The Approach

The Approach — The dark water off Alcatraz, 03:47 AM — light fog rolling off the bay

And there it is — dead ahead through the gauze of fog. Alcatraz. Good God, it's real. All gray concrete and iron rising bone-white out of the black water, the old lighthouse cutting a pale orange eye through the mist. You've read about this place in case files, photocopied it, tabbed it in reports. You never once imagined you'd be swimming toward it in the middle of the night alongside a man the government spent thirty years pretending didn't exist.

John Mason: Nervous, lad? Steady your breathing. The water's cold, the whisky's warm, and there's a lot of good honest men get seasick before they meet their maker. Don't be one of them.

Beside you, Mason sits easy as carnage in the ribs of the boat, white-knuckled only on the inside. The SAS captain they dragged out of a hole in the desert. The only man alive who walked off this Rock and lived. He stares at the island not like a target — but like an old enemy he owes twenty years' worth of debts.

Up in the bow, Commander Baxter raises a closed fist. The engine dies to silence. Fog swallows the boat. Baxter turns back, hooking his finger toward the island.

Commander Baxter: Two minutes. Goodspeed, you get your hands on those rockets, you disable them, you get off this island. That's the entire plan. The general's given San Francisco until six to pay him. We don't have the luxury of a plan B.

Nicolas Cage: Six in the morning. That's the clock. Six hours. Inside that concrete tomb is a rogue Marine general, eighty-plus civilian hostages, and fifteen VX rockets — each one holding enough nerve agent, you chiffed quietly to yourself on the flight over, to kill every soul in a crowded stadium. And you're the only man on the mission who can disarm them.

Then it happens — the unexpected, the thing they drilled you could never prepare for. Through the fog, a sound like the world clearing its throat. A low, thrashing whump-whump-whump that gets louder and louder until the fog itself seems to pull back, chased by light.

A helicopter cuts through the mist in a broad, lazy arc, searchlight dragging white fire across the water. It's not headed for the island. It's hunting. Coming this way, low and slow along the channel, sweeping toward your silent boat. Baxter curses under his breath. Mason goes utterly still — a statue in black.

Commander Baxter: Son of a bitch. They've got rotating patrols off the dock now. That bird has infrared — it finds us, it's over before we start. We move, we're sitting ducks on open water.

The fog closes in. Your heart hammers against your ribs. Six hours. Fifteen rockets. A helicopter carving the black water, thirty seconds from sweeping over your position — and Baxter just told you there's no plan B.

Stanley — your call. What do you do?

Dr. Stanley Goodspeed: I take a shot of whiskey, and then throw up overboard

Mason sees your hand shake and, without missing a beat, presses his flask into your palm — tin, warm from his ribs, dented a dozen times. You unscrew it. The whisky hits your throat like a fist wrapped in velvet, burns a trail straight down to your boots.

John Mason: 'S better than the last swill we could afford, lad. Always keep one on you. The body's a coward — whisky's the bribe that talks it back into line.

The warmth settles in your stomach for exactly one glorious heartbeat. And then — the boat rocks on the chop, the ferry captain's soul you inherited takes one look at the black heaving water and the spinning beam of the searchlight and says enough of this — and you're over the gunwale, heaving last night's nervous energy into the bay as loud as you dare.

Which is to say: catastrophically loud. The sound carries flat and far across the water. Mason's weathered hand clamps over your mouth before you can finish, but his eyes are fixed past your shoulder, and you follow his gaze.

The helicopter's searchlight stutters. Then it swings — a long, white tongue of light licking across the water, straightening like a finger pointing at your boat. The engine note drops. It's turning toward you. Baxter's face, just visible under the balaclava, has gone the color of chalk.

Commander Baxter: They've got us, they've got us! Goodspeed, damn it — whatever you're gonna do, do it NOW. That's a Ghost Hawk, she's got chain guns and a full squad of Recon Marines. She finds us on open water, nobody walks off this rock.

The whisky's warm in your belly and the vomit's out of your system — but your cover's blown. The searchlight is zeroing in, and Baxter is out of patience.

Stanley — now, right now, what do you do?

Dr. Stanley Goodspeed: Shoot out the light

You hear your own voice give the order before your brain signs off on it. The M4 snaps up from your chest, stock finding your shoulder like it was always meant to be there, and somewhere in the back of your skull the lab-rat that never held a rifle is screaming. The front of your mind is already lining up the shot.

The Ghost Hawk is close enough now that you can feel its rotor-thump in your teeth, its searchlight a white sun boring into the fog. The boat heaves under you with every swell. The chopper banks, slow and confident, giving you the full face of that blazing light. Baxter shouts something you don't hear.

You breathe out. The crosshatch of the reticle settles on the blinding white heart of the beam. Everything else — the bay, the island, the six hours, the fifteen rockets — falls away until there is only you, the rifle, and that light.

One shot. The boat's rocking, the rotor's shaking the air, and that searchlight is a blazing white sun filling your vision.

Roll your attack against the spotlight.

Shooting out the Ghost Hawk's searchlight with your M4 carbine from the rocking boat — a hard, pinpoint shot on a moving target. — Rolled 1d20+2 — Result: 14

You squeeze. The M4 barks, the stock thuds into your collarbone, and for one crystalline instant you'd swear you drilled it dead center.

Sparks scream off the searchlight's mounting bracket — six inches low — and the beam flickers, dying to a dim yellow smear behind star-cracked glass. The lens is shattered but still burning. You're so close, and so very loud.

Any hope that was a silent shot evaporates. The Ghost Hawk yanks up hard, nose sliding sideways as the pilot pulls into a bank, and the hatch rips open. A sergeant leans out over the black water, and the world fills with the agonized shriek of a chain gun cycling. The bay erupts around the boat in white geysers of foam. Baxter is screaming something — lost in the roar.

And through it all, old Mason is bolt-upright next to you, not a hair moved, one hand clamped on the gunwale, watching the tracer fire stitch the water toward your hull with the patient, cataloguing calm of a man who has been shot at by better men than this. He turns his head just enough to look at you.

John Mason: Ahh, now it's a party. Close one, lad — but you've gone and poked the hornet's nest. If you've got a share of that nerve left, use it now.

The chain gun's chewing the water thirty feet off your bow, and the whole bay knows you're here now. The island's dead ahead — a black wall of concrete barely visible through the tracer-light and foam.

Stanley — you've got seconds to move the team. What do you do?

Dr. Stanley Goodspeed: Take out the chopper

Somewhere in you that seven-year-old with the chemistry set surfaces — the kid who never met a volatile situation he couldn't make worse, or somehow, impossibly, right. You drop the carbine's strap and throw yourself toward the SEALs' stores, fingers closing on cold green metal. The Stinger. A shoulder-held truth-teller the size of a fire extinguisher, and twice as smug about it.

The firing tube comes up heavy on your shoulder. Baxter's shouting something about not having line-of-sight, about the chopper banking too hard, about it not being a fair shot — but the rotor's kicking up fog like a storm and the searchlight is swinging wild overhead, and all your science-brain needs is one clean thermal picture of that engine exhaust against the cold bay.

The seeker head wakes with a rising, keening whine in your ear — a sound like a star going supergiant — and somewhere in the roar of the chain gun you hear the lock tone break through, clean and high. The Ghost Hawk senses its death and starts to pulley away hard, dragging its fire in a screaming arc back toward you.

Cold comes over you. The same cold that took over when you lined up the searchlight. The whole world shakes down to one point: the moment between the lock tone's peak and the chain gun's arrival on your hull. You key the trigger.

You've got a lock. The rotor-thump is tearing the air, the searchlight's swinging for your face, and the chain gun's coming around on you by the second. You're holding the weight of it, the seeker keening, one breath from launch.

Roll to acquire the lock and get the Stinger off before the chain gun finds your hull.

Pulling the Stinger up under chain gun fire, getting a clean IR lock on the Ghost Hawk, and launching before the incoming fire tears through your boat — Rolled 1d20+2 — Result: 14

Your thumb drops to the trigger. The lock tone is a full-throated shriek in your skull, the chain gun's tracers are stitching the water toward your hull, and then— the button goes home, the launch tube barks white smoke, and a missile the size of a baseball bat steps off your shoulder with a roar that bottoms out your lungs.

It's a line of pure fire, flat and true across the black water, and the Ghost Hawk doesn't have time to scream. The exhaust seeker already owns it.

The missile catches the chopper dead in the engine, and the night becomes daylight — a rolling, blooming fireball that swallows the Ghost Hawk whole. Rotor blades shear off in flaming arcs and spin away into the fog. The wreckage hangs for one impossible beat, then drops out of the sky and slams into the bay a hundred feet off the island, throwing up a wall of steam and foam like a whale surfacing on fire. The glow of it catches every window along the west face of Alcatraz.

For a long, awful second the only sound is the hiss of burning rotor parts sinking into the water. Then the scrap of the boat's engine, and Baxter's hand landing hard on your shoulder. His face is a mask of exhausted respect.

Commander Baxter: Goddamn. The lab rat's got teeth. But hear the sirens? That fireball just flipped the lights on for every sentry, every camera, every trigger-happy jarhead on that island. Say goodbye to sneaking in. It's a fight now, or it's nothing.

He was right. Through the ringing in your ears you can hear it — distant klaxons wailing across the water, and the chop of more rotors thudding out of the fog to circle and search. Mason stands in the bow, watching the burning wreck settle into the shallows, and there's something almost pleased in his eyes.

John Mason: That's the loudest way to start a prison break I've ever had the pleasure to watch. Alcatraz knows we're coming now. So be it — we were never going to slip in quiet with those fifteen rockets and eighty hostages. Sometimes, lad, you don't creep up on the tiger. You kick in the door and hope you're the nastier thing inside.

The boat surges forward into the dark of the island's lee, torchlight of the burning chopper painting the Rock in orange and shadow. The concrete wall rises over you now, enormous, patient, patient as the dead men buried in the old prison cemetery above. The dock's cracked pilings sag into black water ahead.

The chopper's down — and with it, any hope of a quiet insertion. Klaxons are wailing across the island, more rotors are wheeling in the fog, and the concrete face of Alcatraz looms like a cliff you're about to climb by the fingernails.

Stanley — you're thirty seconds from the dock. Mason's watching you, Baxter's watching the sky, and everyone on that island knows you're coming. How does the team come ashore?

Dr. Stanley Goodspeed: I start floss dancing

The klaxons are wailing. The burning wreck's still hissing in the shallows, painting the Rock in orange and shadow. Rotor-thumps are closing in overhead. And you — Dr. Stanley Goodspeed, the man who just blasted a helicopter out of the sky with a Stinger and threw up over the gunwale — set the carbine down against the boat's ribs, roll your shoulders like a prizefighter, and begin to floss.

Full send. Arms pumping, hips swinging in a perfect lopsided weave, the tactical vest riding up under the balaclava. Somewhere in the back of your mind the nervous energy that nearly buckled you five minutes ago burns off as sheer, ridiculous motion. You floss like a man who has seen fifteen VX rockets and decided the only sane response is to dance at them.

Baxter's jaw drops. For a full three seconds nobody on the boat moves — the SEALs staring at you like you've spontaneously grown a second head. And then, impossible as it is, a low, wheezing laugh punches out of Baxter's chest. One of the younger operators cracks. The fear in the boat cracks too.

Commander Baxter: What the hell are you doing?! We're a minute out from dying!

You don't stop. You floss past the stores, floss past the lockbox, floss to the very bow of the boat — and when you finally stop, gasping, raw with it, the burning island is right there, the dock's cracked pilings thirty feet off the bow, and every man on the boat is looking at you different. Like maybe the unhinged one is the one who keeps them from cracking.

John Mason: Aye, that's the secret, lad. Half this war is about not losing your nerve. I've seen men dance worse than that and win medals. Though I'd've gone with something with a bit more fire in the hips, myself.

The dock scrapes the boat's bow. The klaxons are closer now, boots hammering concrete somewhere above you, the burning chopper's glow dancing across the prison wall. For three ridiculous seconds, you've made death wait — and the whole team's a little less scared because of it.

Stanley — the Rock is here. Same question, but you're grinning now: how does the team come ashore?

Dr. Stanley Goodspeed: Storm the main dock