The Jackal

The Jackal is the main antagonist of Far Cry 2. He was voiced by .
==Biography==
He was born in the , in 1972, making him 36 years old in Far Cry 2. He is an arms dealer who supports both the Alliance for Popular Resistance (APR) and the United Front for Liberation and Labour (UFLL). He has been selling his weapons to many countries in for at least sixteen wars.
Aside from the two warring factions, he is known to sell his weapons to many gun shops scattered throughout the Unnamed African Country (UAC). It was stated in the beginning of the game that every gun, bullet, and corpse is traced back to him. He is wanted by the for breaking many arms laws, but has managed to avoid the authorities for many years now.
The Jackal is known for selling his weapons at very low prices and being very good at hiding. Despite his apparent lack of morals, he is a man of humanist and nihilist beliefs, even quoting 's when the player first encounters him.
The Jackal served in the during the , running smuggled arms to rebels across the world from all the way to Africa. Eventually, he found himself comfortable in Africa, selling weapons in the warzones, which has slowly justified his own actions.
At one time, he agreed to an interview with Reuben Oluwagembi. The interview was recorded on tapes, which were taken by the APR and the UFLL to cover up atrocities they committed. These tapes were somehow scattered by the mercenaries and ended up all over the region.
Each tape features the Jackal's views on a particular subject, revealing his values, his experiences and his justifications for what he does. According to a rumour discussed by Prosper Quassi and Walton Purefoy, The Jackal has , and only has three months left to live.
While it could be nothing more than a wild tale, anything is possible in a war-torn nation (as they mention their disbelief on hearing some guy was hired to kill him). This could possibly explain his sometimes-strange and unpredictable behaviour towards the player.
==Personality==
The Jackal is highly cunning, very intelligent, and a nihilist, he often quotes Friedrich Nietzsche. He is always one step ahead of his enemies. He also possesses a calm demeanor, such as when calmly threatening the player with a machete, and his interviews with Reuben. Although he's an arms dealer, he has a humanistic side, helping the refugees to escape the APR and UFLL's war.
The Jackal appears to be one step ahead of everyone, as he somehow knew about the mercenary's arrival in Pala on his first day there, why the UFLL and the APR teamed up, and knew where to steal the case full of diamonds.
At the beginning of the game, when the merc arrives in Pala and blacks out due to the severity of malaria, The Jackal appears in front of him as he awakens in his hotel room. The Jackal examines the paper given to his assassin, and mocks him that he's too sick and has failed his mission, and that he knows that he is effectively "fired".
The Jackal points out that, since he the merc is out of the job, and only works for money, he is no longer his problem. The Jackal then declares that nobody can kill him, and jams his machete into the wall - just a few inches above the player's head - to reinforce the point. Most likely believing that the merc will not survive for long, he leaves behind his Star .45.
After the merc is betrayed by one of the factions and seeks shelter from a sandstorm, The Jackal reappears and saves him. The Jackal is fairly surprised that the merc is still alive, and gains a bit of respect for him. He then talks to the player before leaving. After the APR and the UFLL agree to a peace treaty, the player is sent to retrieve a case full of diamonds to fulfill that goal.
However, the Jackal is also aware of this, and ruthlessly kills everyone at the designated area. When the merc tries to retrieve the case, The Jackal holds him at knife-point, but allows him to live. However, he knocks him out for the merc to be imprisoned and take all the blame of the aftermath.
Soon, when Reuben informs the player to go back to the prison, The Jackal is waiting there. He claims that his views have changed, and orders the merc some final mission objectives; retrieve the diamond case that was stolen by the arms dealer, and kill the remaining leaders of the factions. After both tasks are completed, the player meets the Jackal in his hut in a last meeting. The Jackal prepares to burn down his home, and he gives the merc a choice.
The merc can take a car battery and blow up a mountain to protect the fleeing refugees, but will die from the resulting explosion. However, he can take the diamonds to bribe the guards at the border, and soon shoot himself in the head (the gun to be used for the job being in the suitcase, which The Jackal notes will never jam). In either scenario, the Jackal will presumably do the task that the player does not undergo, and perishes as well.
If the merc chooses to bribe the guards, he will commit suicide soon after, both due to the agony of his advanced malaria and because he cannot live with himself afterwards. In this case, The Jackal will short-circuit the car battery and blow himself up in the huge explosion, dying a few minutes before the merc does. If the merc chooses to short-circuit the car battery and blow himself up, The Jackal may or may not commit suicide after bribing the guards.
The Jackal's body is never found in either scenario, so it is almost certain that he does not commit suicide if the merc chooses the car battery, whether or not he truly does have cancer.
==Tapes==
Players get the first tape from Reuben Oluwagembi the first time they visit Mike's Bar. In addition to the first tape, eight others are spread throughout Leboa-Sako. These tapes can usually be found sitting next to or on top of a larger object.
In most cases, they’re next to a wrecked vehicle. The tapes are all numbered and contain a specific topic discussed by Reuben and the Jackal.
The tapes are gathered in the same order regardless of where players pick them up. For example, the first tape players grab is "Smuggling", followed by "Circulation", then "Economics", and so on.
===17/09/2008 - Infamy===
Jackal: You can't break a man the way you break a or a . The harder you beat a man, the taller he stands. To break a man's will, to break his spirit, you have to break his mind. Men have this idea that we can fight with dignity, that there is a proper way to kill someone. It's absurd. It's anaesthetic. We need it to endure the bloody horror of murder. You must destroy that idea. Show them what a messy, terrible thing it is to kill a man, and then show them that you relish in it. Shoot to wound, then execute the wounded. Burn them. Take them in close combat. Destroy their preconceptions of what a man is, and you become their personal monster. When they fear you, you become stronger, you become better. But let's never forget: It's a display. It's a posture, like a 's roar or a thumping at his chest. If you lose yourself in the display, if you succumb to the horror, then you become the monster. You become reduced. Not more than a man, but less, and it can be fatal.
===2/10/2008 - Smuggling===
Jackal: Getting them in is easy, I brought them in over the mountain, through the desert, whatever. The hard part is moving them inside the country. Whenever you get stopped, you're gonna bribe someone or shoot someone... Not good for business. No, once you're inside, you want to hand off as fast as possible, let the customer deal with it.
Reuben: How do they move the shipment?
Jackal: Hm... I delivered three hundred kilos of to Mbantuwe about six months ago. He showed up with a dozen of his men... dead men. He packed C-4 into their corpses figuring no one will search them. Smart guy.
===20/09/2008 - Circulation===
Reuben: Where do you get the weapons?
Jackal: It's a romantic notion that they all came out of the after the ; that was a windfall back in '89, maybe through '91... but that's all over. I move weapons, I profit from circulation; you get a ceasefire in , both sides disarm, you think they two thousand tons of guns? No. They sell them to me. I resell them wherever the next war is starting.
Reuben: Those are Soviet guns from 1989?
Jackal: Hm... That's about half. The rest mostly come from old European armies after they abandoned their colonies in the '60s and '70s, you know, guns, , ...
Reuben: So, some of these guns are very old? They have been sold, bought, and sold repeatedly?
Jackal: (Laughs) They aren't bio-degradable. Only the dead are bio-degradable.
===24/09/2008 - Economics===
Reuben: Why arms? Why not car parts, radios...?
Jackal: What's the difference? Same job really... You get up, you get on the phone, you meet your clients, you discuss a fair price, you make a delivery, and receive payment. Sounds boring... But it's not... It's just... Simple. I'm doing what men have been doing for thousands of years. Trading one thing for another. Maybe it's you who want to attach morality to it... Make it evil? Insane... People are working gun factories in Belgium or the States... They're unionized, right? You think kids making radios in pull down forty grand a year on a forty hour week? You start thinking too much about morality... THAT's insane...
===17/09/2008 - Home===
Reuben: Why Africa? People need weapons all over the world. Why here? Why my home?
Jackal: Every place is somebody's home, pal, but it doesn't stop people from going to war. I don't start wars, I didn't start this one; it seems like it's your fellow Africans that want each other dead. Besides, why should I give a sh-t about your home? Why should anyone? You want me to go somewhere else... So that it's someone's home that you don't give a sh-t about?
Reuben: What if it was your home?
Jackal: War is my home.
===24/09/2008 - Rat-Catcher===
Jackal: I spent a year in once. In the dark... It’s a hell hole... Covered in raw sewage, guards breaking some inmate's fingers with a hammer, just out of pure f-ckin' meanness. Men die of starvation there all the time. I saw a guy in the opposite cell catch a rat with his teeth, cause they have him handcuffed for 24 hours a day for two months. He couldn't eat. Seeing someone do that, he was weeping as he crushed it to death in his mouth. Seeing his eyes, his face, it’s madness. He was dead three days later.
Reuben: What killed him?
Jackal: Realisation of what he’d turned into.
===20/09/2008 - Career Counseling===
Reuben: How do you become an arms dealer in the first place?
Jackal: Back in the Navy, we delivered guns all over the world, droppin' off guys with 20 crates of rifles for the local fighters, so they could knock over some dictator. Mind you, that’s not 20 crates of factory M16’s, these were illicit weapons, confiscated in some raid and then redistributed. No paper work, right? If a crate here or there goes missing, hey, it happens. Military teaches you two things: how to deal with bureaucracy, and how to avoid it. Learning how to avoid it means learning how to deal in arms. You muster out, you apply what you learned. Every gunman I have ever met got his start that way: losing illicit weapons in transport with national militaries.
===2/10/2008 - Stability===
Reuben: Did you ever choose sides in a conflict?
Jackal: Ah, I did it once, was a bad idea, cut my profits in half. Almost got me killed. Never again. You sell to both sides. You can help level the field, stabilize the market, draw out the conflict and make more money. A big sale to one side doesn’t generate repeat business. Both the APR and the UFLL are using my weapons. Now, they're in detente both sides are stockpiling. Less violence. More spending. It's perfect.
Reuben: But it's anarchy! Thousands are dead, hundreds of thousands are displaced!
Jackal: If I picked sides, fewer would be displaced but more would be dead; and I would probably be one of them.
===17/09/2008 - The Humanist===
Reuben: Have you ever refused to sell weapons to anybody?
Jackal: I’m a humanist, I don’t judge, maybe you would?
Reuben: I couldn’t sell arms...
Jackal: Bullshit, Reuben, you have all the skills to be an arms dealer. Better one than me even. You’re smart, you’re creative, you’re a salesman. (Laughs) You sold me on doing these dumb interviews. Man, the rest is just paperwork.
Reuben: I mean, I’d be unable, psychologically, to sell arms.
Jackal: I’m talking facts and you’re talking theory. You’re not a good person Reuben, you’ve just been lucky enough you've never had to be otherwise. When it comes down to it, what a man can do is what a man will do, but believe what you want.
===15/10/2008 - Stealing Boots===
Jackal: Saw this kid on the side of the road yesterday, couldn't be eighteen, seventeen. Had a across his lap, and a dead APR half in the ditch next to him. Couple of close range blasts with that tore big chunks of hamburger out of his torso. Kid was looking at the guy's leg, taking his boots. Kid just looked tired, just beaten down, ragged, tired, old. Kids that age shouldn’t look like that.
===30/10/2008 - Gluten-Free===
Jackal: I’ll tell you what's sick. People in the , US, f-ckin' , . They pay their taxes and some remote piloted drone fires a missile into a public market to hit some warlord. Yeah, so maybe war doesn’t happen for another six months, and the price of their gluten-free stays low. It’s not sick to arm people. It’s sick to bump off their crooks and dictators in protection of our interest, and then call it 'international justice'. These people don’t have remote piloted drones guarding their interests ten thousand miles away, they don’t have a war machine paid for with taxes. Where I am, they usually don’t even have a f-ckin' government. The drone is the oppressor, the gluten-free sorghum bread is the oppressor, the is the great equaliser. I empower these people.
===5/10/2008 - Necessary Evil===
Jackal: What do you think you’re gonna achieve with this interview? You think somebody in the 's going to read it and come after me? Sh-t no, I’m a necessary evil. They want me here, they’re glad I’m here. Because if I wasn’t, they might have to come try to stem the tide. It would be thankless and worthless, and once the bodies started coming home in bags, they’re screwed. A dead twenty-three year old from gets more airtime than the death of fifty-thousand people he gave his life to protect. So, even if they did give a shit, their own media prevents them from taking action.
===13/10/2008 - Lion’s Share===
Jackal: Who gets the lion’s share, that’s what it’s all about, whether it’s between children or animals or warlords. It’s not that everyone wants a piece it’s that everyone wants the BIGGEST piece. And the biggest piece doesn’t go to the or to the , the biggest piece goes to the lion because the lion is the f-ckin' king, that’s how it works, it worked that way a million years before there were men saying otherwise, that’s probably how it should work.
Reuben: But you are not the lion; they call you "The ".
Jackal: Shh, sometimes the jackal steals the lion’s share, but don’t tell anyone.
===30/10/2008 - Unrecognizable===
Jackal: I saw that truck you were driving in, perforated with 50. rounds and torched on the side of the road. I looked inside, corpses blown to pieces and burnt beyond recognizable. No camera, no tape recorder, no... no book. So, I dunno, maybe you’re dead, maybe not, maybe you find these stupid tapes and do whatever the hell you wanted to do with em, or maybe the interview's over, wasted words, wasted life. Maybe I’ll see you soon.
===13/10/2008 - Gutshot===
Jackal: Saw a firefight today, little skirmish broke out of this road block when some APR guys got lost in their truck. Maybe five or six of them trading fire with the UFLL guys manning the CP, went on for twenty minutes, guys popping up from behind rocks to spray a few shots, ya know, randomly at each other, all of them almost too afraid to die. When it was over the two UFLL guys who were unhurt ended up running off into the jungle terrified. I went down and had a look around. The guy had been shot through the stomach, bloody mess. He saw me and whimpered at me to help finish him off. Funny how guys get shot because they're too afraid to die, and then they're lying there dying and they're too afraid to live. Idiots.
===5/10/2008 - No Sense===
Jackal: You see these APR kids, or UFLL kids, or whoever’s listening to these damn broadcasts on the radio. Mbantuwe, Tambossa. I can’t even remember who, cause what’s the difference? Glassy-eyed little sh-ts shouting out in support of whatever propaganda, lies, bullshit's being spouted at them. It’s absurd. These guys are already dead; they’ve blown each other away for someone else’s... for someone else. Tambossa, Mbantuwe, UFLL, APR, there’s no popular resistance, no liberty and labour. There’s no ideology at all. There isn’t even a desire to win. There’s no sense in it, no sense in it at all. What would it matter if we butchered the lot of them? Would it change anything?
===19/10/2008 - Numbers===
Jackal: If you have to kill someone, if you have to, is it somehow better to do it clean with a bullet through the head? Is it somehow worse to chop 'em up with an axe? And what if you have to kill ten, or a hundred, or a thousand? What if in doing it you save a thousand, or you spare ten? What if you save yourself? What is the measure of a man, or of his murder? By what insane calculus can we answer questions like these? Should we even try?
==Abilities==
*Business acumen: The Jackal is able to maintain his weapons business.
*Weapon knowledge: The Jackal is very knowledgeable about different weapons.
*Knifemanship: The Jackal is skilled with bladed weapons. He is skilled with his machete in combat.
*Marksmanship: The Jackal is experienced with many firearms such as handguns and assault rifles.
*Stealth skill: The Jackal was able to ambush the protagonist many times.
*Master Tactician: The Jackal is very intelligent. he manages his arms dealing operation without getting caught and conceives a plan to help refugees escape from enemy soldiers using the protagonist's help to bribe the guard and detonate the dynamite explosive charges to block the soldiers from advancing.
==Equipment==
*Machete: The Jackal carries a machete as his melee weapon of choice.
*Star Model-P: The Jackal took this handgun from the player, threatening them before giving it back.
*IMI Desert Eagle: The Jackal carries this semi-auto as his sidearm of choice.
*AK-47: The Jackal sometimes carries this assault ruffle strapped to his back.
*Flare gun: The Jackal brought this flare gun with him for the final mission.
==Trivia==
*Contrary to the popular belief that he is voiced by (most famous for voicing Max Payne), he was actually voiced by and modelled after Dwayne Hill. James McCaffrey was, in fact, uninvolved with Far Cry 2 in any way.
*There is a theory that Jackal is Jack Carver, the protagonist of . Although the textures of the Jackal in the game's files are named "jackcarver", and that confirms that the Jackal is based on Jack Carver, Jack is younger than the Jackal.
*He appears to be inspired by aspects of two of 's novels, and . The Jackal uses the codename from the former and has telling similarities to the main character in the latter, who conducts a coup in an African nation which he then undermines to save the nation's people. Forsyth himself worked in central Africa, getting to know a host of real-life mercenaries and arms dealers. Interestingly, Forsyth has since commented that the arms dealers were the most frightening people he ever met.
==Licensing==
This article contains content derived from the "The Jackal" article on the Far Cry Wiki, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
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