The Jackal Tapes (from Far Cry 2)

12 min readJul 27, 2023

(This is a little exercise I had fun doing, combining dialogue from collectable recordings you can find in the game, strung together to make one coherent scene. The parts you enjoy are most likely not my original work, but that’s okay, I just wanna show off something I just really appreciated about this game! I hope you enjoy reading, its good stuff.)

The Jackal Tapes

A stranger with sunglasses and a red tunic sat on an uncomfortable metal chair, with another one facing him. Both placed on the side of a dirt road. The hot African sun beamed down on the man, causing him to sweat, drops running down the man’s face. The man ignored it, this was usual, still he sat on the metal chair, with his arms crossed.

A truck was seen on the horizon, kicking up dust from the road. It stopped three meters away from the stranger. The car door opened and out stepped a well dressed man with a buttoned up shirt, vest with many pockets, and fragile looking glasses, with a notebook in one hand and a tape recorder in the other.

The stranger remained seated. This was expected. The other man sat opposite as he pressed record on the tape recorder.

“Ahem,” he placed the recorder on a dirty overturned milkcrate, between them. “Date is 2nd of October, 2021. Reuben Oluwagembi speaking. Please, state your name for the record.”

“The Jackal,” the stranger served with an unknown east coast accent.

“No birth name? Christian name?” puzzled Reuben.

“Look,” scoffed The Jackal. “I’m a busy man Reuben, so if we can cut to the chase, please?”

“Very well,” Reuben adjusted his glasses. “You are The Jackal, professional gun runner and arms dealer that is well known within proxy war markets. How do you become an arms dealer in the first place?”

The Jackal mused at a mile a minute in his speech.

“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 paperwork, 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.”

“Why arms?” asked Reuben. “Why not car parts, radios?”

“What’s the difference?” asked The Jackal as he pulled an almost empty, packet of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, lighter included.

“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,” The Jackal lit the end of the cigarette hanging from his lips.

“People that are working at gun factories in Belgium or the States, they’re unionized, right? You think kids making radios in Bangladesh pull down forty grand a year on a forty hour week? You start thinking too much about morality, that’s insane,” The Jackal took a small victory drag in his defended position.

“Where do you get the weapons?” Reuben moved on.

“It’s a romantic notion that they all came out of the Soviet Union after the collapse; that was a windfall back in ’89, maybe through ‘91,” The Jackal continued. “But that’s all over. I move weapons, I profit from circulation. You get a ceasefire in Liberia, both sides disarm, you think they slag two thousand tons of guns? No. They sell them to me. I resell them wherever the next war is starting.”

“Those are Soviet guns?” Reuben confirmed. “From 1989?”

“Hm,” The Jackal paused for a moment. “That’s about half. The rest mostly come from old European armies after they abandoned their colonies in the ’60s and ’70s, you know, French guns, Dutch, Belgian.”

“So some of these guns are very old?” Reuben continued. “They have been sold, bought, and sold repeatedly?”

“They aren’t biodegradable,” The Jackal laughed. “Only the dead are biodegradable.”

“How do you get them into the country?” Reuben questioned while The Jackal took a longer drag.

“Getting them in is easy.” Spoke The Jackal as grey smoke left his lungs. “I’ve brought them in over the mountain, through the desert, whatever. The hard part is moving them inside the country. Whenever you get stopped, you gotta 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.”

“How do they move the shipment?” Reuben inquired.

“Hm,” The Jackal exhaled in a long breath. “I delivered three hundred kilos of C4 to Mbantuwe about six months ago. He showed up with a dozen of his men. Dead men. He packed C4 into their corpses, figuring no one would search them. Smart guy.”

“Did you ever choose sides in a conflict?” Reuben continued, hiding his disgust.

“Eh,” The Jackal reminisced. “I did it once, it 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 détente. Both sides are stockpiling. Less violence, more spending, it’s perfect.”

“But it’s anarchy,” Reuben retorted. “Thousands are dead, hundreds of thousands are displaced!”

“If I picked sides, fewer would be displaced but more would be dead and I would probably be one of them,” The Jackal continued his argument.

“I spent a year in Black Beach* 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 fuckin’ 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 had 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.”

“What killed him?” Reuben asked with suspicion.

“Realization of what he’d turned into,” The Jackal admitted with a cold look of solitude and determination on his face.

“You can’t break a man the way you break a dog or a horse. 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’s a proper way to kill someone. It’s absurd, it’s anesthetic. 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 lion’s roar or a gorilla 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,” The Jackal finished his cigarette to the bitter end with one final drag, flicking the butt to the savannah grass.

“Why Africa?” Reuben shifted as he stared at the litter. “People need weapons all over the world. Why here? Why my home?”

“Every place is somebody’s home, pal,” The Jackal grinned. “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 shit about your home? Why should anyone? You want me to go somewhere else so that it’s someone else’s home that you don’t give a shit about?”

“What if it was your home?” Reuben shot back.

“War is my home.” The Jackal concluded.

Both men sat up straight. Staring. Neither backing down, yet both agreeing that them, and the land, had seen enough blood.

…

“Have you ever refused to sell weapons to anybody?” Reuben continued after the pregnant pause.

“I’m a humanist,” The Jackal coyly replied. “I don’t judge, maybe you would?

“I couldn’t sell arms,” Reuben said with confidence.

“Bullshit Reuben,” The Jackal cackled. “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, you sold me on doing this dumb interview. Man, the rest is just paperwork.”

“I mean, I’d be unable,” Reuben corrected. “Psychologically, to sell arms.”

“I’m talking facts and you’re talking theory,” The Jackal countered, leaning closer to Reuben, his sunglasses sliding down his nose. “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,” The Jackal leaned back. “But believe what you want.”

The Jackal took his sweat covered sunglasses and wiped them with his shirt, looking down and changing the subject to another story.

“Saw this kid on the side of the road yesterday, couldn’t be eighteen? Seventeen? Had a shotgun across his lap, and a dead APR half in the ditch next to him. Couple of close range blasts with that 12 gauge 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.” The Jackal finally looked up, meeting Reuben’s gaze.

“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 shits, 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 war or for someone else. Tambossa, Mbantuwe, UFLL, APR, there’s no popular resistance, no liberty and labor. 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?”

“I thought I was interviewing you,” Reuben said with an unimpressed tone. The Jackal smiled as he motioned for Reuben to proceed. “What do you hope to achieve with this profession?”

“Survival, fortune, pick whatever noun suits your narrative the most,” The Jackal shrugged. “But I’m good at what I do.”

“How?” Reuben quickly threw out.

“Because I understand the rules of the jungle,” The Jackal readily answered. “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 monkey or to the giraffe, the biggest piece goes to the lion because the lion is the fuckin’ 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.”

“But you are not the lion,” Reuben responded. “They call you, ‘The Jackal.’”

“Shh, sometimes the jackal steals the lion’s share, but don’t tell anyone,” The Jackal winked.

“I saw a firefight just today, a little skirmish broke out at this roadblock 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. This one 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,” The Jackal looked off while getting lost in his own words.

“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?”

“Mr. Jackal,” Reuben said, catching the man’s attention. “You are doing it again.”

Visibly annoyed, The Jackal stood from his seat, his hand hovering over the Desert Eagle strapped to his leg.

“What do you think you’re gonna achieve with this little interview? You think somebody at the Pentagon’s gonna read this or hear this and come after me? Shit 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 Iowa 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.”

“The fact remains,” Reuben remained seated, steady in his response, glancing towards the tape recorder, evidence of the present and whatever may come. “You profit from death, literal death for your own gain. If nothing else, in my opinion that is sickening.”

The Jackal towered over Reuben, both in a stalemate while threatening with their own weapons.

“I’ll tell you what’s sick, people in the UK, US, fuckin’ Canada, Sweden. 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 sorghum bread 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 fuckin’ government. The drone is the oppressor, the gluten-free sorghum bread is the oppressor, the AK-47 is the great equalizer. I empower these people,” The Jackal turned and walked away, leaving the chairs, the recorder, and Reuben in the distance. Nothing more was said.

…

The Jackal stopped his car next to a burnt out truck, fire long deceased with bullet holes covering the windshield and sides. Searching through the dirt, he found a familiar tape recorder. Amused, The Jackal pressed record.

“I saw that truck you were driving in, perforated with 50. caliber rounds and torched on the side of the road. I looked inside, corpses blown to pieces and burnt beyond recognizable. No camera, no equipment, 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.”

The Jackal tossed the device, smoked, then reentered his car and drove to the nearest town, nearest hotel, nearest bar, nearest drink. A few hours later, there was commotion in the streets about a well equipped, malaria ridden mercenary that had passed out and was brought into the hotel.

The rest has been lost to sand and war…

Thank you for reading, here are the recordings in the order I put them in:

*(Article from 2007 about Black Beach prison https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/inside-black-beach-prison-the-hell-hole-awaiting-dog-of-war-simon-mann-6587521.html )

The Jackal Tapes (from Far Cry 2)

The Jackal Tapes

Written by Like a Leaf Literature