Pursuit Read online

  Faster than he could have articulated them, his thoughts sped through his brain. He was in serious trouble. He had breached his static defense line to send three units down 66 to try for an intercept. Because of the explosion and wreck of the pursuing police car, contact with the quarry was now lost. They were free, loose in the maze again, and there was a gap in his line at Route 66.

  The explosion had occurred at Lemont Road and Route 66, ten miles down 66 from the point where 66 bisected the Tollway. The static defense, the blockade on the Tollway to the south and east of that line, was already obsolete. The cars there could be pulled out and used offensively, provided there was time to use them. Could they be brought up and used to reinforce the arc of cars stretching north of 66, and plug the hole?

  Most of the cars were farther away from the blockade points on the Tollway than were the fugitives. The idea of bringing them up as reinforcements was useless unless he could gain time. How?

  Freeze it! He could freeze time by having the units already in position to the north of 66 pull out and physically block the inbound lanes. Stop all traffic through their intersections into Chicago. If the fugitives went around the stalled lines they would be giving themselves away. They would have to wait in line immobilized, while he moved his forces. Then his men from the south end could come up to reinforce them.

  He realized that his greatest weakness was still the hole at 66 and the two adjoining intersections which he had stripped for the abortive intercept try. These intersections had to be sealed first. They must have first priority.

  He had started to reach for the mike when a thought from a deeper level hit him. According to games theory, the safest optimum assumption was that the pursued knew the pursuer’s strategy.

  Something in him rebelled at the concept. They couldn’t know about the Tollway blockade. He had used the teletype! Besides, nothing that had happened had indicated that the men had a radio.

  But, using the games theory assumption, if they did have a radio, the minute he started to broadcast, his whole strategy would be compromised. They would know about the blockade and all its elements.

  The first thing he had intended to do was to plug the three holes directly north of 66. If the fugitives were listening they could beat his cars—drive right through.

  Impasse! There was no way out for him.

  Then it hit him—a double-win strategy, a fail-safe maneuver.

  He would use the games theory assumption, use it as a lever, on a forcing gambit, and then, if the assumption failed, he would still have the original reinforcement strategy intact.

  He said into the mike, “Civil Air Patrol, this is Franklin, State Police. How far are you from the intersection of the Tollway and Route Sixty-six?”

  “Uh, about five or six miles.”

  That was good enough. That left one absolute condition, about which he could do nothing but hope. He decided to risk it.

  He said, “Civil Air Patrol, head for Tollway and Route Sixty-six junction. Do not transmit until I call you.”

  He said slowly and succinctly, “This is Franklin to all cars north of Route Sixty-six on the Tollway blockade. Pull out and block traffic inbound. Do not allow any cars into Chicago through your intersection. Do it now!”

  He continued slowly, without pause, “Civil Air Patrol, three intersections on the Tollway, the one at Route Sixty-six and the intersections at either side—Plainfield and Archer—are unguarded. Get there as quickly as you can and maintain a patrol. Our quarry is a green Chevrolet, two men, bullet hole in the back window. Do you read the transmission?”

  “Roger,” came the reply, “on the way, but—”

  “Do not transmit unless you sight them,” Franklin almost shouted. “That’s an order. I have priority.”

  Deliberately he began to pull the cars from the south half of the blockade and dispatch them north, to reinforce the units now blocking traffic. He was careful to dispatch them only by number and to refer to the units being reinforced only by number, giving neither the street location nor direction.

  He finished with an admonition: “Cars Seven-Eight and Three-Four, keep your engines turning. Be ready to move out without notice.”

  41

  The green car tooled up 55th Street toward the Tollway, observing the speed laws.

  The driver was clear-headed and alert. Once more, as soon as the immediate danger was past, he had relaxed.

  The tightly controlled man in the back seat was having a little harder time of it. For the first time in his adult life, he was feeling in less than complete control of himself. His cold poise was wearing away, abrading under the repeated cycle of excitement and danger. He wasn’t completely out of action by any means; but he was profoundly shaken.

  The radio boomed out the trooper’s announcement that he was at the scene of the fire. Rayder half listened. So what?

  As Franklin’s voice came on, directing the cars in the north segment of the blockade to pull out and seal the intersections, Rayder snapped to alertness. He spun the dial, flooding the car with volume.

  “Did he say blockade on the Tollway?” Grozzo’s fear-tightened voice sounded louder than the radio.

  “Shut up,” roared Rayder, straining to catch everything that was coming in.

  Franklin’s direction to the plane and then his clear exposition of the three unguarded streets brought them to violent action.

  “We gotta beat that plane!” yelled Rayder. “Plainfield is the closest. Go! Open up!!!”

  The husky driver needed no urging. He pulled into the left lane, turned on his lights and, dropping the car into second, charged the oncoming traffic at seventy miles an hour.

  Deftly, like a swivel-hipped quarterback going down-field, he danced the high-powered machine through the knots of cars approaching them. The quick and the bright yielded to him, getting out of the way. The uncomprehending or frightened, or those with slow reflexes, he maneuvered around, matching and balancing his car’s speed against his own reflexes, surely and deliberately using the power from the big engine and the racing brakes to maneuver the sedan like a sports car.

  They turned south on Madison and raced the two miles to the junction with Plainfield. Coming into the intersection they had a green light. His hands a blur of motion, Grozzo cribbed the wheel, hit the gas, then the brakes, then the gas again, and sent them through the turn in a sixty-mile-an-hour racing drift. Two miles straight ahead, barely visible, was the Tollway interchange.

  The luck was holding.

  42

  A transmitter came in. It carried a different background sound from those of the police cars. The aircraft engine was much noisier. The pilot was excited.

  “State Police, this is Civil Air Patrol. I am over the junction of Route Sixty-six and Tollway at about three thousand feet. About a mile north of me and a mile and a half west, on Plainfield, there is a green car headed in toward the city going like blazes. He is driving against traffic most of the time and keeps his lights on. Shall I—”

  “Can you stay with him? Can you keep him in sight?”

  “No sweat.”

  “Stay with him. Stay on the air. Give us a continuing broadcast of where he is and whether he turns.”

  “Roger.”

  Franklin turned the volume up high, and said, “This is the Superintendent to all units. This is it! Our quarry is on Plainfield now, approaching the Tollway from the southwest, about a mile out. Anyone who thinks he is close enough to get into it, get down there. Some of you dispatched north as reinforcements should be at or near the Plainfield intersection now. You should be in the best position to give chase. Units Seven-Eight and Three-Four, you are released from reserve. Move out. Seven-Eight, you are almost directly in their path. Move up three blocks to the intersection of Plainfield and First. Commandeer a truck and block the road.”

  43

  The airplane wheeled over and fell in behind the fleeing car. With each dispatch order that came over the transmitter, the car spurted ahe
ad, until it was traveling the city street at over a hundred miles art hour.

  As the car flashed under the Tollway interchange, a blue police car, looking from the air oddly like a toy, came rapidly up the Tollway from the southwest. Without slowing, it turned into the parabolic curve of the exit ramp and went around it in a full-power, tire-smoking drift, emerging from the exit chute like a stone from a slingshot. It was only two blocks behind the madly plunging green machine. A minute later, another one completed the same maneuver.

  The sight of the cruiser seemed to unhinge the driver of the first car. His maneuvers became less precise, almost as if his reflexes had gone bad. The crisp authority with which he had controlled his machine seemed to give way to sluggishness, to uncertainty, perhaps to fear. His responses became exaggerated. The car began to wallow and slip in its desperate maneuvers. But it did not slow down.

  When the roadblock became visible ahead, the driver of the green car hit his brakes to kill speed, then turned and braked more to set up his drift for a turn.

  And the long string of luck ran out!

  He overcontrolled. Instead of a drift, the car went into a wild slide, out of control. It slid around once, glanced from a taxi, then went head-on into a utility pole.

  The crash was so loud that the pilot heard it plainly. His quiet words, “Oh, my God,” came back over the air.

  His observer, sitting alongside, was not so reverent. He took the mike and said, “It’s all over. They ran into a post, but good.” He paused a minute, then said, “Say, you know it’s a good thing they were driving fast enough to draw attention to themselves. We’d never have picked them out otherwise. There’s hundreds of green cars, and you can’t tell one from the other from the air. We have to fly at least a thousand feet high over towns. Whattya suppose they were driving so fast for? Nothing was chasing them!”

  At the Post, Franklin leaned against the radio and said softly, “Oh yes there was. It’s something called the Safest Optimum Assumption. We made them race you for that hole.”

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