Free The Fallen by Jack Ziebell Page A

jumped out and flung the taxi driver some money.  He had gotten out to reason with her and the taxi driver had taken off, maybe realising he’d just been overpaid, or maybe knowing the risks of hanging around in that area better than they did.  Then they were alone on a dark corner and Sarah had suddenly snapped back into reality, asking sheepishly ‘which way is Umoja from here?’  He’d lost his temper and told her she was an idiot, which she wasn’t, but the sense of danger he felt made for the kind of loose talk he immediately regretted.  They’d walked down several deserted streets not speaking, before she’d said, ‘If you didn’t want to come you should have just stayed at home.’  That’s when he saw them.  Three men, faces concealed by the shadow of a doorway across the road.  As they passed he heard them cross over and start walking behind them, whispering to each other.   That was the last thing he remembered before coming to in a Nairobi hospital bed, his head aching and bandaged.  Sarah was beside him.  She’d told him that he’d been hit over the head and knocked out and the men had taken his wallet and her bag and run off.  But something in her eyes told him there was more to the story and a few days later back at their flat he had found an empty bottle of anti-retroviral drugs; the kind you take if you think you’ve just been infected with HIV.  She’d said they belonged to one of the girls on her team, he knew she was lying but he’d let her lie; he didn’t want to hear the truth.  They went out to Nando’s once more after that but hardly spoke.  Two weeks later she was redeployed to Cairo and he’d returned to London.   He felt that they were lucky to be alive but also that he somehow should have done more.  Could he have turned around and challenged the men sooner?  Should he have yelled at her to run?  Should he have been more forceful in stopping her from getting out of the taxi?  He felt like he’d failed at his task of husband and protector, but what was worse was that he got the feeling she felt the same.  He’d wanted to talk about it but could never find the right time; either things were going too well and he didn’t want to ruin the moment, or they were already too sour.  He was afraid that emotions would get the better of them and a talk would turn into a screaming match, which would finish with her saying, ‘I know what you want to say, ‘I told you so!’, so why don’t you just say it?’  But what he wanted to say was that he loved her, so that’s all he had said and the rest was left buried.
    He wanted to keep her safe but with the type of work she did that wasn’t an option.  He told her he loved her for who she was, not what she did for a living but she had said they were the same thing.  He had suggested that she take a job in London and she had told him a story about a teenage boy whose mother had kept him from going on a school skiing trip, because she was worried about him.  While the boy’s classmates had been away in Switzerland, he’d been hit by a car and killed in his hometown.  ‘You never know what’s going to get you and when your time is up, it’s up,’ she would say.  He didn’t believe that and neither, he thought, did she.  When you go on field missions, you assess the danger and you take calculated risks, you don’t live your life like an Indian fatalist, driving your tuk-tuk at sixty in the wrong lane along a cliff-edge highway, abdicating all personal responsibility for your life to some God’s busy hands.  So what could he do?  He couldn’t stop her and he couldn’t protect her, so he just tried to put it to the back of his mind and not think about it.  Worry does not sap tomorrow of its sorrow but saps today of its strength is what his mother would have said.  But he did worry and felt all the more emasculated by it.
     
    They cycled on.  The sun was hot and they had nearly finished the water they