Black Sail: headquarters

The New Mexico Shop & Home

The Jackson spread was a good size by any standard — completely walled with what seemed to be the typical adobe walls of the Southwest. There was no indication that the walls were heavily reinforced concrete under the soft molded edges of the adobe look.

The five towers at the corners and front plus the gate on the west side looked quaint, but they were strategically placed for defense and heavily armored with radically upgraded .50 calibre M2s on their custom, hydraulic mounts that could be computer-controlled from back in the garage if necessary.

Most impressive was the belt feed from down in the tower that gave the massive machine guns the ability to fire several thousand rounds without reloading. The sound/flash suppressors made them run a little hot. The larger front tower held four of the M2s with two facing the mountain slopes behind the complex to stop attacks from that direction.

The folding deck on top of the house not only covered the top of the house bridging the courtyard, but also made an excellent landing pad for helicopters. The hacienda was a serious fortress.

They had their own generator run on propane, but it was rarely used even though Jakob had buried a 12,000-gallon tank in the back yard. He hadn’t had to fill that for over five years now and it was still at 80%. All the flat roofs were covered with solar cells that were coupled with the windmills. The landing pad covered the roof solar and cut power a little. But those three towers spaced along the southern wall inside of the compound were megawatt units that covered most of their needs.

The entire hacienda was completely off the grid, with all power stored in a state-of-the-art lith-ion storage facility built into the back of the first floor of his workshop—plus and secondary storage of lead-acid kept continuously trickle-charged. Actually, workshop was a euphemism for a complete metal fabrication and vehicle construction facility covering five thousand square feet of ground built into the rock of the mountain at the southeast corner of the compound next to the mountain.

The adobe walls ran up to nearly twenty feet tall as they blended into the second floor of the shop. The first floor was cut back into the bedrock of the mountainside. No one knew about the basement, tunnel storage areas, and bunker. The lithium-ion cells worked better if they were kept cool. The technologyy was being tested for Sandia lab and it worked well. Denzell was working on a new source built on the Organic Radical Batteries (ORB) developed by NEC in the middle of the first decade of the millennium.

The entire second floor was a full machine shop with computerized mills, lathes, and boring machines. They could build virtually anything made of metal – and often did. Their primary skill was gunsmithing. The front third of the first floor was a large garage where he kept his mobile toys. Even Stones had never seen the hidden doors in the rock walls at the back of the garage that led deep into the mountain.