'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.'
By the end of the week, the search force was empty-handed and Escobar had clearly moved on. There was little chance now that he would be found quickly.
Harrell returned to Bogota with complaints about Pinzon's attitude, effort and tactics, while Pinzon spread word of Delta's failure. At the embassy, Col. Pinzon would henceforth be known simply as 'Pajamas.'
In the capital, U.S. Ambassador Morris Busby had his own problems. Once the Colombian government's invitation for help was made known at the Pentagon following Escobar's escape that July, it had prompted an overwhelming response and now the competition was on.
The CIA made a bid for funds to get 'Majestic Eagle,' their own more expensive eavesdropping version of Centra Spike, flying. All the other branches had their own ideas about how to best locate a fleeing drug lord. By the end of the first week, the ambassador had people camped out on the floor in the embassy conference room.
Every direction-finding, surveillance and imagery team in the U.S. arsenal descended on Medellin.
Anything that had a potential manhunting capability was shipped to Colombia. It was like a sweepstakes. There were so many American spy planes over the city, at one point 17 at once, that the Air Force had to assign an AWAC, an airborne command and control center, to keep track of them. It took 10 giant C-130s just to deliver the contractors, maintenance and support staffs for all this gear.
For Joe Toft, the DEA country chief who had spent years learning his way around Colombia, the initial excitement over all this military help quickly soured. The flood of new data required intelligent, seasoned analysis, which was in short supply.
This sudden full-court press was meant to cause problems for Escobar, but instead it provoked a crisis in Bogota. One night, one of the newly arrived aircraft, an enormous RC-135, flew so low that the Colombian press was able to photograph it clearly.
When a radio report broadcast evidence of an American military 'invasion' of Medellin, all hell broke loose. The mayor of Medellin demanded an immediate investigation. The Colombian defense minister was forced to admit that the government had invited the Americans. A judicial investigation began instantly, on charges that President Gaviria's administration had violated the constitution by allowing foreign troops on Colombian soil.
The defense minister argued that American troops weren't on Colombian soil, they were just in the air - in fact, most of the military planes were flying out of Panama. There was nothing in the constitution about overflights. Of course, no one knew about Delta Force.
It was the journalistic equivalent of war. Radio Medellin started broadcasting the tail numbers of American aircraft, including one of the CIA planes, which was promptly flown out of Colombia.
CIA Station Chief Bill Wagner was furious, Jacoby was spooked, and President Gaviria, mindful that he had asked for this help, was now politely complaining to Ambassador Busby, 'This is nuts!'
By the end of the week Busby had ordered home everything except Centra Spike, the CIA and Delta. It was clear that Escobar was not going to be caught, even with the most sophisticated targeting information, until Colombia could muster a mobile, elite strike force that was trustworthy, determined, stealthy and fast. What was needed, clearly, was a surrogate Delta Force.
'Pajamas' Pinzon would have to go. And whether it was quid pro quo or not, Gary Harrell was shipped back to Fort Bragg.
'Captain' Vega stayed camped out up at La Catedral, and 'Colonel' Santos stayed on at the Holguin Academy awaiting the arrival of the one man everyone felt was needed to make the effort come together: the indefatigable, incorruptible Col. Hugo Martinez.
Col. Hugo Martinez was delighted when he got the news, in Madrid, that Pablo Escobar had walked out of jail. No one knew better than the colonel what a charade that imprisonment had been. Martinez had spent nearly three years hunting Escobar before his infamous 1991 'surrender' to a luxury prison cell guarded by his cronies, which Martinez viewed as the evasive drug lord's most ingenious escape to date.
Martinez had never met Escobar, but his life was inextricably entwined with the fugitive's. From 1989 to 1991, the colonel had been in charge of the first police campaign to capture Escobar. His efforts, though ultimately futile, were rewarded in 1991 with a comfortable post in Madrid, as military liaison to Spain.
There was another, more urgent reason for his transfer: Escobar had tried several times to murder the colonel and his family in Colombia. On the very plane that took Martinez and his family from Bogota to Madrid, a bomb had been set to explode at a certain altitude. It was discovered, in flight, after the airline received a last- minute phone tip. The pilots held a very low altitude to the nearest airfield, where the bomb was found and removed.
Now, in the summer of 1992, the Colombian and American governments had decided that with Escobar once again a fugitive, the man to lead the new, expanded hunt for him was Police Col. Hugo Martinez.
It was a good time to leave Spain. Just a few months earlier, a car bomb had been discovered on the street outside the Colombian Embassy in Madrid, right where Martinez passed each day to work. The colonel avoided the street that day only because he had heard a radio report of police activity blocking the road. The police activity, of course, was the Madrid police bomb squad. The device was so complicated that they detonated it on the spot.
Everyone knew who the target was. Martinez was asked to stay away from the embassy for a while. He took his wife and family on an extended camping trip, feeling impotent, isolated, pursued and angry. So long as Escobar remained in jail, there was nothing he could do. The drug boss' escape was a godsend, an opportunity to fight back again.
Martinez was six years older than Escobar at 48, a point in life where a man feels it is now or never for his life's goals. He was quiet and bookish, with an aloof manner that seemed ill-suited to leading men in the field.
Tall and fair-skinned, with a long face, high forehead and prominent nose, he towered over most of his comrades in the police command, and looked more European than Colombian. He had a wry sense of humor and a
