Col. Pinzon, who already was unhappy with the Americans' refusal to allow him to see their command center inside a steel-lined vault on an upper floor of the embassy, clashed with Harrell.
Harrell was a country boy with a direct style. He had a handshake that people warned you about. Pinzon was something of a dandy, a stylish officer with a crisp salt-and-pepper crew cut who played a good game of tennis and kept a manicurist and pedicurist on his staff.
Pinzon was told of an American surveillance team's phone intercepts that had pinpointed Escobar at a finca, or estate, on a hilltop in a wealthy suburb of Medellin called Tres Equinax. He scoffed at the idea that the fugitive could be found magically by plucking his phone calls out of the air, but agreed that if another call came from the same place, his forces would be ready to move in. Four members of the Delta team would fly to Medellin the next day to help plan the assault if it came.
One of the first two operators to leave for Medellin was a man known to the Colombians as Col. Santos, or simply Jefe (Chief). None of the Delta men used their real names. While Boykin was the commander, and Harrell was initially in charge in Medellin, it was Santos, whose real rank was sergeant major, who would stay on for most of the 15-month hunt, supervising the Delta operators and Navy SEAL commandos who rotated in and out.
Santos also acted as liaison between the embassy and the Colombian units hunting for Escobar. He was a slender, exceedingly fit former track star of Mexican heritage who had grown up in New Mexico speaking both Spanish and English.
A man of exceptional warmth and poise, Santos had a wry sense of humor. Where Harrell was full of hearty bluff, Santos was calm, smart and resolutely nonconfrontational.
He and another operator boarded a plane to Medellin the following evening, laden with portable global satellite positioning devices, microwave visual imagery platforms, and video cameras with powerful lenses for remote day-and-night ground surveillance. They were to link up with Colombian forces and pinpoint the spot where Escobar's phone calls had originated, using coordinates supplied by the airborne Centra Spike electronic-eavesdropping unit.
They would train a camera on that location and begin watching for signs of the fugitive's presence. The microwave transmitter would send real-time images back to the Colombian police, so that there would be no mistaking the target.
The two Delta men were late arriving at the Holguin Academy. They had been dropped at the wrong landing strip and had to wait for their police escorts to drive from another airstrip to retrieve them.
It was bad enough that they had spent three hours in the dark at a remote airstrip deep inside narco country, two unarmed Americans loaded with sophisticated spying gear. When they finally did link up with the Colombian police search force, things would get worse.
After an unnerving trip from Bogota, the two Delta soldiers finally arrived at the Medellin headquarters of the Colombian police units searching for Pablo Escobar in July of 1992.
The two Americans slept that night in sleeping bags on the floor of a storehouse just inside the main gate of the Holguin police academy - close enough, they thought, to be obliterated by a car bomb parked outside.
They awoke to their first view of the city. Medellin, Colombia's second-largest city, had a reputation for mercantile genius and industry. The city's traditions had nurtured, in part, its most recent boom as the world capital of cocaine.
One of the Americans, known to the Colombians simply as Col. Santos, met the following morning, July 28, with Lt. Col. Lino Pinzon, a commander of the search forces. Pinzon indicated that he regarded Delta's arrival as an insult to his leadership skills and a threat to his career. The elite, top-secret American commandos had been sent after a request by Colombia's president for help in the hunt for Escobar.
It was a classic culture clash. Pinzon had already complained to Joe Toft, the Drug Enforcement Administration chief in Colombia. Toft tried to calm Pinzon, to convince him that working with these Americans would bring credit and glory to his unit, but he knew Pinzon wasn't buying it.
When big, aggressive Gary Harrell, a Delta lieutenant colonel, arrived later that day from Bogota, things got worse. Harrell and Pinzon had already clashed at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota. Now, on Harrell's first day as the top American at the Holguin Academy, he and Pinzon began quarreling.
Still, the two men were stuck with each other and began setting up joint operations. Delta positioned two operators in Escobar's former observation tower up at La Catedral, the prison Escobar had built. One operator was Sgt. Maj. Joe Vega - a "captain" for this operation - a broad-shouldered weight lifter with long, black hair.
The Colombian police had moved into the prison and were living in comfort, the commander ensconced in Escobar's former luxury suite. Vega had a satellite phone and laptop computer to help him rapidly correlate the map coordinates sent to him by Centra Spike, the secret American Army team of electronic-surveillance experts who operated from two specially outfitted twin-engine planes.
Vega also carried an 8mm video camera with several high-powered lenses, and a microwave relay to transmit the image down to the Holguin Academy.
The team waited for Escobar to make another phone call from a finca, or estate, in an exclusive Medellin suburb of Tres Equinax where Centra Spike had previously homed in on one of his conversations. He was quiet that night, but early the following evening, a Tuesday, Centra Spike picked up another phone call from the same spot.
In the observation tower, Vega quickly found the coordinates on his map and alerted Harrell, who tried to rouse Col. Pinzon and get his men moving.
According to Delta soldiers and DEA agents, the Colombian commander did not respond.
When the embassy in Bogota learned that Pinzon had not moved, calls were placed to the Presidential Palace, and President Cesar Gaviria himself finally ordered Pinzon and his men to get going. Outraged that the Delta team had gone over his head, Pinzon was indignant, and took hours to assemble his men.
It wasn't until early the next morning that Pinzon launched his "raid." Pinzon dispatched about 300 men in a caravan of pickup trucks and cars.
From his perch at La Catedral prison, talking by phone to Steve Jacoby, the American major in charge of Centra Spike at the embassy, Vega noted the procession of headlights as this giant convoy begin moving up the mountain.
"Wait a minute," he told Jacoby. "Now there's another set of headlights moving down the hill on the other side of the mountain."
Escobar would not have even needed to be tipped off. Everyone on the mountain could see and hear the approach of the police.
Pinzon's men found the estate to be typical of an Escobar hideout, luxurious furnishings far beyond the norms even for that neighborhood, including a sparkling new bathroom with a deep tub.
Pinzon seemed pleased when his men turned up nothing. He later told DEA agent Javier Pena that he had a "gut feeling" that Escobar had never been at the finca. He would find Escobar quicker, he said, by relying on his own instincts rather than all this American technology.
As soon as the police withdrew, however, Centra Spike intercepted more phone calls, these from Escobar's men arranging to move him to a new hideout and discussing the need to collect identity documents and weapons. It was 4:30 a.m. when Pinzon, clad in silk pajamas, answered Harrell's summons at the door of his quarters.
"How do you know he's there?" Pinzon asked.
Harrell was not at liberty to explain.
Again, it took pressure from Bogota to force Pinzon to move, and again he sent the caravan up the hill. They spent the rest of the night and most of the day searching door to door, and found nothing. Pinzon complained to Pena: "These Delta guys are trying to get me fired in Bogota."