Kill the Media

Kill the Media Jeffrey A. Friedberg

KILL the MEDIA

Jeffrey Friedberg

Copyright 2012 by Jeffrey Friedberg

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Kill the Media

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ISBN: 9781452476001

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Jeffrey A. Friedberg

a1.detective@gmail.com

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KILL the MEDIA

We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently.

We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled us, were cowards and hypocrites.

The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.

We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

The object of persecution is persecution.

The object of torture is torture.

The object of power is power.

~George Orwell, 1984

For Nikita

PROLOGUE:

Jack Vane, private eye, stood in the beer and spirits aisle of Smithton’s Supermarket. He was looking at a bottle of Glenfiddich, twenty-one-year-old, single-malt whiskey, $144.99.

He remembered a day when his team had ambushed and killed a North Vietnamese general outside Hanoi and taken a case of this stuff from the general’s staff-car for free,

Those were the days, ran through his mind.

The rear doors of the market suddenly slammed open.

At the hard flare of scorching New Mexico light, Jack turned to look.

Three black-armored men rushed in shouting. They brandished war machetes—twenty inches of wickedly curved Gurkha blade, wide at the tip, narrow at the hilt, the kind used to chop off heads.

A shadow suddenly raced past the corner of Jack’s eye from the front of the store and vanished amid the aisles. A fourth man, the trained soldier in him automatically registered.

And then a crazed-looking girl appeared—shrieking into a bullhorn strapped to her chest, the microphone obscenely duct-taped to her face, You are all meat!

All of the antagonists were out of Jack’s view before he could react. People screamed in terror all over the huge store.

Then a dozen smoke grenades went off—the big cylindrical ones. He knew the sound of them hitting the floor, bouncing, tumbling, rolling in half circles.

Jack protectively shouted to the other shoppers as loudly as he could, Get down, get behind something, or get out!

He knew somebody would call 911, but the police would be five minutes or longer getting here. More screams and the sounds of panicked shoppers running, knocking things over, falling.

When Jack had become the private eye that he now was, he was retrained to act with civilian restraint. Police, media, lawyers, and community groups could make life tough for any lone-wolf vigilante.

He shouted again what they had taught him, Get down, get behind something, or get out!

He was thinking, Caution, civility, restraint; wait for the police, and….

Screams and Thud! Thudd! He knew that sound from bloody jungles all over the world—big knives striking flesh.

Jack drew his .45 Kimber pistol and moved to the sound.

The invaders already had dozens of shoppers corralled in two aisles and blocked all paths to the exits. Even if the victims could get past the armed men and the raging woman, the exit doors now had duct-taped to them ominous, black bags covered with wires. There was already a pile-up of bodies at the doors where other shoppers had panicked amid screams, shouts, and racks of goods crashing over, and the girl shrieking on the bullhorn—You are meat!

Somebody yelled, Bomb! And fresh panic erupted.

Through the dense grenade smoke, Jack caught a glimpse of war-machetes rising and falling—more sounds of hard chops on meat—Thud! Thudd! Thudd!—

Jack stepped around the corner into an aisle and saw two black-armored men with their combat-machetes. Wild-eyed, they stood over a pregnant woman and two small children who cowered on the floor.

Jack shouted Freeze! and instantly sent each man four bullets—two below the waist and two in the face, bypassing their armor. They dropped like disconnected androids.

Then the crazed girl with the taped face had suddenly twisted around Jack’s neck, like a lashing python. She was biting and clawing him. And from a corner of one eye—he saw sudden movement. Two men running into this aisle with their Gurkha machetes covered in offal—they were coming for him.

Jack reached around to the girl’s throat, crushed her windpipe and flung her away.

The men charged Jack as he staggered back and crashed to the floor, reflexively snapping off an unaimed shot into the face of one adversary. When the dead man hit the floor, the remaining enemy reversed and ran for his life, not realizing Jack’s gun was now empty.

Jack pressed the magazine release button, let the empty mag drop to the floor, inserted a fresh one, and racked a round into the firing chamber, shrik-chck!

He got to his feet, sick and out of breath.

Four men, one girl—that’s five. One still alive, he thought.

One of them was alive in the store—Jack hadn’t heard him leave or seen any flash of sunlight.

Jack crawled to the end of the aisle.

He rose to a crouch.

He peered through the smoke and crept out slowly. He traversed the rear of the huge store past the meats and dairy sections on his left against the wall. As he passed aisles on his right, he saw frightened people in clusters.

Those in the middle of the store had too far to run for an exit and stayed put. They were clumped and fixed, where they could become bloody fodder.

Those trapped at the exits had jammed up and could become dead meat. Some who had seen the black bags and wires taped to the doors had retreated as best as they could in the thick smoke. Terrified screams raked the air, from groups of huddled and confused people.

As far as Jack could tell, nobody had tried to stop the invaders.

Everyone he saw appeared younger than he and able-bodied; big men in cargo pants and muscle tank-tops; large women in bold spandex who looked strong and dangerous.

But all of them had terrified or sullen eyes and were frozen in place. Nobody moved to help Jack. He was alone in this, even though he was older than anybody he saw, he thought.

He stopped to stare at the woman he had seen earlier with two small boys. The boys reminded him of himself and Stevie, his brother. Stevie had been a fire fighter EMT but was accidentally killed in the crossfire of a gun battle—my fault, Jack thought.

But he doesn’t die this time. Jack already knew he was ready to give his life to save these two little boys.

Then he heard metal hit floor—and ball steel rolled across concrete as if in some bowling alley of death. Hand grenades! flashed through his mind. And then the blasts and screams. Already part deaf, he covered his head and tried to burrow into the floor until it stopped.

The bastard is still here.

Jack slowly moved through the smoke toward were he’d heard the grenades hit the floor; he was too far away to see any damage. He moved with all the stealth he had.

Jack never heard his quarry surface behind him to tip over the display of canned goods. It crashed down on Jack and knocked him flat.

The man leapt upon him, slashing with his twenty-inch Gurkha knife—random cans took the hits—exploding mush and liquids everywhere. In a near frenzy and rattle of cans, Jack blindly kicked out his legs from the pile and caught the attacker in the chest, knocking him back.

Jack struggled to his feet to find himself face-to-face with pure hatred and rage; but the enemy had lost his chopping blade—Jack saw it on the floor, too far away.

Vane raised the big Kimber .45 and pointed it right between the enemy’s eyes.

The other man gathered himself to lunge.

Behind Jack—Lieutenant Desdemona Warchovski of the Albuquerque Police Department squared her six-foot frame, tossed red hair from blazing eyes, and said, Don’t move, Vane, or I will fucking kill you. You have gone way too far this time. Step away from your victim. Do not turn around to look at me. Step away! Now—using two fingers, slowly place your firearm on the floor. If you deviate, I will kill you—you got that?

Yes, Desdemona.

Jack Vane! Do you understand these commands?

Yes, Lieutenant.

Good.

Crrrkk! went the big Colt .40 as she thumbed back the hammer.

Jack said, I know you still hate me for breaking us up, but if you kill me, Des, darling, it’s all on closed circuit TV.

I know. she said.

That’s good, Des.

Some other time, you fucking termite.

***

Desdemona Warchovski raised her voice to Captain Bonner, "Goddammit, Patrick, you’ve got to let me lock him up—everything he did there is clear as hell on video! The Occupy Community only chopped up the meat and deli sections—they harmed nobody. It was just an animal-lovers’ protest—they chopped up dead meat in the display cases, so what? It was only about, ‘Don’t eat red meat.’ —Patrick, even you don’t eat red meat!"

Bonner said, They had those Gurkha killing knives, and grenades.

They only had harmless M-18 smoke and ball pea-grenades used in paintball games!

Bonner said, Those ring-pull grenades look real enough to me. And we don’t know what they actually intended, Lieutenant. Game grenade or not—one of those could kill. Jack Vane acted in good faith against armed invaders, and you have no case against him.

The witness says—

Des! Bonner slammed a red fist on the table. Thumpp! The remaining ‘witness’ is a perpetrator, a liar, a rap-sheeted domestic terrorist, and I don’t buy anything he says. Everyone else told us they feared for their lives and that these maniacs were about to start chopping them to burger bits.

We don’t know that, Patrick.

Yes, we do! You are letting your feelings against Jack Vane affect your professional judgment, Lieutenant.

She sneered, "Patrick—make that stick professionally, if you can!"

You know I can’t in front of any board, but everybody recognizes it’s true.

Warchovski sat back.

She said, "The media, the politicians, the environmentalists, and the Hollywood people will have a field day at your expense, Patrick. This Jack Vane is a lone wolf vigilante; he killed four of their Occupy Community, and they do not like that."

Captain Pat Bonner shrugged, and said, "You expect me to fear them because they control the language—words? They change the goddammed language and the meaning of words every day, Desdemona. They even outlaw and ban words. Soon there will be no words left to use—only their words. That is, only the words they permit us to use.

"They don’t scare me, Desdemona. I serve justice and all the people; not money; not votes; not political parties; and, not some so-called ‘community’ that’s under the thumb of all the above.

"And I don’t serve or wait for their re-invented words, words, words, either—their goddammed marching orders. I think for myself, Desdemona. I don’t obey the special phrases they exploit to control people’s thoughts, emotions, and actions. You know—like in that book, 1984. I saw the movie too. Richard Burton, John Hurd. Good movie. Big Brother. He waved a hand. All that."

Bonner sat back, popped a Mentos, and gazed out the window.

Desdemona stared at him.

She said, Never mind. I’ve got Special Agent Mamel and the good old FBI coming in on a good old fashioned civil rights investigation.

They can investigate all they want. There’s nothing here.

Are you telling me to back off an ongoing investigation, Captain Bonner?

No, he said, avoiding the trap—the recorder hidden where he knew it always went, in her bra—but go home anyway, will you?

Desdemona stood, turned, and walked out. Her Manolo boot-heels rang like shots in the hall.

She knew one day she would get Jack Vane.

She would teach him a lesson for having dumped her.

For embarrassing her in front of the world.

And in front of herself.

CHAPTER 1

Legendes of sleeping warriors doth appeare everywhere—asleep in a secrete caevern, beneath a mystique mountaine, thé anciente warriors awaite thé daey whan thr kildren and thr enemey goeth to war. And then thé noise of thet stryggle will awaken thé sleepers, and they wyll tyke backe thr land and grinde thé enemy’s cities to duste, and they wyll establishe a gilden kyngdom on thé Earthe.~ The Mystic Palimpsest of Marquette.

The supernatural being awoke alone in the