Crown Jewel: The Battle for the Falklands Read Online Free Page B

consumed their relationship ever since.  The boy had decided his path, and the King found every flaw as an excuse to stab at the heart of the one he was meant to nurture.  What the King would never know, never realize, is that he too had become just like his own father.
    Once, King Edward had had his own spark of desire within; a desire to live his own life and walk his own path.  This spark had been readily snuffed.  The once young Prince Edward had longed for the embrace and acceptance of his own father.  However, he had been pushed away, frozen cold by pretense and appearances, forever corrupted with a centuries-old attitude that had broken many a royal son.
    Even when in the same room, Albert and his father might as well have been a million miles apart.  Although his father knew nothing of the incident at Jugroom Fort, Albert’s return home—simply a matter of security—was viewed by King Edward as a failure of sorts, a retreat; a defeat on the field of battle.
    The King did not see the medals on his son’s chest, the badge of the army air corps, nor his pilot’s insignia, or the blood on his hands.  He saw only that his son had been forced home.  Albert’s warm, dark, brown eyes—the eyes of his mother—looked deep into the blue eyes of his father, the Germanic eyes inherited from the royal bloodline of Europe.  Looking into the cold pools, Albert realized his father would have preferred him to come home in a flag-draped coffin, preferred it to his running from a cadre of sheep-herding rifle-toting peasants.  At that moment, Albert also realized that his father would have preferred it, had he been the one to die that day by the River Dee.
    Albert was about to say it was not his choice to return from Afghanistan.  However, like many explanations before, Albert knew his words would be futile, would float in the still air of the palace’s grandeur, and echo softly among the frescos and ornate ceilings before fading to silence.  He adjusted his tight collar.
    The scratchy confines of Albert’s uniform became a symbol of his bondage; bondage to a life for which he did not ask, a life he would trade for nearly any other.  In that moment, Albert wished he could see his mother once more.  He wanted to be a little boy again, held in her comforting arms, crying over the injustices that kept a free spirit bound, the hell of a life that sucked animus until one was a beaten shell of the child that once was, a zombie that shambled through day-to-day tortures with a forced smile painted on wrinkled skin.  Albert felt the worst of the human condition: hopelessness.  However, such feelings ran counter to all he had been taught as an Englishman—stiff upper-lip and all—Albert wanted to embrace this hopelessness.  He wanted to run, to fly, to hide at the ends of the Earth.  He wanted to trade places with that little girl.  He wanted to be dead.
    “Albert, you will go to Stanley in the Falklands,” King Edward said to the floor.  Really, the King did not care where it was he was sending his son, so long as it is from his sight.
    “Yes, Your Majesty,” Albert replied with a sigh.
     

2: DOGO
     
    “ No one becomes depraved all at once .”—Juvenal
     
    There was a building in the heart of downtown Buenos Aires, on a street not far from the main square in the Monserrat neighborhood of the central capital.  Constructed in 1929, the neo-classic building included a collection of antennae that jutted from its mansard roof, but was, to all outward appearances, otherwise stuck in time.  Twenty-odd stories in height, pedestrians tended to quicken their pace as they passed it by.
    Known as the home of Argentina’s National Directorate of Strategic Military Intelligence, the building hid a long, dark history that the bright lights flooding its façade could not wash away.  Its upper floors held the aroma of wooden shelves and old books.  Below street level, however, the thick air of its basement reeked of