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.
Found with Maria Victoria's letter were unsent letters Escobar was preparing for former associates in Medellin, demanding money and threatening, 'We know where your families are.'
In a cable to DEA headquarters, American agent Steve Murphy stressed the positive results of the raid:
'Intelligence obtained at the search site and recent Title III intercepts indicate that Escobar no longer enjoys the financial freedom he once had. While he may continue to be a Colombian land baron, Escobar and his organization are extremely short of cash.'
On the night of Nov. 26, 1993, the U.S. Embassy in Bogota learned that Pablo Escobar's wife and children were planning once more to flee Colombia.
They hoped to fly to London or Frankfurt, Germany . The family was growing increasingly desperate. They had been under round-the-clock protection by agents from the fiscal general, Colombia's top federal prosecutor, ever since a failed effort to fly Escobar's son, Juan Pablo, and daughter, Manuela, to the United States in March.
In the intervening months, Los Pepes had killed members of their extended family and burned most of the
