The 4 Phase Man Read Free Page A

waiting.”
    “Spiros, Hector!
Ketagatay kati!”
    But the men the lieutenant had ordered forward just looked at each other, looked at their friends bodies in the stairwell, then slowly shook their heads.
    Before a reprimand could be issued, new orders contemplated or screamed out, a new sound filled the room.
    Heavy footsteps coming
down
the stairs.
    The lieutenant grabbed the old woman, holding her in front of him as a shield. Men crouched, lay flat, their fingers pressing on the triggers with ninety percent of the force necessary to fill the air between them and the stairway with a solid wall of lead.
    “Don’t die for this, boys,” Xenos’s voice called out from very near the bottom of the stairs.
“Tota esos na say afisso na zis.”
    One of the soldiers near the back of the taverna dropped his weapon as he ran out the door.
“E zoe enai glikeah!”
    “Open fire!” the lieutenant screamed, and the air was shattered by the remaining seven AR-15s emptying their clips into the wall by the stairway.
    After ten seconds of violent noise, a silence filtered into the place. No one moved. No one spoke. Everyone prayed that it was over.
    Silently the lieutenant ordered two men forward to check it out. When they hesitated, he carefully aimed his pistol at them and gestured again. With more caution than any of the others had ever seen before, the two men reluctantly crept forward, into the stairwell.
    Less than a minute later they returned, carrying an empty pair of climbing boots and a small cassette recorder.
    “I’m still waiting, Xenos’s voice said calmly from the tape player.”
    “Shit, the lieutenant muttered, a moment before he feltthe cold steel of Xenos’s knife pressed against the base of his skull from behind.”
    The men gasped at the man in stocking feet who held the knife to their officer’s head and pointed a gaping .44 Magnum at the rest of them.
    “Order them to drop their weapons or you die first,” Xenos said in a voice very much like the devil’s, the lieutenant thought in an instant.
    “English no good,” the lieutenant stammered out in an attempt to buy time and think of something.
    Xenos smiled spasmodically. “You understand well enough.”
    The lieutenant was trembling so hard that he was almost impaling himself on the rock-steady knife. He instantly issued the order. “Do it for God’s sake!”
    Most of the men did as they were told.
    Two didn’t.
    “Release lieutenant,” one of the last yelled out, “or we kill you and others!” He leveled his rifle at Xenos.
    Xenos looked almost sympathetically toward the young, cleanest cut of the soldiers. “Don’t die, boy. Not for him. Not over this. This has nothing to do with you.
Tota esos na say afisso na zis.”
    For thirty seconds the standoff held, then the young soldier’s finger began to tighten on the trigger.
    The shot that exploded through the room lifted the soldier into the air, slamming him into the wall; his life created an abstract on the clay as he slid to the floor, already dead.
    “Dumb,” Xenos whispered as the last armed soldier threw his guns across the room.
    “Dureté!”
    Xenos whirled around, almost pushing his gun into the face of an old man, who instantly paled. But the younger man who had called out the name was standing behind and to the side of the first man.
    “You going to shoot everyone today?” He laughed. “Or just your old friend?”
    “You ain’t that good a friend, Franco.”
    The young man laughed again. “You got that many in this room you can be so picky?”
    Xenos shrugged as he lowered his gun, and allowed the old man—the taverna owner—and his sons, who were waiting outside, to round up the surviving soldiers and lock them in the cellar.
    “What are you doing here, Franco? Xenos asked as he poured himself a glass of goat’s milk five minutes later.”
    The young Corsican sniffed at the pitcher, turned up his nose, then grabbed a nearby bottle of ouzo. “You know this is a safe