Pursuit

by Richard Unekis

  When the machine landed, it remained poised for flight, its rotors still spinning, the pilot at the controls. The Lieutenant walked toward the road, to accomplish his mission. The rain into which they had almost flown swept through the fields toward him. He watched apathetically as it advanced down the road. His mind was on other things.

  Suddenly, from the dark background, emerged a blurred shape, which rapidly took on substance as a car. In the instant it took the Lieutenant to identify the car, its occupants, emerging into the clearing air, beheld their uniformed pursuer by the roadside in a timeless posture, his machine patiently standing nearby like a grazing charger waiting for a knight.

  Three pairs of eyes met in mutual astonishment. The confrontation lasted only a second. Then the car was past, roaring down the road.

  The Lieutenant squawked and jumped upright. He tried to run, and tripped on his trousers. Hopping, waddling and jumping, he somehow made his way to the aircraft.

  He pointed down the road and started to stammer. The pilot, who had seen it all and was waiting only until Preen got back in, ignored him. He reached over to latch the door, then gunned the engine to full power. The Lieutenant was thrown to the floor, still desperately grasping his pants.

  21

  As they emerged from the store, Franklin waved at the men who had accompanied him. “You men are turned back over to your local dispatch control.” He got into his car for the ride back to the Post, and said to the driver, “Hit it.”

  As soon as the police car pulled away from the store, Franklin reached for the mike and said, “Sergeant Catlin? Franklin. Did your men get off the lot?”

  “Yes, sir, and while you were conducting the investigation, Captain Prescott called from downstate and ordered blockades—”

  “What?” Franklin interrupted, sitting upright. “The orders you received from him are countermanded. Now, listen. If the men who pulled this have a thirty-five minute start and your men just left the Post a few minutes ago, it’s probably hopeless to send them out a few miles from here and set up roadblocks.” He paused just a second, then continued, “We’ll do the sweep search instead. We may have a chance to overtake them. Do you remember the technique from your last staff school? Have your men had a skull session on it?”

  He didn’t wait for a reply, but continued in a rapid voice: “All right, this is how we’ll do it. Pair your men, two cars to each highway in your service area, in each direction. Have them proceed as fast as possible, overtaking all traffic, out to the limit of the area.

  “If a suspect is sighted, the lead car will flag it down and make an examination, while the second continues the sweep.” Without pause the voice continued, “All right, Sergeant, dispatch them. Do not acknowledge this message. Get to it.”

  The Sergeant leaped to the other transmitter and pressed the switch. He thanked the Lord he had thoroughly briefed the men on this.

  “Post Seven to all cars. Sweep search. Sweep search. Pair as follows”—he glanced up at the big wall map showing the city and the five arterial routes leading out of it, then down again as he dispatched from memory—“Cars Ten and Eight, Route Ten, west. Cars Eighteen and Four, Route Forty-five, north. Cars Two and Nine, Route Ten, east. Cars Five and Seven, Route Forty-five, south. Cars Six and Twelve, Route Sixty-two, northwest. Car Twenty, return to Post. Suspects are two men, white, in blue and white car, make and model unknown. License unknown. One is short, heavy and dark, and dressed in a guard’s uniform. Suspects are wanted in connection with eighty-five-thousand-dollar supermarket robbery this city at approximately 10:40 A.M. That’s it! You know what to do. Acknowledge and question.”

  The receiver squawked.

  “Car Two, okay.”

  “Car Four, okay.”

  “Car Five, on the way.”

  “Car Six, roger.”

  “Car Eight, me, too.”

  “Car Nine, okay.”

  “Car Ten, okay.”

  “Car Twelve, okay.”

  “Car Twenty, on the way in.”

  The Sergeant waited a few seconds, then said, “Car Seven, acknowledge.”

  There was no reply.

  “Car Seven, if your receiver is working, but transmitter is out, stop and call in by telephone. Car Twenty.”

  “Car Twenty.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “About eight miles north on Forty-five, headed back in.”

  “Go on through town and take Car Seven’s place, sweep south on Forty-five with Car Five. Car Five, where are you?”

  “Car Five. I’m about twelve miles south, almost halfway to Bucola.”

  “Okay, keep going, don’t wait for Car Twenty. He has to cross town.”

  “Okay.”

  Franklin came in just as the Sergeant was finishing the dispatch. To the Sergeant he said, “I want to stay abreast of this. Where’s a map?” The Sergeant pulled one from a drawer.

  “I didn’t hear all the dispatch,” Franklin said. “Will you scribble the car numbers on some pieces of paper and let me have them? Also some thumb tacks.”

  The other nodded and complied.

  Franklin cleared the top of a desk and set up his map. Once it was set up, he sat back and relaxed. There was nothing to do now but wait for something to break. Captain Prescott’s attempt to set up a blockade came into his mind.

  A crisis had been building in the high levels of the department for several months, ever since the Governor had broken with tradition to go outside the department to secure a new Superintendent. The young Superintendent’s ideas and methods—based on his naval experience—were a little bit hard for the seasoned veterans to take.

  The “sweep search” idea was one. To the older officers, the idea of stationary roadblocks to seal off an area was as natural and normal as putting on shoes in the morning. Now, they were told by this young scientist that there was a better way, that a wall chart of an area was no longer enough, that they had to calculate; to use time as a factor, to be familiar with the theory of games and such expressions as “least possible chance” and “minimum probability,” and to use, or at least understand, the algebraic terms in which these concepts were expressed.

  Some of the younger officers had responded enthusiastically to this new application of symbolic logic to the search problems of their police department. After all, the state covered almost sixty thousand square miles, and was covered by a tremendous network of roads. But a large percentage of the executive force—the arm which ran the department from day to day—responded with frustration and resentment to this imposition of new ways.

  Until today, this conflict over tactics had remained under wraps. There had been no occasion calling for a choice between the old and new methods. Now Franklin had a feeling that this would be the day. He would either have to force the adoption of the new tactics, or retreat and forget the whole business.

  This was a situation made to order for a sweep search or perhaps it was better to say that a sweep search was the only thing that might have a ghost of a chance. Unless, that is, the fugitives had obligingly doodled along at thirty-five miles an hour while the cruisers passed them to get out to the place where the roadblock was to be set!

  He hated publicly to countermand the Captain’s order, but it was the man’s own fault. There had been specific instructions issued to cover situations exactly like this one. And those instructions called for use of the sweep.

  He shifted around in his chair to watch the chattering teletype, then glanced at his watch. It was 11:35, too early for any possible results yet. Actually, he didn’t hold very high hopes for the sweep. But he was convinced it was the only method offering even a chance, and that made him determined to see that it was used, if only for the purpose of enforcing discipline in the organization.

  22

  The Sergeant brought over the map and spread it on a desk, and Franklin began to pore over it. As to the superiority of the sweep over the blockade, Franklin had no reservations at all. Mathematically, the
sweep represented a way to go back in time, a time-recovery system.

  A blockade, he thought, was like a dam. It was essentially a static, passive thing, and it affected only the cars that came to it in any given period of time.

  A group of cars leaving a city at any specific time interval, say fifteen minutes, would travel more or less as a coherent, fifteen-minute-long “block” in the traffic stream—like a log in a river.

  Since the blockade was passive, it could only sit and wait until the “block” or log got to it. And most important, it had to be set up before the wanted block arrived.

  The sweep, on the other hand, was an active, offensive method. Since it moved outward from the city itself, faster than the traffic flow, it was in effect like a speedboat in the stream. It could not only overtake and examine the “log,” the block of fifteen-minute-long traffic, but it could pass them and examine cars which had left even before the sweep car. In terms of effect, then, the sweep went back in time, recovering that portion of time represented by travel that had taken place before the sweep car had left town.

  The limit to this time recovery effect was governed only by the speed of the sweeping car, and the distance it was prepared to go.

  The application of this principle here, he thought, was obvious. It was to recover, if possible, the thirty-odd-minute lead that the fugitive car enjoyed.

  He settled down to compute the optimum distances and times the cars on sweep might have to go before making contact. A doubt of some kind kept bobbing around in the back of his mind, but he wasn’t able to put his finger on it.

  23

  “That’s him. That’s the sonofabitch,” Grozzo shouted as the car accelerated past the Lieutenant and his idling helicopter. “What we gonna do?”

  He sounded a little hysterical, as if his nerves were on edge. Rayder turned and froze him with a hard look.

  “We’re gonna outrun him,” Rayder said at last. “We’ll go on down to Bucola and get the other car. It’ll run faster than this one. We’ll beat him down there in this one and get the other one before he gets there to see us switch.” He was not as confident as he sounded. He turned again and said, “Keep on that radio. If he starts to broadcast, yell.”

  Grozzo nodded.

  The car had made two miles back toward the west before the helicopter rose to take up the chase. Soon they approached the road down which they had been traveling toward Bucola, before they had turned off into the rainstorm.

  “At least we know this road,” the driver mumbled.

  He pumped the brakes, then took the corner as fast as he dared. He wished Grozzo was driving. The chunky man could handle a car as if he had been born to it.

  He glanced back again. The other man was in turn giving his attention to the radio and to the helicopter, which had followed them around the turn like a kite on a long string. Both machines were wide open, and appeared to be about evenly matched. The car might have just a slight edge. It appeared to be gaining a little, but not enough to make much difference in the ten miles left to Bucola.

  “Anything on that radio?” Rayder yelled.

  The other man turned the dial, then said, “The Post back in the city is on to the caper. They’re dispatching cars down all the highways.”

  “That means the helicopter radio must be out, or he would have told ’em about us,” Rayder replied.

  Grozzo leaned forward on the back of the front seat. He seemed to be calmer now, but still worried. He talked loudly, over the noise.

  “If he tails us down there and sees us get in the other car, all he’s gotta do is set down some place and call in on a phone, and we’ve had it.”

  “I know. Any ideas?”

  “We could go back into the rain.”

  He gestured at the line of clouds parallel to them and now only about a mile away.

  “This storm can’t be more than ten miles across. With that helicopter and a few cars, they could sew us up like we were in a net.”

  There was a moment’s silence, then Grozzo said, “Well, if we went in, we’d have a few minutes to think. Christ, they’re gonna pick us off the way it is.”

  Ahead a couple of miles a blob of green stood along the highway, higher than the corn. It was the grove into which they had driven in the morning, running over the barbed wire gate. Rayder began to think rapidly.

  “That grove!” He pointed. “Wasn’t it at the corner of a road going east and west?”

  “Not quite at the corner. That gate was a couple of hundred feet south down this road from the corner.”

  Rayder glanced back at the helicopter, which was being bounced around some by the winds of the storm. It was far enough behind so that it dropped out of sight behind the corn whenever a gust of wind blew the craft from one side of the road to the other.

  He said to the other man: “If we turned down one of these crossroads, he wouldn’t be able to see us till he was almost overhead. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will this car run through that corn?”

  “Yeah, but don’t go in there over twenty miles an hour unless you want to wreck it.”

  “I don’t mean speed. Will it keep going through a cornfield?”

  “I think so.”

  They were approaching the grove.

  “Hold on,” Rayder yelled.

  He slammed on the brakes and let the car skid, raising a large cloud of dust from the gravel as he killed speed. At the crossroad he spun the car left, turning toward the rain clouds.

  To the men in the helicopter, the car was lost behind the corn. The pilot immediately began a left turn.

  Rayder, however, instead of accelerating toward the east again, went only a hundred yards, then abruptly turned off the road to the right, straight into the cornfield. The car sagged and almost stopped as it rammed the wall of tough corn stalks.

  “More gas,” yelled Grozzo. “Don’t let it stall.”

  Rayder nodded, flooring the gas. The engine roared. The automatic transmission screamed at the unaccustomed stress between the increased engine torque and the resistance the car was meeting from the thick green plants. They held their breaths, but the car continued to move.

  The stalks swished, scraped and rasped against the front and sides. Small, immature ears of corn thumped and splattered against the windshield and top, leaving milky streaks. The windshield wipers and antenna were carried away. The headlights were smashed.

  The engine rapidly heated under the load, and the smell of hot oil filled the car. They could see nothing except a wall of the green stalks advancing on them.

  Grozzo, who had had the presence of mind to orient himself to the direction of the rows of corn, reached over and twisted the wheel to correct their direction. The car had begun to veer, and with nothing on which to guide, they might have missed the grove they were aiming for, and circled aimlessly in the field.

  Abruptly, as if driving out of a tunnel, they were in the grove. The car shot forward as the resistance to it ceased. Rayder clapped on the brakes barely in time to miss a tree.

  They hopped out, and between rolls of thunder, could barely hear the flop!—flop!—flop! of the helicopter rapidly diminishing toward the east—and the storm.

  Exchanging a grin of mixed relief and triumph, they jumped back into the car, then steered it out of the grove and south again toward Bucola at ninety miles an hour.

  As the blue and white car slowed and made its second turn east, apparently headed for the storm again, the Lieutenant unbuckled his seat belt. Jumping to the front like a child pushing his nose against a window, he pressed against the plexiglass bubble, striving for a view of the car.

  The pilot immediately set the craft into its peculiar tilting turn toward the curtain of rain, now about a mile to their left. They came out of their turn directly above the road, going east. The car was not in sight.

  Just for a second, the pilot had a crazy idea that the Lieutenant was going to cry.

  “Land there,” Preen shouted, poin
ting to a barn lot alongside the road. “We’ll wait for them to come out again.” He began to tug at the riot gun clipped to the roof.

  The pilot had just begun to wonder how the car could have made it into the rain without their seeing it—it hadn’t seemed that far ahead—but he was jolted from his train of thought by this latest madness.

  “Wait! Wait till I set it down!” he shouted to Preen, who was wrestling at the gun, unaware that he was jostling the controls and bouncing the machine in the air.

  Preen turned around and shouted at the pilot: “Hurry up! I want to be waiting for them this time.”

  He seemed obsessed by the idea that it was all going to happen again.

  The pilot took advantage of the respite to land the helicopter quickly and turn off the engine. He leaned over the yoke with a long “Whew!” then, noting his superior again working frantically at the simple catches securing the gun, he quietly slid his catch, opened the port and stepped out.

  He walked around to the blind side of the machine, lit a cigarette and leaned against the side, listening to the commotion, shuffling and muttered curses as the other man continued his furious struggle with the gun.

  Finally, there was a triumphant cry as the Lieutenant got the gun loose, and then a thump as he opened his hatch and leaped to the ground. He ran around to the other side, swinging the gun wildly, and yelled, “Come on, come on!” He took off for the road a few yards away.

  “Good God!” said the pilot softly, then thinking fast, he yelled, “The rain’s moving in. We can’t leave her here. I’ll fly cover for you.”

  Without waiting for a reply, the pilot leaped in and started the motor. Immediately, since the engine was warm, he lifted off and moved out to the road, directly over the Lieutenant, who was apparently too intent on his job to notice. Peering down, the pilot thought, “Well, even if he didn’t hear me, he couldn’t do anything about it now, except shoot me down.” He smiled. Abruptly, the smile faded, and he sent the craft up another two hundred feet before leveling off.