Thessaloniki, Greece, May 18, 1943
It would have been easy to shoot the German. The sentry was tired, he was hot, and he was bored. Very little had happened in the northern Greek port. Partisans and commando groups flown in from Crete had been setting the countryside on fire over the past two weeks. Stand-up battles between German, Italian and Bulgarian infantry companies and once a battalion were now an almost daily occurrence. Prisoners were seldom taken and if they were, neither side tried to keep them seldom alive for long. Yet the fighting had not touched the northern port city. This was the cushiest garrison in all of Greece. As long as the ships were loaded and unloaded at the piers and the channels were swept daily for mines, life continued as it had for the past two years. The private guarding the dockyard entrance knew he had it good.
Eighty yards away, a man who had been trained as a sniper smiled. It was a smile of a predator and in no way was it gentle or warm or inviting. It was a smile of anticipation, it was a smile of the hunt. He could have taken down the German sentries in a few seconds if he had a well calibrated rifle, but that was not his mission, at least it was not his mission today. Instead, he continued to count and he continued to watch. Soon, his patience would be rewarded, but until then, hsi fingers did their job and made another tally mark in the left hand column.