Chasing Pancho Villa Read Free

question hang there for the young captain to consider. “I don’t know, I don’t know. I want you, captain, to find out if there is such a plan. We must know.”
    â€œThen my mission, sir?” James asked. Is it counter-espionage?”
    â€œYes captain. But the President and I are most concerned about the Germans.” Pershing said, looking hard at the younger man.
    â€œThe Germans, sir?” James repeated.
    â€œYes, I suspect strongly that they are supplying Villa and others like President Carranza with important information they get from their spies operating across the Rio Grande. Remember, they’ll do anything to stir things up for us.”
    â€œYes, sir,” James agreed. “My mission, then, is to watch the Germans?”
    â€œMore than that, Captain James,” Pershing said. “Our border is threatened. Villa has already proven how vulnerable we are to attack.”
    â€œI don’t expect you to watch every German in Mexico, Captain,” Pershing continued, as if reading his mind. “Just one—a very dangerous soldier by the name of Von Moltke. Colonel Hermann Von Moltke. Currently, he is working with the Mexican general, Obregón. We believe he operates a very sophisticated spy ring. Your mission, Captain James, is to break it.”

CHAPTER TWO
    Paris, France, 1100 hours, July 23, 1916
    Artillery fire rumbled somewhere off in the distance just north of the city. On the busy stone Parisian streets, military vehicles loaded with supplies and replacements for the front passed others packed with returning dead and wounded. The motor vehicles made growling noises that echoed in the narrow tree lined streets and mixed with the clop, clop of draft horses’ hooves. Voices of soldiers and vendors were occasionally heard above the din of civilian traffic.
    Honking, then a loud crash of metal on metal followed by yelling, was heard when a motor truck laden with ammunition swerved out of control and crashed into the front of a speeding taxi. Steam from two radiators shot high into the warm humid air, sending pigeons roosting in the Oak trees upward like an explosion of feathers. The accident happened directly in front of an elegantly built 19th Century brick building, so close that it forced the old doorman to run deep into the marble-lined lobby.
    The street noise penetrated the old window panes in the building’s largest office, located four floors above, but it didn’t disturb the room’s only occupant, a youthful looking man dressed impeccably in a dark wool suit. He sat unmoving in the wood desk chair, staring out the window. Indifferent to the riot of sounds below, he looked north across the gray Parisian skyline toward the maelstrom less than fifty miles from the old city.
    Harrison James had long grown accustomed to the sounds of war, but they were strikingly different and implacably ugly compared to the pleasant sounds of prewar Paris. During the first months of the war there had been a general fear that the Kaiser’s army would reach and lay siege to the city, not unlike the war of more than 40 years earlier. The French evacuated most of the government, but the siege had not happened. On the Marne River, the French Army finally halted the overextended German advance.
    Now entering its third year, the war had evolved into a stalemate of trenches—bloody, horrible gashes in the earth—that weaved their way across northern France, just north of the capital from the English Channel all the way east to Switzerland. The entire area became a battlefield for the contending armies known as the Western Front. Harrison sometimes wondered if it would have been better if the Germans had taken the city in 1914, possibly ending the war—and the suffering—quickly.
    The summer of 1916 was devastating for the French and British armies. The allied offensive along the Somme River failed miserably to break the stalemate, with the casualty