doubted the spooks from Centra Spike and the CIA knew what they were doing.
The colonel had allowed the American role in his command to grow. On July 14, he met at the Search Bloc base with U.S. Army Col. John Alexander, visiting from Delta Force's headquarters at Fort Bragg, and agreed to allow the unit to establish a ground-based listening post in the Medellin suburbs to supplement its Beechcraft spy flights. This allowed the U.S. Army's snoops to keep constant tabs on radio and cell phone traffic in Medellin - but it was a potentially controversial and embarrassing move for both countries.
The presence of Delta operatives at the Search Bloc base was a closely guarded secret. Having more U.S. Army personnel living in Medellin exposed them to danger and increased the likelihood that their presence would be discovered by the Colombian press.
Revelations that gringo soldiers had been allowed not only to operate on Colombian soil but to conduct electronic surveillance in a major city might bring down the Gaviria administration. And for Washington, the presence of American soldiers set up just outside a city as violent as Medellin was fraught with danger.
As it was, Centra Spike's Steve Jacoby and Delta's commanders were being summoned to the Pentagon on a regular basis to reassure nervous administrators. But having a permanent presence on the ground gave the unit a 24-hour capability, instead of being limited to the hours the Beechcrafts were in the air.
Martinez had also agreed to Alexander's suggestion that Delta begin playing a more active role in 'development of targets and subsequent operational planning,' according to a memo Alexander wrote to Busby about the meeting. The ambassador himself met with Martinez at the Search Bloc base on July 22, the first anniversary of Escobar's escape, to tour the facility and underscore America's continued commitment.
Martinez hardly needed convincing. If his superiors would not let him off the hook, then finding Escobar, finishing this thing, was the only way out. When he learned that a special unit of Colombian police had been successful in tests with a new portable direction-finding kit, he requested that it, too, be sent to Medellin to aid the hunt for Escobar.
There was only one problem. The special unit included his son Hugo.
Col. Hugo Martinez did not want his son coming to Medellin. Without telling the young man, the colonel had twice intervened to block his transfer to that dangerous city. Now he would block him again.
The younger Hugo Martinez was a lieutenant who worked for a special Colombian electronic surveillance unit that used portable devices to track down the source of a radio signal. The unit had been successful in recent cases, and was running tests in Bogota. The colonel believed it might help finally find Pablo Escobar, who was believed to be hiding somewhere in Medellin.
The Americans in their surveillance planes could tell the Search Bloc what neighborhood and even what block the signal from Escobar's cell phone was coming from, but in a city as densely populated as Medellin, a block wasn't good enough. The colonel hoped this new team might provide the pinpoint capability they needed.
'Send the team, but I don't want you to come here,' Martinez told his son.
The team members using the portable electronic gear would have to live and work undercover in the city. Coming and going from the protected headquarters of the colonel's Search Bloc outside Medellin would blow their cover.
Given the bounty Escobar had placed on the head of every police officer in Medellin, and the even higher reward for killing a member of the Search Bloc, Martinez feared putting his son in such a position.
'Send someone else,' the colonel said.
The younger Martinez reminded his father that he, his mother, brother and sister had been living with the threat of Escobar for years. Once, knowing that his phone conversation was being recorded and would eventually reach Col. Martinez's ears, Escobar had said: 'Colonel, I'm going to kill you. I'm going to kill all of your family up to the third generation, and then I will dig up your grandparents and shoot them and bury them again.'
He had been a target for a long time, Hugo told his father. 'At least this way I have the chance to fight back. I'm part of the team, and it won't work as well without me. We need to try to resolve this, so that it is not always going to be hanging over our heads. We can do it together.'
Young Hugo looked nothing like his father. He was short, stocky and dark where his father was tall, pale and slender. But father and son shared a stubborn ability to stay focused - a trait that Hugo would demonstrate in the coming months.
Hugo also shared his father's keen intellect, but in him it was less apparent. He was a visionary, the kind of man who could persuade other people to follow him even when only he understood where they were going.
The father led by stern discipline and example; Hugo led with enthusiasm. When he talked about technical matters that often only he understood, Hugo flushed with pleasure. He would begin making scratchy diagrams of his ideas, leap to his feet, gesturing, explaining, exhorting. He believed in technology with evangelical passion.
During his father's first war against Escobar, Hugo had been a student at the National Police Academy in Bogota. He was 20 when the threats against his family started.
Their lives changed dramatically. No longer a typical, upper-middle-class family, they effectively became fugitives. They were not allowed to travel, and hardly a month went by without hearing that someone close to them had been killed or kidnapped. Friends they had known for years shunned them out of fear.
Hugo escaped some of this when he entered the police academy, where, aside from a few appropriate precautions, he lived as a normal cadet. He was training to become a police officer, to support the nation's laws and institutions, with a full appreciation of their fragility. He longed to help his father hunt down Escobar.
When he graduated, Second Lt. Hugo Martinez was sent to an investigative arm of the Colombian judiciary. He was placed with an electronic surveillance unit that had been given portable eavesdropping and direction- finding equipment by the CIA. The surveillance team had already purchased equipment from France and Germany that was designed to perform a similar function, but they had never been able to get the direction-finding part of it to work.
Hugo was assigned to work with the CIA kit, which looked like a prop from an early science-fiction movie. It was a gray metal box about a foot square, with cables snaking out the sides, and a spray of antennae on the top, one at each corner and six more in the center. It had a screen, no bigger than the palm of his hand, that displayed the strength and direction of a signal.
The whole contraption fit inside a bulky suitcase, and was used in concert with the much bulkier French and
