Back at the Klondike river, The Peregrine Falcon pressed on defiantly. She was being pounded by shell after shell after shell, but her 4" iron plates did their job with flying colors. Even with enemy field artillery and arrow barrages from both sides, she steamed on as if guided by some giant unseen hand. Her goal was to reach the part of the river that ran through the bottom of Kaserine pass, where the river was too shallow and winding for the larger warships to follow. She would then only have to fight light gunboats, sloops, and rams, all of which she could easily handle. Then, as she veered hard to starboard to dodge a tree trunk sticking out of the water, her keel struck a small sandbar. Although it was too small and too soft to cause any damage, it slowed her tremendously until the ship passed over it. It only took two minutes, but that was all the time the gunboat Richardson needed to advance enough to come side-by-side with the Falcon. Richardson opened up with her full broadside, but even at point-blank range, it did little if any damage to the Lakian vessel. Then, as the turret that housed her Parrot gun rotated, the men on board Richardson realized that all they had done was seal their ship's own fate. Just before the Parrot began singing again, some of the Richardson's crew dove into the water behind the boat to avoid being blown to pieces, sucked down with the ship, or burned to death. The first shot fired by the Parrot gun hit the bow planking just above the waterline, creating a sizable hole, killing 3 men and wounding 5. The next shot went right down the barrel of one of the Richardson's 11-inch smooth-bores just as the gun fired. The two rounds met in the middle of the barrel and peeled it back like a banana. The entire gun crew was killed except for one lucky boy who had just ran off to bring back a cart with more shells. The next round from the big Parrot went in through an open gun port and opened up a hole below the waterline on the other side. The bow began to drop as the weight of the water pulled it down, and the ship also began turning towards the shore away from the Falcon. But even as the ship ran hard aground and started to burn, she still had some fight left in her. One of her crew ran up to the huge 72-pounder gun mounted on the top deck, aimed it, and yanked the fire cord before he dove off the deck. Less than a minute later, the flames reached the main magazine and Richardson ceased to exist in the massive explosion that could be heard 12 miles away at the fort. Richardson may have gone up in flames, but her last shell hadn't That single shell flew through the air and hit the deck of the Falcon about 10 feet aft of the smokestack; but instead of bouncing off like it should have, it exploded on impact. The explosion wounded 4 of her crew, one of which ended up being fatally wounded. Tragically, the one Fox who was not dead yet but dying from the wounds, turned out to be Rocky's cousin Sean. Worse still was the fact that Sean's mate, Megan, had just discovered mere hours before that she was pregnant.
