not the international airport of the night before , but a dusty airstrip staffed by one uniformed black hunk armed with a sub-machine gun , and inhabited by a collection of exhausted people in charge of vast amounts of shopping : a woman with a fridge in a crate , another with several suitcases containing rusty tins of heinz soup ( i know because mr uniform made her open the cases up ) and a man in charge of a dodgy-looking teenager .