GOD'S TROOPS ON FRONT LINES IN WAR ON DRUGS

The drug deal was going bad.

"Get in the car," the trafficker barked to undercover agent Vince Sanchez.

Sanchez, who caught sight of a pistol underneath the car seat, put on his
best macho and annoyed act.

"No way I'm getting' the car," he said. Standing in the parking lot of a
Denver restaurant, Sanchez was aware of something else, and it consoled him
even more than the slouching undercover agents packed into a nearby
flotilla of cares.

"You got six guys behind you," says Sanchez, "but if the Lord wants you to
go home, he's the one calling the shots."

Sanchez got home, safe to fight another day as an undercover agent for the
Drug Enforcement Administration.

While all the agents cover for each other, Sanchez, 36, has an added reason
to trust seven or eight of them ^V they are fellow Christians.

One of them, Dan, now 38, was there as backup on the drug deal going bad.

"I really felt good I had a brother waiting for me," says Sanchez, a
divorced father raising his daughter alone.

Dan and Todd, 35, are two of Sanchez's closest friends in the Lord. They,
unlike Sanchez, are involved in current undercover assignments and don't
reveal their last names.

Their work is dangerous and delicate, putting them in regular contact with,
as Todd puts it, "not just sleazeballs, but mid- to high-level traffickers,
attorneys, physicians, high-profile businessmen, people who conduct their
transactions in ties and suits."

While Christianity has a long tradition of justifying self-defense killing,
undercover agents also may have to weave relationships with lies and
deception.

How do they square that with their stringent sense of right and wrong?

"Our lying is not for personal gain," Sanchez says. "It's for the people
of Colorado and the people of the United States."

Second, the Bible has precedents where God's elect lied to spies and evil-doers.