Hugo did, however, prevail on his father to let him keep his small Mercedes van and two men to work on the equipment alone. Working with the little direction-finding kits had always been his favorite part of the job anyway.
Now there were competing groups trying to track Escobar: Hugo's vehicle and the ones coordinated by the CIA. Over the next few weeks they picked up Escobar's signal several times, and even though the force had no faith in the equipment, it was ordered to conduct raids.
Col. Martinez protested that they needed to marshal their intelligence and men, wait until the fix was certain and the opportunity was right. But his superiors in Bogota had grown suspicious and impatient. Even the U.S. Embassy wanted more raids.
The most spectacular of these came Oct. 11, after radio telemetry placed Escobar in a finca, or estate, on a high hill near the village of Aguas Frias. Located in a well-to-do suburban area just outside Medellin, the finca had a clear line of sight to the high-rise apartment building where Escobar's family was staying.
After the raid on the seminary, Escobar's voice had disappeared from the radio waves. The Search Bloc feared the raid might have frightened him. But after days of silence he finally made a call, coming on at one of the regular times with his son.
It was this call that the Search Bloc picked up and placed at the hilltop finca in Aguas Frias. In the tone of his voice and the thrust of his conversation, Escobar gave no indication that anything untoward had happened.
By the autumn of 1993, Pablo Escobar was in bad shape. His lifelong, fabulously wealthy organization had been dismantled and terrorized by the vigilantes of Los Pepes.
In a single two-week period, five members of his extended family had been killed, presumably by Los Pepes, and several of his remaining key business associates had been kidnapped and murdered. Others were in prison, on the run or in hiding.
In an effort to raise money for his war against the state and to continue his flight, Escobar's associates were selling off his assets around the world. A DEA cable dated Oct. 21 noted that an Escobar family physician was traveling and selling off the family's properties: a 70,000-acre timber farm in Panama, estates in the Dominican Republic, and two 20-acre lots in South Florida. Efforts were also under way to sell his art collection, jewelry and precious stones, including a collection of uncut emeralds valued at more than $200,000.
Escobar's primary link with the rest of the world was now his loyal teenage son. Just as Col. Hugo Martinez now hunted Escobar with his son at his side, the drug boss and his son conspired daily to evade them. They were now talking by radio four times daily. So long as the Search Bloc knew where Juan Pablo was, and could monitor his communications, the colonel felt he would never completely lose track of Escobar.
For two days running, the electronic surveillance teams traced Escobar's radio to the top of a hill in the Medellin suburb of Aguas Frias in October 1993. It was a spectacular locale, a heavily wooded small mountain in the vast range of the Occidental Cordillera. There was only one road up the mountain to the finca, a collection of small cottages around a main house.
The colonel ordered a surveillance team to load a radio telemetry kit on a helicopter and fly over the area. As it happened, they were passing overhead at the moment Escobar made another call. The kit indicated that the radio call had been initiated directly below. Alarmed, the Search Bloc major in charge immediately ordered the helicopter back to the main Search Bloc base, fearing that it had alerted Escobar to their presence.
When they returned, the major told Col. Martinez that Escobar was making calls from the hillside, but there was a good chance he had been spooked by the helicopter. The colonel decided to launch a raid on the finca if Escobar made another call that afternoon.
Martinez could sense that the ring was closing around Escobar. For weeks, he had felt they were getting close to finally finishing the job. When Joe Vega, a Delta sergeant, left Medellin that fall, the colonel had warned him not to go.
"You will miss it," Martinez said. "We are going to find him soon."
He daily consulted special stones and other ritual objects, and in them he saw omens of a resolution. It was a gut feeling, well informed by the knowledge that Escobar could not hold out much longer. His ability to run was now limited, and their ability to find him was improving every day.
Now, on this day, Oct. 11, Martinez believed that the whole effort was coming together. The electronic surveillance had tracked Escobar to a likely hideout and had monitored his presence there. All of the direction-finding equipment now agreed: Escobar was staying at that finca on top of the hill. This was the day they would get him.
The usual time for his call was 4 o'clock, so with choppers circling near the hilltop, and with forces poised to move quickly up the hill, the colonel and his top officers gathered in his operations center around a radio receiver, waiting for Escobar's voice to crackle on the air. There was no call at 4. The men waited. Five minutes later there still was no call.
It was beginning to appear that Escobar had slipped the noose again. But at seven minutes after the hour, his voice came up. The raid commenced.
Escobar wasn't there.
The colonel then cordoned off the mountain for four days, establishing an outer perimeter, an inner perimeter, roadblocks and search teams. Search Bloc helicopters dropped tear gas and raked the forests around the finca with machine-gun fire. More than 700 police and soldiers searched the area with dogs, but they did not find Escobar.
He had managed another miraculous escape. The assault teams had hit the finca, assuming that Escobar would be calling from inside. It turned out - they learned this listening to Escobar's phone calls in coming days - that in order to improve the signal, every time he called his son he would hike into the woods farther up the hill. So he'd had a ringside seat as the helicopters descended. He'd hidden in the woods and then fled down in darkness. He later sent his wife a battery from the flashlight he used to light his way, telling her to keep it, "because it saved my life."
Despite its failure, the raid gave a boost to the electronic surveillance teams, because there was ample evidence that Escobar had indeed been staying at the finca. In the primary house, the base for a portable radio phone was found, turned on, the handset missing. The radio was preset to the frequency Escobar had been using for the last four weeks in his talks with Juan Pablo.
The house was run-down except for a newly installed bathroom, which always suggested the drug boss' presence. The assault teams found two women at the house, Monica Victoria Correa-Alzate and Ana Ligui Rueda, who said Escobar had been staying there for several days.
They explained, quaintly, that Escobar had been "dating" Correa, who was 18. Rueda had been working as his cook. Both women confirmed that Escobar had been nearby when the helicopters came down, and they gave the Search Bloc a description. He had been wearing a red flannel shirt, black pants and tennis shoes. His hair, they said, was clipped short but he wore a long black beard with no mustache.
In the house the police found eight marijuana joints, a large quantity of aspirin ("suggesting a great deal of stress," a DEA cable describing the raid speculated), a wig, a videocassette of the Medellin apartment building housing his wife and children, several music cassettes, two automatic rifles (an AK47 and a CAR15), just over $7,000 in cash, and photos of the fugitive's two children, Juan Pablo and Manuela.
They also found false ID documents and a list of license-plate numbers, evidently compiled by Juan Pablo, of vehicles driven by officers assigned to the Search Bloc.
The documents confirmed that Escobar's organization was in poor shape, and that he was very worried about his family. One letter said Maria Victoria, Escobar's wife, needed money to continue supporting the Colombian fiscal general's forces and bodyguards hired to protect her and the children. She complained that it was very expensive to feed 60 people and that she had to purchase beds for them. The letter blamed Col. Martinez for a recent grenade attack on the family's apartment building, which had been publicly attributed to Los Pepes.