When a nightmare straight out of folk mythology once again walks the earth, no one is safe. The monster that lives in the human psyche as a vague racial memory, and which lurks on the edges of your dreams, the very thought of which has fuelled many a legend and created fear down through the ages, awakens after an earthquake cracks open a cave in Gibraltar and ends its self-imposed entombment. It brings into the world an ages old strain of the rabies virus to which humanity no longer has any resistance and which cannot be counteracted by modern antidotes. By spreading the infection among the rocks famous apes and turning them into savage killers it spreads the disease to the human inhabitants of the colony and from there out into the world. While whole countries and governments go down, an embattled Great Britain sends a hastily put together team to Gibraltar and the Sierra Nevada mountains of neighbouring Spain to capture the creature in the hope that some kind of remedy can be gained from studying it. But things don't go as planned. Sweeping action on the rock of Gibraltar and the Sierra Nevada mountains of southern Spain, a modern-day naval battle in the Alboran Sea just off the coast of Malaga and elite small unit operators fighting for their own survival and that of the human race, ending in a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the Iberian Peninsula, while the world fights on to survive.