The Journalist

The Journalist

By G. L. Rockey

ISBN: 978-1-77145-171-0

Copyright 2014 by G. L. Rockey

Cover art by Michelle Lee Copyright 2014

All rights reserved. Without limiting the
rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the
prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the
publisher of this book. This book is a work of fiction and no
created character in this book is of or about any person living or
dead, except for true historical figures which are mentioned in
context of their news media.

Prologue

4:00 p.m.
EST

Sunday, May 25,
2020

Nearing the mouth of the Potomac River,
Ensign Kelly Greene throttled back the pulsing engines of the
restored presidential yacht,
Benny I
. Waiting for the craft
to slow, she touched the right earpiece of her thick horn-rimmed
glasses. The tiny receiver embedded in the opaque plastic frame
confirmed that a wireless microphone, concealed on the quarterdeck,
transmitted audio to the recorder she had taped under her belt.

She glanced at
Benny I’s
controls.
Five knots. A guarded smile crossed her lips as she swung the
ship’s wheel to port for a return run up river. As the craft slowly
turned, she scanned, lounged around a small mahogany table on the
quarterdeck, the object of her surveillance—U. S. President
Benjamin P. Armstrong’s Elite Inner Circle. Better known as the
E.I.C., the three-member team (affectionately parodied by the media
in human brain anatomical terms—Medulla Oblongata, Cerebrum and
Cerebellum) advised the President on everything from breakfast
cereal to nukes.

Cerebrum, the head of the trio–Leo Novak, law
professor emeritus, Harvard—fidgeted like a sparrow on a
low-to-the-ground bird feeder. He blew his tiny beaked nose,
cleared his throat, adjusted his rimless oval glasses, ran his hand
over his slicked-back yellow hair, dusted the sleeve of his blue
blazer and adjusted the collar of his white polo shirt.

Less jittery than Novak, Medulla Oblongata,
head of Military Satellite Intelligence–General William “Mac”
MacCallister, five-six, two hundred pounds, dress-blue Air Force
uniform–teetered like an oversized Humpty Dumpty on the top edge of
a ten-foot stone wall.

The third team member, Cerebellum, White
House media guru Dr. Barbara Lande puffed on a thin seven-inch
Montecristo cigar. At twenty-eight, the slender, six-foot Bean Town
redhead wore a bright green blazer that matched her eyes. Tan
slacks and white deck shoes rounding out the look, she mirrored a
model out of
Boating Weekly
.

To the average onlooker, the six intense
eyeballs of the E.I.C. might appeared to be set in three average
people who savored some half-cooked bird that turned on a backyard
barbecue spit. But veiled was a desire that washed the moment like
a rare and exotic unseen sauce to please their White House bosses
evangelical hunger to save the world.

Lande slid her left hand through her G.I.-cut
hair and chatted: “It’s all perception, gentleman. Create the
perception, and they’ll follow like sheep.”

“What about the goats?” Mac said.

Novak snickered.

Ignoring them, Lande savored another puff,
said, “How do most people know for sure that China is really there?
Read about it, see it on TV, scan the Internet–nobody feels the
goods anymore. It’s all virtual, the only reality is water, fire,
earth, the elements, atomic numbaahs, atomic weight, how they’re
put together is all in the head of homo sapiens.”

Mac scratched his knees. “I’d say there’s a
little more to reality than that.”

Novak nodded agreement, “Lande, I think you
should stick with communications, lay off the science, and most of
all get rid of those nasty cigars. ”

The throaty marine motors of the yacht
gurgling in the background, Lande leaned back, studied the white
ash on her cigar and said, “Brain tissue stirs ideas and out of the
mouths of the word-making-mammal comes meaning, and the meaning
becomes deeds put down toward the reordering of history that ends
one reality and begins another.”

Novak raised an eyebrow. “And where is that
from, Doctor?”

“My dissertation.” She tossed her cigar butt
overboard. A gull swooped to snatch it from the water.

Novak gave a little sigh, batted his eyes,
“Let me recap what President Armstrong and I discussed this past
week at Camp David.” He cleared his throat. “As you know, with the
latest unconscionable act in France the President believes that the
time is ripe for a conclusive solution to international bickering,
economic chaos and insane hit skip terrorism. He has no doubt in
his heart that it is his divinely appointed destiny

a unique moment in the annals of this planet, in the
context of history, that is, to conceive a new world order, to move
forward in our combined human evolution with freedom and democracy
for all the earth’s people.”

Mac offered a snappy nod of approval.

Lande rolled her eyes.

Novak continued, “The President also
desperately wants to make the streets of America safe again for the
average freedom-loving Joe and Jane Doe. In tackling the
knucklehead global bad boy syndrome at its root, he intends to
forge a new world peace under American protections and freedoms at
home and abroad.” He looked at Mac. “He wants to utilize our cyber
attack superiority, the military’s satellite pre-emptive missile
technology, while we’re still on top.”

Lande said, “I always liked up top best.”

Mac whispered, “Jesus Christ.”

Novak folded his arms. “So, Doctor Lande, why
don’t you expand on this plan you have to accomplish the
President’s mission?”

Lande stood. “As I was saying, gentlemen,
it’s all perception

”

Ensign Greene, concern in her eyes, pressed
the temple of her horn-rimmed glasses to her ear–static,
intermittent reception as Lande continued,
“...they’ll...sheep...”

Hope for the best, she thought and made a
small course correction, then settled back for the return trip to
the Washington Naval Yard.

Chapter One

4:30 p.m.
EST

Sunday, May 25,
2020

Pompano
Marina

Homestead,
Florida

With gusts of wind building to thirty knots,
Biscayne Bay a churning bowl of four-foot white caps, his Sunday
routine jilted by Mother Nature, fate, whatever, Zackary Stearn
called it quits and set his heading ten miles south of Miami, his
home port, Pompano Marina.

Twenty minutes later, he glided into his
rented mooring, tied up, threw out two extra side bumpers and
decided to get some back-burner work done before going to
dinner.

Sitting in the galley of his RV and home, a
forty-foot refurbished Chris Craft he had dubbed
Veracity,
he nursed a Glenlivet on the rocks and noodled around with what
seemed an endless editorial.

The subject sloshed around several things:
first, the current President of the United States, Benjamin P.
Armstrong; second, Armstrong’s manipulation of the press; third,
the shrinking number of newspapers in the U. S. of A; fourth, the
cannibalism of information by blogs, social media’s glut of
misinformation, the Internet; in general the whoring of
information, news and otherwise.

Zack looked over his yellow-pad draft
editorial notes:

In the beginning, so the story goes, there was
darkness upon the face of the deep. From there the tale gets
complicated. One supposition suggests there was some sort of Big
Bang in the darkness—the Big Bang must have been really big because
it was the beginning from which there evolved many mysterious
things, earth being one of them, the current President of the U. S.
of A. (Benny P. Armstrong) the other.

Moreover, said story reports, following this Big
Bang, Planet Earth separated itself out from a plethora of other
things and placed its whirling blue-and-white mass in an ordered
course around another wondrous object—the sun, of which Benny is
the son

(work on this). Then along came
time (which also had started sometime around or before the big
bang, maybe?) and moved forward for some reason in sixty-second
minutes—hour cycles (think it has something to do with the sun,
earth’s rotation, ancient Babylonians, look it up, etc.)—then,
after many evened revolutions around the sun, there came upon
Planet Earth living things—one of which evolved into a word-making
mammal (credit Cerebellum, Dr. Lande, on that word mammal thing)
Homo sapiens (one male and one female); and this species
multiplied, subdued the earth and everything in it. Then came
capitalism, then came journalism, then came television news, then
came the internet

so called “news” that
makes yellow journalist look like Mother Teresa’s diary

He put his stubby pencil down, turned to his
computer, accessed Google search engine and keyed in DAILY
NEWSPAPERS, clicked search and read the first hit:

Dailies, newspapers, circulation - Spurred by
the Internet’s ever expanding presence combined with mega-media
international corporate takeovers, bloated staffs, albatross plants
and soaring newsprint costs, many daily newspapers have gone the
way of T. Rex. Adding to their demise is the economics that forced
them to share a shrinking piece of the advertising pie dollars with
television, radio, Internet, local cable news operations and
satellite TV. A few giant newspapers still survive in print form:
The Wall Street Journal
,
New York Times
,
L.A.
Times
,
Chicago Tribune,
Miami Herald
. It is
interesting to note that they are now mostly feature vehicles with
hack-fiction writers producing supplements for local PTA groups and
high school soccer news inserts. In some larger communities, small,
cost-efficient weekly gazettes have become reliable niches for what
is called in some circles ‘the meat of local news.’ Two of the more
popular are
La Voz
of Los Angeles and
The Boca
of
Miami.

The Boca
being his newspaper, “Hear,
hear,” Zack said, printed the page then read articles he had
clipped as source material for his editorial.

The Wall Street
Journal

March 15,
2020

New York — BLUE CHIP industrial stocks soar to record
numbers amid rumors of Armstrong’s global military posturing.

WSJ, (Page 1-A) OIL DEMAND FIVE FOLD

With China and India hell bent into the personal car
business, the thirst for oil to keep the machines running is
causing an insane scramble in international oil markets. Who would
have thought a slippery substance buried in the earth for billions
of years would become so valuable.

World oil producer nations raise prices — In its
latest move a cabal of oil producing nations has raised the monthly
average basket price of a barrel of oil to an all-time high of $165
per barrel.

With alternate fuel production trumped by other
concerns, electric vehicle cost out of reach, the price at the
gasolene pump in the USA at $8.50 a gallon, President Armstrong
promises swift action. He noted that the increase has pushed the
cash flow to oil producing nations to over a billion a month of
America’s hard-earned dollars. Noting “We being first, Henry Ford
and all, are entitled to lower prices.”