and all of this could be seen clearly through the infra-red device affixed to my own MP5SD SMG, the business end of which was pointed in their direction, ready to take them all down if necessary.

When looking through the sights at a tango, from a position of tactical obscurity, one might be tempted to assume that its a power trip for the trigger man. Holding within their trigger finger, the lives of five men, or at least in this case, the three that I'd tagged, the other two being the primary focus of Donahue, who lay prone upon a sandbank ridge overlooking the AO* about three hundred meters to the south of my position.

In all honesty and during an operation, or at least in the case of veteran operators, there is very little going on in the way of reflection, either regarding the life circumstances that found your tango in the sights of your crosshair, or your own life and the meaning of it all. We're trained and filtered not to consider anything of that nature, especially so during an operation.

We work with hard data and facts pertinent to the tactical operation itself, and it was only due to my own involvement with the investigation that I had any clue of the inner workings of what was behind this newly emerged network of low cost, highly effective armaments and sites and their growing deployment in the Middle East region.

These men, each of them had knowingly traveled down a road (some more aware than others) and were well beyond the point of no return. They knew they were assembling a facility whose sole purpose was the extinguishing of thousands of lives in an instant, their targets a relatively short distance from their current location, and given the secrecy of the emergence of this site, this was not a deterrent in the form of a political manouevre to counter the speculated nuclear capabilities of their neighbours. This was a clear threat to thousands of innocent civilians, and to the stability of the region.

A much bigger question though was hidden in the midst of this mess and it was seldom a question that people stopped to ask themselves and truly consider it long enough that we might one day come to a solution. In different circumstances, these men would undoubtedly be involved in their society in some peaceful and productive way. Who is to say that any one of us suddenly thrust into their shoes wouldn't just as quickly become part of the pack:

When you run with the wolves, then be a wolf. When you run from them, then be the prey. Know your place in the twisted paths of this jungle. Play your part and play it well, for survival depends upon it. Certainly an anecdote explored by Kipling, and in this existence, world and lifetime, it was more than applicable to us all.

However, that still begged a solution and the question, where did it all begin?

...to be continued (deep in research)...

To be continued...

* AO - Area of operation

* SMG - Submachine gun.