299 Days: The Restoration

Chapter 313 Dmitri’s Rules for Gray Manning

In west Seattle, Ed Oleo had been staying under the radar all fall. He and Dmitri talked a lot about being a “gray man.” Back in the fall, Dmitri gave Ed a lesson in “gray manning” — lessons Ed was putting into place just before midnight on the day after New Year’s.

Dmitri was a gold mine of information about how to be a gray man, like he had been in the former Soviet Union. Dmitri’s people had gray manning down to a science, which, in large part, was why the Soviet Union collapsed.

The first rule of gray manning, Dmitri explained, was to be and remain gray — that is, to blend in and not alert the authorities that you are resisting them. A gray man or woman can’t do the resistance any good if he or she is in jail because he or she decided to spout off about politics or some other waste of time in a repressive regime. “There is no upside and much downside,” Dmitri said, using his favorite American businessman’s phrase, “to openly making political statements” during the Collapse. Several people in TDFs learned this the hard way. Anonymously making political statements, like the “I miss America” graffiti Dmitri and Ed were seeing in Seattle, was a different story, Dmitri explained. “Don’t let the authorities know it is you making the statement,” he would say. “Let them, and especially the general population, think it is everyone making the statement.”

The second rule of gray manning, Dmitri explained to Ed, was to not try to do too much. “It is not up to you,” Dmitri, “to take down the system. It cannot be done by one person.” Instead, Dmitri explained, “the system was built by many people, and needs many people to sustain it.” This meant, “It takes many people to bring it down.” Dmitri would laugh and tell Ed, “You Americans care so much about the individual. You think individuals can do anything. That is true of some things, but you are wrong about an individual being able to take down the system. It takes many gray men to bring it down.”

The third rule of gray manning, Dmitri said, was to use the system against itself. For example, if the system requires a person to submit an application to do something, like have a garage sale, then submit an application. The system will spend its resources processing the application. By spending a little time to submit an application, a gray man can cause the system to spend much more time and energy processing it. Don’t complain out loud that you shouldn’t have to have a permit to hold a garage sale, he would say, “Send in the application and let them work on it. Let all the problems they create for you become their problems.”

The fourth rule was to do everything possible to strengthen alternatives to the system. The best example was the black market. It competed with the official system, so the stronger the black market was, the weaker the system was. This was one of the things about gray manning that directly benefited the gray man: the black market often had things the system could not provide.

The fifth rule was to notice things.

“Just keep your eyes open,” Dmitri said, “and notice little things.” Dmitri gave examples like when the police changed shifts, when your neighbors came and went, when the stores had food and when they didn’t. “All of these things will help you make a plan to do things, like sabotage, and they are also useful pieces of information to tell allied forces when they arrive.”

“Sabotage is the next rule,” Dmitri said. “You know the phrase, ‘throw a monkey wrench?’”

“Sure,” Ed said, “it means to destroy something.”

“My people invented that phrase,” Dmitri said with pride. “It came from the industrialization period in the Soviet Union when resisters would actually throw a wrench into machinery and destroy it. It was impossible to know which worker did it. And it would take weeks to fix the machinery. This cost the system a tremendous amount and also stopped production for weeks. All for the price of a wrench, thrown into a machine anonymously.”

Ed said, “We don’t have any machines like that anymore in America, so what are our monkey wrenches?”

“Electricity,” Dmitri said. “America needs electricity to function, Disable the electricity and you have thrown in the monkey wrench. The final rule is keeping a mental file on everyone you meet,” Dmitri said. “Figure out which side everyone is on. When the time is right, you can deal with the people who support the government. But be sure they are really supporters. This takes time and patient observation. You’ll know who to target for that day when you have an opportunity to — how you say — take them out.”

Now, on the day after New Year’s, Ed was putting Dmitri’s lessons to use. He decided not to involve him because he didn’t want to get him in trouble. News had been trickling in that the Patriots had launched an offensive in Olympia on New Year’s Eve. This might be the time for Ed to strike, but only if the Patriots attacked Seattle. He was far too outnumbered to take on all the Limas in Seattle on his own. He could support a Patriot attack on his city, but he needed them to be on the gates of Seattle before his lone-wolf work would be effective.

Ed’s first idea was, when the time was right, to take his shotgun and use one of his rifled slug shells to shoot the electrical transformer at the nearby police station right about at the time they changed shifts. Then he was reminded of Dmitri’s second rule of gray manning: “It’s not up to you alone to bring the system down.” Shooting the transformer would be loud and he would have to travel by foot to get there and back with a shotgun in his hands. Bad idea.

Ed came up with a second plan. He realized that he had plenty of information on three of his neighbors. Most people in his neighborhood didn’t give a crap about politics. They just mouthed the correct things and put up the stupid “We Support the Recovery!” yard signs. But three neighbors were hardcore Limas. They were the FCorps block captains.

Ed got to know them and even did some home repairs for them for free. He wanted to be sure that they were truly Limas before he put them on his list. During his visits to their homes, he was doing more than repairing their homes. He was casing the places, figuring out where the locks were. He even replaced a lock for one of them, and managed to keep the second key. Now he could get in whenever he wanted.

Ed still had his shotgun. Now all he needed was for the Patriots to attack Seattle.