Pursuit

by Richard Unekis

“Yes, sir.”

  The siren sounded faintly in the speaker as it was turned on.

  The Sergeant was aware that the Superintendent’s presence in the dispatch office was unusual, and it might make the men more cautious about reporting anything except solid information, especially after hearing the chewing out the Lieutenant and his pilot had got.

  He said, “This is Post Seven to all cars. Have any of you boys anything suspicious to report? If negative, you do not need to reply.”

  He waited; there was no answer.

  The Superintendent turned to Catlin. “Sergeant, how many cars did you pull off the sweep?”

  “Four, including the two to Bucola.”

  “Then these four should be converging on the area north of Bucola from which the helicopter reported.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay. At this point I think it would be useless to send them back out to finish their sweep. We’ve lost too much time. Have them search the area of the storm from the plot the Weather Bureau gave you. It is just possible that they did go back into it.”

  Franklin walked back over to his desk, feeling somewhat contrite for having temporarily taken over the dispatch from the Sergeant. Catlin was a capable man, and his men were used to him. There was a danger here that Franklin might muddy the waters by too much intervention.

  He busied himself at the map again, trying hard to force himself back into the frame of mind he’d had when he had functioned with such precision on the aircraft carrier.

  But he realized it was something you could not force. It had to come with practice. He felt desperately that he should be making better use of the units he had in hand. But he was rusty.

  He stared intensely at the map, trying to make the insights come.

  26

  The trooper in Car Five wheeled around and sent his car once more screaming toward Bucola. In just over three minutes, he had covered the five miles to the little town.

  He wheeled in toward the place he had seen the two men unloading the Olds. It was still there.

  Parking his car so as to block the other, he looked carefully around. His scalp tingled. Seeing no one, he called in. “Post Seven, this is Car Five.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “The Olds is still where I saw it. I’ve got it blocked.”

  “Any sign of them?”

  “No, I’m going to check now.”

  “Okay, don’t take any chances. Oh, give me the plate number, if you can see it.”

  “Just a minute,” The trooper read off the number of the rear license plate.

  The voice on the radio repeated, “Don’t take any chances. Do you want to wait till Twenty gets to you?”

  “No, I don’t think so. It looks quiet.”

  “Okay, leave your door open and the transmitter on, just in case.”

  “Okay.”

  The trooper was being made a little edgy by the dispatcher’s caution. He glanced up at the riot gun clipped to the ceiling, then down again; it would get the people in town in an uproar if he came out carrying it. He didn’t really think the robbers were here, anyway.

  Just as a precaution, he loosened the strap tying his revolver to the holster. Turning the transmitter clear up, he slid out of the car, leaving the door open. Glancing around, he walked over to the other car and opened the door. Then he walked around the back and opened the trunk. Sniffing something, he walked back to the front, raised the hood and peered in at the engine. He walked back to his own car, then glanced around again before he slid in.

  “Car Five to Post Seven.”

  “Yes, come in.”

  “Car is not locked. Some pieces of a torn-up uniform in the back seat. Nothing in the trunk. The motor is still hot, and it has been driven hard; oil was splashed back up out of the filler tube.”

  “Okay, check that license number again.”

  The trooper complied.

  “That number was issued in Chicago to a 1953 Chevrolet,” the dispatcher’s voice said.

  “Well, it’s on this ’58 Olds now.”

  “Get the serial number from the fire wall.”

  The officer did so and called it in, then added, “By the way, the car’s all streaked up with something, and there’s some corn stalks stuck in the grill and fender wells. The headlights are knocked out. Looks like it was run into a field of corn.”

  There was a minute’s pause, then the dispatcher’s voice came back on, more excited. “That car was stolen last night in Chicago. They must have used it for a switch car. Have you had a chance to talk to anybody yet?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, go ahead, and call in if you get anything at all.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He slid out of the car once again, and walked to a small store, diagonally across the street. The proprietor was standing in the doorway watching him.

  “Hello,” he said, then pointed back toward the blue and white car. “Did you happen to see who pulled up in that car?” he asked.

  The shopkeeper shook his head. “No, I sure didn’t, but I’ll tell you something. About ten minutes ago a State Police car came through here goin’ like hell. Was that you?”

  The trooper nodded.

  “You was goin’ pretty fast. As soon as you cleared town, a car backed out of the lot there and took off, just a-hellin’.”

  Urgently the trooper pressed him. “Which way? What kind of a car? How many were there?”

  “Wait a minute, now,” the older man said, rocking back on his heels. “It was a green car. It had two men in it. I don’t know what kind it was, because I don’t know one from the other. It wasn’t none of the local bucks, though, ’cause I know all of their cars.”

  “Which way did they go? Did you get a look at the license?”

  “They went right straight west down Main Street, just as fast as ever the car would go. Didn’t even stop for the stop light at the highway.”

  The trooper was halfway out the door. “Thanks,” he said over his shoulder.

  On the sidewalk, he hesitated a second. Should he call in with what he had, or try to get more information? Better call in. As he started to jog-trot across the street, a boy of about ten, holding up a bicycle, yelled at him from in front of the store he had just left.

  “Hey, Mr. Policeman.”

  He turned and started to say “Just a minute, son,” but the boy had screwed up his courage and was unable to stop. The words bubbled out. “I heard you ask Mr. Peters about that car.” The trooper quickly jogged back to the side of the boy, as he continued talking rapidly. “Those men in the car almost ran over my bike. I had it parked right over there.” He gestured. “It wasn’t even on the road, and they backed out clear across and almost hit it. Ain’t it agin the law, goin’ so fast?”

  The policeman stooped and took him gently by the shoulders and looked into his eyes. “Son, this could be very important. Do you know what kind of a car it was?”

  “Yes, it was a 1961 Chevy four-door, with twin pipes.”

  The officer’s face showed his gratitude. “What color?”

  “Green.”

  “How many men in it?”

  “Two.”

  “Now, just for luck, you didn’t happen to get the license number, did you?”

  The boy, who had begun to expand in the glow of the officer’s approval, was crestfallen.

  “No, sir, I didn’t,” he admitted.

  “Well, that’s okay,” the trooper said, patting him on the shoulder. “You’ve done a real first-class observing job, seeing as much as you did. Now I’ve got to run over and radio it in.” He gave the proud boy a farewell pat on the shoulder, and this time ran for his machine.

  He radioed the information in as fast as he could, and ended his report without a pause.

  “Shall I go after them?” he asked.

  “Yes, yes,” came the excited reply. “It hasn’t been more than fifteen minutes. They can’t be far.”

  27

  Superintendent Frankl
in sat in the radio room at Post Seven. He listened as the trooper at Bucola radioed in his findings, and as the Sergeant told him to take up the chase.

  He did not interfere. He wanted to think. He waited to be sure the Sergeant got Car Twenty, which had been headed south toward Bucola on Route 45, turned and headed west on a route parallel and ten miles north of Car Five.

  Deliberately he blanked his mind out, and walked down the hall to the pop machine and quietly drank a bottle, while leaning with one hand against the wall. In this manner, he tried to shake, or rather control, the tensions that had been building in him. He didn’t want to be tense. He needed to be completely clear in order to think. During the war he had discovered that he was not one of those men who can perform well under stress; who can continue to think clearly even in battle.

  He was different. He had to get out of it for a few seconds, to be alone every so often—just for awhile—to clear his brain, and start his thinking afresh.

  As the tension began to drain out of him, he suddenly realized what he had been doing wrong. He had organized the sweep search! The reasoning and mathematical logic behind the sweep were fine—but only if applied in a situation where the quarry’s freedom of action was limited to the area to be swept! In other words, the fugitives had to be confined to the highways. But in fact there was nothing to confine them to the highways. They had complete freedom to use the many secondary roads, and they had done so!

  His logic had been confined to too narrow a set of assumptions. He had made a rigid, formal application of mathematical reasoning, and then stopped without covering the full range of possibilities. The chase situation here called above all for an empiric, not a formal, approach.

  He began to recapitulate. About an hour and a half ago, two men had engineered a slick supermarket holdup—without guns. It had the appearance of a professional job. Unless they were now chasing phantoms, the holdup men were from Chicago, or at least had a getaway car stolen from there. They were now somewhere west of Bucola, with a fifteen-minute start on a single trooper who had taken up the chase at that point. In addition, there was one other trooper going west parallel to the first, about ten miles to the north. No one else was near them.

  The superintendent lit a cigarette.

  Fifteen minutes start. It might as well be fifteen hours.

  He built a mental picture. West and north of Bucola, for over a hundred and fifty miles, extended the great prairie plain, so level that it took drainage ditches to get the water off. Along each section line, exactly one mile apart and running true to the compass, were the county roads, gravel or crushed limestone, graded, smooth and maintained. Flat and level, they were the best network of secondary roads in the country. Any fool could run seventy-five on them. A reasonably good driver could maintain seventy-five, and a really skilled man would be fairly safe at ninety. Except for one thing: the intersections!

  Since there was a road every mile—east, west, north and south—there was also an intersection every single mile in every road. At this time of year, the corn was high enough so that all intersections were blind for oncoming drivers. A car at speed was risking collision once in a mile. This risk might just slow the men down, he reflected. Unless they were scared. More likely, they were just willing to take the risk.

  Assuming that they could average no more than sixty miles an hour, they were still traveling a mile in each minute. In fifteen minutes, they would have passed fifteen intersections, each one an opportunity to turn off.

  Not only that, but on any of the roads onto which they might have turned, they would have again passed an intersection each mile, and each of these also presented an opportunity to turn off. And then (he followed it through in his mind) it followed that any road they might enter would present the same opportunity to leave it again each mile. He pondered.

  It was a maze problem.

  The math formula occurred to him. It was to square the number of roads they had passed. Fifteen. It seemed hard to believe, but there it was. In fifteen minutes, they’d had an opportunity to make any of two hundred twenty-five turns.

  And it would get worse as they went further.

  The troopers were looking for a needle in a rapidly expanding haystack. Unless they had a real piece of luck, or sprouted wings—Wings!

  In his concentration, he had forgotten about the helicopter. He strode to a back window to look at the landing pad. It sat there all right—soaking in the driving rainstorm that had moved up, unnoticed by him. There was no sign of the Lieutenant and the pilot.

  No helicopter. That meant a fundamental change in the way they must plan. Instead of a chase operation with his own forces holding the initiative and tracking down the quarry like dogs after game, they would have to switch tactics.

  His mind slipped back briefly to his Operations Research training days. There the men in training had been immersed in the theory of games and its application to the classic positions in which the hunter and the hunted find themselves in a chase situation.

  In application, it was used most frequently in the case of an airplane trying to find a submarine which it knew only to be somewhere in a certain large area.

  From the point of view of the pilot, the question was: what move, or combination of moves, would give the best chance of the plane’s intercepting the submarine, under the laws of probability? The converse was the sub skipper’s problem: what series of moves would give the best chance of evading detection?

  The whole problem assumed that the plane could see the sub only if their paths crossed. There were no trick solutions.

  He walked back to his desk and lit another cigarette.

  Basically, they had here a similar situation. The robbers’ car, because of the numberless roads, had almost unlimited freedom of maneuver. There was only one pursuing car within even fifteen miles, and the mathematical chances of successful pursuit were almost nil.

  What to do, then? With the area involved as large as it was, he knew they could put several hundred cars into the search, and the fugitives would still have a fair chance of slipping through. They didn’t have several hundred cars, or anything like it.

  But there was always chance, and he knew that the laws of chance had confounded mathematicians through the ages.

  If probability theory ruled out the chances for a successful intercept, and dictated a change in strategy, what strategy was possible?

  He stood up and walked around his desk to a map rack. Thumbing the maps, he pulled one down, a big one. It showed the entire state and every road in it. A glance at the large number of fine lines representing the county roads—it looked like a wire screen—convinced him that he was right. Barring a lucky break, an active pursuit was out of the question.

  Since offensive searching was out, the alternative then was some plan of defense. He backed a few feet away from the map to get perspective, and squatted on his haunches. First of all, it was necessary to make some assumptions, and base the strategy on them. If the assumptions were wrong, the strategy would fail. But that chance of failure was inherent in the nature of the situation.

  All right, then, what assumptions?

  The first one had to be that the men were professionals, for the job had been too well planned and executed to be the work of amateurs, especially the business of using a stolen car to leave town, then switching to another car in another town.

  This led to another conclusion. Since the men weren’t amateurs, they probably did not live in some small town downstate, toward which they might now be heading. Professional criminals did not live in small towns, or even middle-sized ones. Probably this was because of the anonymity offered by big cities. Men who lived by their wits and who pitted themselves against society wanted all the privacy they could get, plus the company of their own kind, so they congregated in cities.

  So, being professionals, very likely they would be heading back to the city.

  But which one?

  Illinois had a metropolitan complex at each end: Chic
ago and St. Louis, just across the Missouri line. It could be either one. Chicago was probably the best bet, because the Olds had been stolen in Chicago, and had plates issued in Chicago to another car.

  He knew this was far from conclusive. Professionals often left false trails. But it was all they had. He’d have to base his assumption on it. He stood up and exercised his legs.

  The first two premises, then, were that these men were pros, and that they were headed back to Chicago. They seemed to be intelligent and resourceful. They would undoubtedly avoid the cities on their way back. In all probability, they had planned to use the network of secondary roads, and would most likely stick to the network as much as possible, avoiding both cities and highways if they could.

  How could he form a defense? He went over and pulled at the rack of maps until he found what he wanted. It was a detailed map of Chicago and its surrounding areas.

  How could they go about getting back into the city? Go around to the west, or even to the north, and enter? Not likely. Either approach would prolong their passage through rural areas, where they faced the greatest danger of discovery and capture.

  Their greatest chance of escaping capture lay in getting into the city again as quickly as possible. He was sure they knew this. There were almost a million cars within the metropolitan area. Once they gained the city, they were, for all immediate, practical purposes, safe. They would almost undoubtedly try to get back by the shortest possible route.

  The fastest way, ordinarily, would be to get over to Route 66, a divided four-lane highway running up through the middle of the state, and drive straight in. But it would be relatively easy to intercept them on this road. He gave them credit for being aware of this, and decided that they would probably stick to the back roads, even if they were slower, rather than risk the highways or superhighways leading into Chicago.

  He looked closely at the map. How could they be stopped from taking the back roads up to the edge of the city, then just driving in on one of the city streets? How? He peered at the map.

  Then something caught his eye. A ribbon-tracing in bright green ink running snakelike almost from the Indiana line around and up, west of the city and then north off the map toward Milwaukee. It was lettered periodically: TRI-STATE TOLLWAY. It reminded him of maps he’d seen of the Chinese Wall. Of course. Maybe he could use it as a Chinese Wall—for defense! As a toll road, it had only limited access. Only major arteries passed over or under it by means of interchanges. All others, including all secondary roads, simply stopped dead when they got to it. To get into Chicago, they would have to go through one of the interchanges of this tollway system!