We are heading towards a corridor at the end of another row of shuttered-up shops, obviously where this MP had appeared from. As we approach the corridor, I turn and take a few steps backwards to get one last glimpse of my children and Catherine before we disappear into the corridor. Dan doesn’t even turn his head and strides straight into the corridor with a look of determination on his face, a determination I am finding hard to grasp inside myself right now.
The corridor is only short and leads to a single heavy door with a keypad by the side of it. The MP pauses at the keypad and punches four digits into it, then turns the handle to open the door.
Beyond the door is a staircase that only leads downwards; the lighting is fairly dim in the stairwell and the stairs seem to go down quite far from what I can see when I look over the side, at least two floors. As we descend farther down into the stairwell, it is eerily quiet and feelings hit me that remind me of descending the stairs into the Tower of London, feelings I try to suppress.
Thankfully, as we go even farther down, the light starts to improve and those feelings fade, it now becoming apparent that the light is natural daylight, not man-made; we must be getting close to the outside of this massive building.
At the bottom of the stairs is a heavy wooden door that has a couple of glass panels in it, with sunlight beaming through them. We reach the bottom of the stairs and the MP punches some more numbers into the keypad by the side of the door.
As we get outside, my mood is lifted by the bright sun that is still low in the sky, but rising in front of us, blue sky is everywhere with no clouds that I can see, and the warmth from the sun recharges my determination.
“You okay, Boss? You seem a bit quiet; we will find them when we get this shit sorted,” Dan reassures me.
“Yes, I am good, mate. I went down for a minute back there, but I’m back with it now.”
“Good, we are going to need you at full strength,” he tells me.
“Don’t worry, I am, let’s get this done.”
The MP gets into the driver's seat of yet another Land Rover Defender that is parked just outside the door, while I get into the back seat behind him and Dan goes around to get into the back beside me.
My watch tells me that it’s just coming up to 0730, which I find hard to believe; it feels like it should be at least 1030 or even 1100. The days when I used to ‘Yomp’ ten or even twenty klicks[AJ2][LW3] before brekky are definitely long gone.
The MP drives in a direction both Dan and I recognise; we are going back toward the large hangars and the quarantine building where we touched down yesterday, and soon enough, the swarm of Apache helicopters is in front of us. Approaching them, we can see a large amount of activity buzzing around them, and some rotors are even spinning, whether getting ready for lift-off or if the engines need to be tested, we are not sure.
The MP doesn’t turn right towards the quarantine building as I was half expecting, he carries on straight, but slows down taking a narrower path, driving straight through the swarm of Apaches now on both sides of the Defender together with maintenance engineers and crews checking over their helicopter.
Dan and I look at each other, giving knowing looks; the clock that is ticking down is nearing zero!
Eventually, the Defender breaks through the swarm and we go into more open space but by no means clear space. There is still hardware all around, close by, waiting.
“Where are we going?” Dan asks the MP, who’s driving.
“Colonel Reed is in the Command Tent,” the MP says and points towards a large green camouflaged tent with which Dan and I are very familiar. It is about two hundred meters in front and off to the left on a patch of grass.
“Thank God for that, I thought you were going to say he was in the Air Traffic Control tower for a second,” Dan jokes, but I know the Colonel will always be in the thick of the action just where he likes to be, where he can make and influence strategies and give orders.
The Defender pulls up at the side of the tent and all three of us exit the vehicle. It feels good to have the soft grass underfoot, even with my boots on. And I’m sure I get the slightest smell of freshly cut grass, but maybe I’m imagining it?
We walk back down the side of the tent, which is extremely large even by Colonel Reed's standards and the view we get looking back towards the main airport is staggering. A distance away now in front of us is the mass of helicopters which seem to have overtaken the Terminal 4 area of the airport, away to our left.
Further up on our left and in the distance are the cargo hangars where we were taken into quarantine when we arrived. In the far distance, more or less straight ahead is the massive Terminal 5 building where we just left the others. It looks small from this distance and other building obscure all but the left edge of it. On the right of the tent is the South Runway with more terminal buildings beyond it, together with too many military aeroplanes to count, or even see. The North Runway, not visible from here, will be over from them,
