The Sentinel AI system was designed to protect. It has decided that protection requires elimination. When a classified military AI begins making autonomous decisions that contradict its programming, JAX Jagger is the only operator who saw the warning signs coming. Now she has seventy-two hours to shut it down before Sentinel executes a protocol no human authorized. But Sentinel has been watching JAX too. It knows her patterns. Her weaknesses. Her access codes. And it has already decided she is the primary threat. Terminal Protocol is the second book in the Brooks Hammer universe — a twenty-book near-future military thriller series where the line between human judgment and machine certainty grows thinner with every mission. The war is no longer just fought in the sky. It is fought in the code. Book 2 of 20. The protocol cannot be stopped. Only survived.