They came to cure an outbreak. The outbreak was a rehearsal.
Something is killing the rubber-tappers of the Kapuas River, and the wounds don't match anything in the medical literature. Triangular. Three points. Five millimetres deep.
When epidemiologist Maggie Quinn maps the deaths, they don't spread like a disease. They hold a line. They keep a schedule. They read less like an outbreak than a series of appointments being kept—by something moving through the jungle with purpose.
APEX Unit has seen this before. A multinational black-ops team that cleans up what should never have been built, they've tracked engineered predators across Siberian ice and Carpathian forest. Now Major Sara Vance leads them up a river toward a Soviet installation forty years abandoned, and the thing waiting inside it—ten metres of muscle, venom, and claws where no snake should have claws—is smarter than anything they've hunted.
But the creature isn't the mission. The cure it carries in its body is.
Because the corridor of dead villages was never an accident, and the enzyme APEX bleeds to recover was never only a cure. Somewhere upriver, Sara's own brother is running a programme that treats a jungle full of the dying as a proving ground—and the answer to what it's for is worse than the animal in the dark.
Some of the team won't come home. The ones who do will wish they didn't know what they learned.
Headwater Protocol is the third book in The APEX Files—a propulsive, cinematic creature-thriller series for readers of Jeremy Robinson, Greig Beck, and Matthew Reilly. Fast, brutal, and built to be read in one sitting.
