The Two Faces of Polar Bear Chan
There was no trace of me on the television news. My heart, all the same, was hammering against my ribs. A middle-aged sheriff with a thick, unkempt beard stood before the cameras and pressed on with his briefing.
"We've confirmed an additional point of interest."
His voice dropped a register.
Garbage. I knew they were.
The sheriff's announcement was a shock, but I let out a breath of relief all the same. I'd just taken out the trash.
A reporter on the scene jumped in, voice tight with urgency.
"Sheriff — then isn't the missing suspect actually a hero? The man who took these criminals out?"
The sheriff's face pinched, as if the question itself were a headache. He answered flat and blunt.
"Someone cleaned those problems up for us, that's true. But that doesn't amount to a license to kill."
"Until we find this person and look him in the eye, nobody knows whether it was self-defense or just another lunatic's revenge play. The investigation will proceed according to the law and proper procedure."
I had pulled the trigger to protect what was mine and to stay alive. That was all. To someone else, though, I might look like a mysterious avenger — or a vigilante.
Polar Bear Chan.
The nickname spreading among the truckers was beginning to carry a weight it had never had before. This was no longer a hero's tale. It was a tag that could close around my throat whenever someone decided to pull it tight.
I reached to switch the television off — and my hand stopped.
On screen, the anchor brightened her voice, trying to lift the grim mood of the previous segment.
"And now, a story to warm the heart a little in these bleak times. This happened yesterday at a truck stop in Twin Falls, Idaho. Let's take a look."
The picture cut, and black-and-white CCTV footage from a truck-stop diner filled the screen. The very place I had been. On the tape, a man swung a knife. Bill took the blade across his hand. Then I was there, and in a handful of seconds the attacker was on the ground — all of it playing out in slow motion.
As the footage shows, a driver was wounded when another man drew a blade. At that moment, a man who identified himself only as a trucker from Canada stepped in, disarmed the attacker with his bare hands, and administered professional first aid to the injured driver.
There was a larger story behind the incident. The wounded trucker, Bill Maddox, was hauling emergency medicine to Salt Lake City University Hospital. Thanks to the stranger's help, the shipment arrived on time.
Hospital officials said the medicine was critically needed for patients awaiting emergency surgery, and expressed deep gratitude to Maddox and the unnamed trucker who came to his aid.
Among truckers, the Canadian has already been given a nickname — Polar Bear Chan — and accounts of what he did are spreading up and down the highways over CB radio.
"Even in chaos, a man who quietly goes his own way and still stops to help a fellow driver. If that isn't the face of a true hero, I don't know what is. We'll continue to follow Polar Bear Chan…"
My heart was pounding again — for an entirely different reason. The killings at the Montana rest stop had been left as a mystery of a vanished victim. The good deed at Twin Falls had become a hero story on national television.
The same man. Me. The name Lee Chan was being erased, and the fiction of Polar Bear Chan was taking its place.
In the dark, I smiled a bitter little smile.
This world had no interest in making me a hero, and no interest in making me a villain. It was simply consuming my story however the moment required.
On one channel, a mysterious vigilante. On the other, a hero of the open road. Two faces at opposite extremes — and which one was the real me, hiding behind the fiction of Polar Bear Chan, did not matter in the slightest.
I was just a survivor, clawing for another day.
The dissonance rattled through me for a moment. Then I shook my head. Compared to what I had already lived through, this much split vision was a child's game.
I closed my eyes. The smell of a Sahel sandstorm seemed to scrape across the back of my throat — the Foreign Legion years, coming back without being asked.
That day our team had been tasked with escorting a humanitarian water truck. When we rolled into a village in the operational area, children came running out, waving. I dug vitamin candy from my medic bag and passed it around. Their laughter filled the dry desert air. In that moment, I was a savior — a symbol of hope.
A few hours later, on the outskirts of that same village, we walked into an ambush. The firefight was short and vicious. I pulled the trigger of the HK416 A5, and pulled it again. Silhouettes of men going down in the dust. The mercy of putting a round through the skull of a prisoner too torn up to evacuate, rather than wasting the lift on him — that mercy had nothing in common with the gentle savior handing out candy.
I was an efficient killing machine, putting enemies down so that I could live.
Hero and villain. Savior and destroyer. On a battlefield, those two faces always traveled together, stuck like opposite sides of the same coin.
Which face I happened to be wearing did not matter. Only one thing did: staying alive, and protecting what I had to protect.
That was all.
The old memory cooled the chaos in my head back down to ice. I no longer had time to sit around wondering who I was.
I'm still just a survivor on a new kind of battlefield.
I traced the connection between the two incidents again, coldly, the way I would a map.
Anyone whose job is to be suspicious could put the two together.
On the other hand, treating Bill gives me an alibi.
The world had not flipped completely upside down. Not yet. In a country where public authority still functioned in places, I could not afford to get tangled in something this complicated.
First, I started hiding the firearms I had used at the scene. The TAC-14 shotgun and the weapons I had taken off the dead went into a concealed compartment in the trailer — the same way I had stowed them when I crossed the border. The VP9 went into the hidden drawer in the floor of the sleeper. The Remington 870, which I had never fired, I set between the driver's seat and the passenger seat.
Right. I never recovered the spent casings.
I swapped the shells loaded in the 870 for a different brand than the ones I had run through the TAC-14, and packed every round of the matching type down into the trailer's false floor, sealed and tight.
When the busy work was done, I stood and looked down through the window at the dark parking lot below.
Tomorrow, before I reach Boise, I need to find a quiet place.
It was time to mount the guns I had taken at the Montana rest stop, and to rig defensive tripwires. With weapons tucked into hiding places all over the truck, actually using them had become a problem of access. The moment had come to give the rig itself real teeth and real claws — to make it a polar bear in more than name.
With that, my mind settled, and I let myself sleep.
The next morning.
I started the day the same way I always did. The hot water in the truck-stop shower was still a luxury, and the coffee in the diner was still terrible. The one thing that had changed was this: wherever I went now, there were truckers who knew my face.
"Morning, Polar Bear."
"Chan — drive safe out there today!"
Handshakes and nods of greeting came in a flood. It was a little cumbersome, a little embarrassing — but their goodwill sat on my shoulders like a solid shield.
I left their welcome behind me and pointed the big rig at Boise once more.
Today, just driving was not the point. I needed a quiet stretch of ground where I could put teeth and claws on my fortress.
After a long run of highway, I finally found the right place. The shoulder opened into a wide pad, big enough to hold several trucks without crowding — a drowsiness pull-off, or an emergency parking apron, by the look of it. What I liked most was the country around it: open plains in every direction. Anything coming at me would be visible from kilometers out.
I judged I could work here without looking over my shoulder every ten seconds.
I parked, opened the toolbox, and pulled out the tripwire devices, the protective tubing for the wires, and an assortment of tools.
I started with the massive west-coast mirrors hung on either side of the cab. I pictured the worst case — raiders clinging to a moving truck — and rigged three tripwires beneath each mirror, loaded with rock salt shells, tucked in where a grabbing hand would find them whether it meant to or not.
I had considered birdshot at first. At that range, though, there was no way to keep the truck from getting painted in gore, the bodywork would take damage, and I stood a fair chance of catching some of it myself. At under a meter, rock salt would not kill a man. It would, however, deliver more than enough blast and agony to peel a leech off my rig.
Next, the flanks. I imagined a raider vehicle running alongside, crowding me, trying to force the issue. Under the running boards outside the driver and passenger doors, I installed five tripwires each, loaded with buckshot and slugs.
The trigger wires ran along the trailer floor and up the sides to the cab. In a pinch, a single motion from the driver's seat would turn any vehicle hugging my flank into scrap metal and hamburger.
I wanted devices on the front and the roof as well, but that was too big and too complicated a job to do alone.
Climbing onto a moving trailer isn't exactly easy.
This would be enough for most of what the road was likely to throw at me.
When I was finished, I packed the scattered tools away. My W990 was no longer just a way to get from one place to another, and it was no longer just a house on wheels. It was becoming a fighting fortress, ready to drive every spine it had through anyone foolish enough to lay a hand on it.
Once I hit Boise, I should pick up some ballistic plate, too.
I climbed back into the driver's seat and put my foot down toward Boise. The weight on my chest felt a notch lighter than it had the night before.
When the faint glow of the city began to show beyond the horizon, I switched on the radio to break the silence.
The voice that came out of the speaker was heavier, and more hopeless, than any I had heard in a long time.
Yellowknife. The city where I had lived for ten years. The city where my new life had begun. It was being erased from the map. A cold weight settled in my chest.
Dave said he was already on the road.
Then the next piece of news hit, harder than the first.
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY — EMERGENCY STATEMENT
In response to the situation in Canada, the Department of Homeland Security has issued an emergency statement. Citing the surge of climate refugees and an associated threat to national security, the entire land border with Canada will close indefinitely as of 1800 hours today.
The measure amounts to a total shutdown of the land frontier.
"Damn it!"
The curse was out of my mouth before I had finished reaching for the phone. My heart was slamming against my ribs.
Please have made it across.
My hands were shaking as I hit Dave's speed dial.
Ring… ring…
The ringtone stretched on and on, hollow, answering nothing. I was burning up inside.
Pick up, Dave. Please pick up.
Ring… ring… ring…