“Mr. Preaud and his wife, who is pregnant,
hit the ground as people screamed, “Get
down, get down!” After the second explosion,
he looked up to see a giant fan — part of an
air-conditioning unit — that had landed near
them. They had been eating at a Délifrance,
talking about Salah Abdeslam, the terrorism
suspect who was arrested in Brussels on
Friday after a four-month global manhunt.”
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/23/world/europe
/brussels (adapted). Access: March 23rd, 2016.
The verbal tense in the passage “had been
eating” is