The minibus door slides open quickly, coming to a stop with a bang.
"Everybody out, except the injured one," another of the soldiers gives the order.
"Hold on, why isn't Tim coming?" Josh protests and we all look at the sergeant.
"He is injured; they can't deal with him here," the sergeant says. "I have just made arrangements for him to go into quarantine at the medical centre. We will take him there; don't worry they will look after him."
"Andy?" Josh says, looking at me.
"He needs medical attention, Josh, we will have to let them do their jobs."
The rest of us get out of the minibus and the door is slid shut behind us, locking Tim inside.
One of the sentries taps a code into a panel on the wall next to the entrance doors. There is an audible click and then the two men pull a handle each, opening the double doors.
I think we are all apprehensive as we go to enter the quarantine area, but as we go in, it is completely underwhelming. Through the double doors, there is a small waiting room with a few worn chairs along the wall on the left. We go straight through this room into a fairly narrow, tired-looking corridor. The walls of the corridor are painted dark blue on the bottom half and then white up to the ceiling, while the floor has blue rubber tiles which are well trodden.
Two of the soldiers that met us on the helipad lead us down the corridor and through the fire door at the end, which is also painted blue. Following a fair distance behind us are the other four soldiers, including the sergeant; they still have their rifles trained on us.
The other side of the fire door is more open, there is a central well-lit area painted white throughout; this has various offices and other rooms branching off it. At the far end is a large office which has glass windows running right across the front of it. Inside this office, we can see a team of military personnel. I count five of them in there; they are probably managing this facility and all stop whatever they were doing to get a good look at us, the new arrivals.
“Okay, find an empty locker,” the sergeant instructs as he pushes a door open to the right. “I want to see any belts, phones, lighters, body armour, helmets and any weapons you have to go into them, including your sidearm, Captain.”
As we go into the room, he continues. “You will all be patted down on your way out, so make sure anything untoward is put in your locker. Once you have put everything in, use a zip tie off the table to secure your locker and make sure you take note of your locker number,” he says in a monotone.
The room is full of various coloured lockers which must have been previously used by the drivers and other staff who worked out of this cargo facility. Many of the lockers already have zips ties looped through the holes where padlocks would normally go. There must be quite a few people here in quarantine.
All four of us soon find empty lockers and while we fill them with our stuff, the sergeant tells us how it is going to work here.
“As you have probably guessed, this was a storage and cargo building; it has secure cages of various sizes to store the valuable cargo in while it waits to be flown out or transported around the UK. We are using the cages to hold arrivals until they pass quarantine, and we will take you to one after we finish here. It’s not glamorous but it’s the best we can do at the moment.
“Once you have settled in, one of the medical team will come and take your details and blood samples from each of you. These samples are then sent for testing onsite. The virus is pretty easy to detect but they have to take precautions, and there is currently a backlog at the testing facility so it will take at least twelve hours to get the results. So I suggest you get some rest. Any questions?”
“Will I see my daughter, Sergeant?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Will we get food and water?” Dan asks, unsurprisingly.
“Yes, of course, and before you ask, we have installed Portaloos in the cages. Right, if there are no other questions, let’s get moving,” the sergeant finishes.
We all secure our lockers with the zip ties, then file out of the room to be patted down thoroughly at the doorway.
Again, we are led by two soldiers who take us through a door on the opposite side of the central area. This leads into quite a large warehouse which has pallet racking running down each side of it. The racks are full of pallets containing various stocks wrapped onto them. Many are indistinct, but I do see pallets containing bottled water, tinned food and toilet rolls. We walk straight across the warehouse towards large double doors big enough to get a forklift through. As we reach the doors, one of the leading soldiers presses a button positioned on the wall beside them and the doors start to open automatically.
The opening doors reveal the security cages that the sergeant mentioned; they run down the right hand side. At least ten feet high and constructed of thick silver wire mesh, they are different widths, and some have single wired doors built into the fronts and some have double doors. Each is separated from the next by a breeze block wall running down the centre inside.
As the soldiers lead us in, we see that the cages are in the main cavernous cargo area of this building, stacks of pallets and pallet racking everywhere, and away to the left are the large loading bay doors where the lorries
