Tag: Techno-thrillers

This video is “today tech.” Imagine 3-5 years from now.

Watch the video. This is “today tech.” Then envision this:

It’s 3-5 years from today.

PHANTOM, Inc. has produced prototype quadrupeds extending this technology. Some are variants of this form factor. Slightly heavier, armored, and with longer battery life. They’re turreted, with dual 5.56 and LLD (less-lethal dart) guns. A model with twin grenade auto-launchers is spec’d but not yet complete.

Hybrid controls support teleoperation via secure mesh or sat-link, augmented by onboard AI. They’re capable of autonomous operations in certain scenarios, with risk. Multimodal sensor fusion grants visual, IR, and acoustic senses rivaling predatory animals, all feeding into an integrated ballistic computer.

Pair these quadrupeds with similarly capable bipedal combat avatars and control systems that provide such immersion that the teleoperators become present in the avatars they’re controlling.

Add a flight of quadcopters with similar better-than-FPV immersion, armed and equipped for combined-arms tactical execution.

Marry this unit to a delivery platform that can deploy the team at almost 700mph via an adapted Anduril FQ-44B CCA (unmanned collaborative combat aircraft) airframe. These turbofan-powered aircraft are capable of dropping these avatars into a mission site via today-tech, patented, “DropHawk” pods that carry the bots from 10,000’ to the ground, ready to fight, in less than 75 seconds.

The same DropHawks can carry humans, of course, but it takes a bit of a gut check. Some missions will call for someone willing to do this.

The force is lethal in CQB. They’re faster onto the X than the quickest SWAT, HRT, or QRF.

It’s plausible now. It’ll be certainty in 3-5 years. Or less.

These are the tools that Army veteran Sam Knightsbridge and his team bring to counter terrorism on U.S. soil in “Ghost Drop,” the first book of the DropHawk thrillers.

The thing is, there are three things that technology will never change: When it comes to combat, there’s no such thing as a silver bullet; the enemy always gets a vote; and risks and consequences are never constrained to the immediate battlefield.

Ghost Drop is available worldwide for Kindle and in paperback on Amazon.

Book two of the DropHawk Thrillers, “Terror Swarm,” comes out soon, in August, 2026.

“GHOST DROP” Is Now Available on Amazon

“Ghost Drop,” the first book in Kevin Higgins’s near-future military techno-thriller series, is now available for Kindle! (Trade edition paperback, coming within the week.)

Available here, on Amazon for Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H6VTWX2X

"Ghost Drop," a DropHawks Thriller by Kevin Higgins, is now available.

They came to ignite a war on American soil.

In the pre-dawn dark along the Texas border, gunfire erupts as thermal-masked convoys slip across the river behind armed drones and military-grade jammers, leaving a young Border Patrol agent bleeding in the dirt. She’s the first casualty of a war most Americans won’t know is underway until it’s too late.

Yahya al-Ghazali, the mastermind behind the incursion, doesn’t seek victory on any battlefield. He wants panic and chaos metastasizing through the heart of the enemy he blames for everything he’s lost. His weapons are Iranian-backed sleeper cells, buried for years inside American communities, now waking up.

Against him stands Army veteran Sam Knightsbridge and PHANTOM Force: a rapid-response unit forged from the hard lessons of Ukraine and two decades of Middle East combat. Their edge—teleoperated combat robots, delivered by drop pod at 700 mph, hitting faster and fighting smarter than any conventional force can.

But the enemy hides among the very people Sam is sworn to protect, and lethal machines make brutal mistakes. Counterinsurgency on home soil is fraught, and the scars it leaves run deeper than any wound.

Ghost Drop is the explosive first installment in the DropHawk Thrillers, Kevin Higgins’s near-future military techno-thriller series delivering relentless action, plausible tech, and flawed heroes fighting a desperate war. If you crave gritty, hard-edged military fiction ripped from tomorrow’s battlefields, start here.

The war escalates in Book 2, Terror Swarm (August 2026), and detonates in Book 3, Phantom War (Fall 2026).

Available here, on Amazon for Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H6VTWX2X