Colonel Santiago Evera, is stripped to the waist like most of his men. Sweat rolls off his back despite the cold and the thin air as he and his men struggle kaying sleepers and railroad iron.
'Peru is not a rich country' he thinks as the next piece of iron rolls forward off the Holman tracklayer. He's seen the air transports of the rich Fuerza Aérea de Chile buzzing around; some of the transports coming close enough to look at his battalion laying track and blasting clear the rubble from the route marked by Captain Maldonado. Peru's Fuerza Aeronautica stays firmly on its side of the border. Orders are NO INCIDENTS.
He follows Maldanado. Trains packed, with food and clothing, shelter materials, doctors, medical supplies to aid the Bolivian survivors follow him. Where order has collapsed-Peruvian Gardia Civil with locally and hastily recruited Bolivian "police" restore order along the track routes. No Esercito besides tracklaying engineers and doctors. NO INCIDENTS. So orders Hernando Diaz, el Presidente de Peru.
Over the radio in the train's command car (a converted caboose) when he makes his reports, Evera hears that Atlantis and a few other nations send aid-through Chile. He bristles at that. 'Nothing through Peru eh?'
Well Peru's aid will arrive into the interior Bolivian mountain plateau first, he knows. This kind of country you cannot fly supplies in. It has to come in by mule, truck, or railroad. With the roads and the Bolivian government gone. ('Cowards,' Evera thinks about the Bolivian politicians, who deserted their people and fled to Santa Cruz) Peru chooses the slow sure way. The goal is five miles a day, one mile every two hours-no wonder everyone sweats!
Peru is not a rich country, but it knows these mountains....and these people.
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Hernando Diaz bends over a map of Bolivia: "My predecessors should have done this, the fools...."
de la Nazca: "You spend Riyales like I drink water, the steel you send with those track gangs is substandard and we will have to replace it."
Diaz, who was a railroad man before he became el Presidente snaps: "I know the rails are sulfur brittle and that they are what we replace out of our own track lines, but they are there, stacked up as waste iron. Fortunate that we can use now, eh?"
de la Nazca explodes: "But we are tearing up our own tracks to supply iron to our Bolivian workgangs!"
Diaz: "We would tear it out anyway. This just speeds up the modernization process."
de la Nazca grumbles: "Strange, that wrecking our own railroad infrastructure and bankrupting the treasury is somehow going to help us or Bolivia...."
Diaz: "I know what I am doing."
de la Nazca points out the window at the work crews removing the rubble of Commando Supremo: "Emilio Huerta knew what he was doing, too."