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CHAPTER 1 SOUND THE ALARM At the crack of dawn Cellblock B in the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary was silent and dark Clarence Carnes a longtime prisoner lay on his bunk already awake He’d barely slept all night Suddenly the wake-up bell rang out just as it did every morning and the prisoners began to stir They had 15 minutes to get out of bed go to the bathroom and get dressed Some stayed in bed to grab a few extra minutes of sleep After 15 minutes a whistle pierced the air and the prisoners walked to the front of their cells It was time for the morning head count Carnes was one of the first inmates at the front of his
cell He stood eagerly at the bars and looked around He listened as the guards walked down the aisle and counted prisoners one at a time He had reason to believe that the count might be short this morning His friends had planned a daring overnight escape from the escape-proof prison He hoped they had made it What Carnes heard next made his heart leap One of the guards called for a recount It was possible that the guard had simply made a mistake and needed to count again But Carnes didn’t think so His friends were smart and they had a good plan They had been working on their escape for months and had been painstaking about every last detail Right now Carnes imagined they were breathing fresh outside air He suppressed a smile as Officer Lawrence Bartlett the guard on duty counted again Officer Bartlett soon noticed that prisoner John J W Anglin had not gotten up He walked over reached between the bars and tapped the prisoner’s pillow But Anglin did not respond Bartlett called Lieutenant Bill Long down for a look He told Long that Anglin was either dead or he had
been replaced by a life-sized dummy Long poked Anglin’s head Still Anglin just lay there He poked it again harder and this time his fingers pushed right through Startled he swatted the head and it rolled off the bunk onto the floor It was a dummy Long jumped back Long reached through the bars yanked the blanket down and saw rolled up blankets and clothes that Anglin had placed there to look like his body He quickly went to the next cell that of Clarence Anglin John’s brother and pulled off his blanket Clarence’s bed was also filled with blankets and a fake head There was one more prisoner missing from the head count Frank Morris Long dashed over to Morris’s cell and pulled the covers off his dummy head and blankets He was gone too A call was made to acting Warden Arthur Dollison He lived in a duplex on the island with his family When the phone rang in his home Dollison felt a chill of dread go through him It could not be good news to get a phone call right after the morning count As he and more officers
