Plot summary

A group of renegade Marine commandos seizes a stockpile of chemical weapons and takes over Alcatraz, with eighty-one tourists as hostages. Their leader, a former highly-decorated General, demands one hundred million dollars to be paid in ransom, as restitution to families of Marines who died in covert operations and were thereby denied compensation. Otherwise, he is threatening to launch fifteey rockets carrying deadly VX nerve gas into the San Francisco Bay area. An elite S.E.A.L. team, with support from an F.B.I. chemical warfare expert (Stanley Goodspeed) and a former Alcatraz escapee (John Patrick Mason), is assembled to penetrate the terrorists' defenses on Alcatraz and neutralize the rocket threat before time runs out.—Tad Dibbern