Pam-Ann Read online

  Pam-Ann

  by Lindsey Brooks

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2012 Lindsey Brooks

  Published by Strict Publishing International

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  With grateful thanks, to Becca K. and Carol P., whose assistance, advice and, not least, patience, was invaluable and very much appreciated. Thank you, ladies.

  Chapter One

  “Keep your damned hands to yourself, Captain Todd!” Pam shrugged her shoulder out from under the man’s palm. Angry that he had followed her to continue their heated discussion, she did not turn to confront him. In the narrow, cramped space of the airplane’s galley their bodies would be almost touching.

  “Will you just listen to what I’m telling you for one minute? For heaven’s sake, my career is on the line here!”

  “Maybe you should have thought of that before you started groping me last night,” Pam snapped back, replacing the coffee pot and picking up her cup.

  “I already told you, I was only steering you towards our table.”

  “Yeah, with your hand on my butt. And I suppose your proposition to share your hotel room was entirely innocent too.”

  “It was your waist, not your ass,” Todd said. “You’re an attractive young woman, Miss Weston, and we were both off duty. Or I thought we were.”

  Pam felt a thrill of triumph. She had suckered him there, sure enough. She took a sideways step and turned to face him. “On or off Company time, Captain, you have a responsibility to uphold the airline’s standards. That does not include molesting the cabin staff.”

  Todd’s expression grew more exasperated. “I repeat, Miss Weston, I do not molest our stewardesses.” He wagged a finger at her when she raised a sardonically sceptical eyebrow. “Don’t think I don’t know who’s behind these allegations, or that I won’t be denying them and backing it up with proof. I’ve got letters from Tracy Shaw describing in detail what she’d like to do to me. Graphic, explicit descriptions. You’ve got it all wrong. Tracy’s obsessed with me. She made the accusations because I wouldn’t play ball.”

  “I’m not at liberty to divulge who made the allegations,” Pam said, “and I see no reason to discuss the matter further. You’ll have your chance to present your side of the story at our New York office. And I will be presenting the evidence I gathered during yesterday’s flight, and the rather disagreeable time I had to spend with you last evening.”

  He snorted. “Evidence! Is that what you’re calling it? Entrapment, more like. You’d made your mind up about me before we even met, Miss Weston.”

  “It’s Ms. Weston,” Pam said icily, carrying her coffee along the short passage leading to the small passenger cabin at the front of the cargo-carrying Boeing 707. She had immediately regretted agreeing to take the flight Todd had hitched with a colleague at Heathrow, instead of waiting for the airline’s own scheduled passenger service, but he had been eager to get back to New York as soon as possible. If he was so determined to hang himself why should she stand in his way?

  “Whoever he was, the guy must have done a real job on you to turn you into what you are, Ms. Weston.”

  Pam winced. A surge of fury made her stop dead, and she almost turned to hurl her coffee, cup and all, into Todd’s face. A second later she reasserted the calm, rigid control of her feelings she had developed in the last two years, and continued towards the cabin.

  The plane lurched suddenly and the floor momentarily fell away beneath her feet. Hot coffee spilled onto her hand. Once more Todd grasped her shoulder and once more she felt a disturbing tingle across her skin where his hand rested, as she had when he had done it the previous night. Had it really been her waist?

  “It’s okay, it’s only a little turbulence,” he said.

  She gave him a frigid look. “I flew as cabin staff for two years before I became a sexual harassment investigator. I can recognise turbulence.”

  Without warning the plane dropped again, filling Pam’s stomach with the sensation of being in an express elevator. An abrupt jolt flung her and Todd against one wall of the narrow passageway and then the other. She dropped her cup.

  “What the hell!” The man’s exclamation came at the same moment Pam’s mouth fell open as she watched her coffee spill upwards and her cup rise towards the ceiling instead of falling to the floor. She and Todd were doing the same. Her head bumped painfully on the cabin roof and a heartbeat later she hit the floor as gravity righted itself.

  “That wasn’t turbulence.” Todd had fallen harder but got up, scrambled the short distance to the door of the cockpit and yanked it open. “What’s going on?” he demanded as the aircraft lurched again. “Jesus!”

  Pam crammed into the doorway beside him, heedless of her body pressing against his as she looked between the shoulders of the pilot and co-pilot and through the windscreen beyond.

  “What the hell is it?” Todd asked hoarsely.

  “God knows, but I’m turning away, so hang on,” the pilot said. “What’s our position?”

  “Thirty-nine degrees north, twenty-five degrees west,” the co-pilot answered as they banked hard to port.

  Pam stared. Ahead of them was… something. Something a deeper, darker black than she had ever seen, blackness so intense it hurt her eyes to look at it. Yet she found it impossible to look away. It had no shape that she could have described. Around it the clouds boiled and writhed, thrashing and swirling with all the fury of a storm-tossed sea. Yet within the blackness was nothing. It could have been a solid wall or a bottomless pit, and with no reference point to judge by, as near as a mile or as far away as fifty.

  The aircraft leaned further as the pilot banked more steeply. A teeth-jarring shaking joined its sudden lifting and dropping. Bracing one arm against the doorframe, Todd circled Pam’s waist with the other and she was glad of its comfort. There was something horribly, frighteningly unworldly about whatever it was she was looking at.

  “This isn’t right,” she heard Todd say, and shivered at the tremor in his voice.

  “What the hell is happening?” the pilot demanded. “I’ve turned nearly a hundred and eighty degrees and it’s still in front of us.”

  “Get us away from it, for Christ’s sake!” the co-pilot said.

  “What about diving under it?” Todd asked.

  “Oh shit, it’s too late!”

  The blackness swelled. It shot towards them in a heartbeat. The roiling clouds vanished and utter darkness filled the windscreen. Pam’s heart leapt. It was inside the cabin, rolling like an unstoppable wall of water over the pilots in their seats and hurtling towards her and Todd in the doorway. She opened her mouth to scream. Something with the consistency of molasses engulfed her, trapping the cry in her throat, filling eyes and mouth and nostrils. At the same moment she felt painfully heavy, and then abruptly had no weight at all. Her bottom hit the floor with a painful thump.

  Pam’s mouth and nose were clear again. She could breathe. “My God, what happened?” She could speak too. She opened her eyes and her vision was normal. What she saw was not. The cockpit was gone and so were the pilots. The reassuring pressure of Todd’s arm was gone as well. In a weak glow of electric light she looked down a windowless corridor of shiny metal that ended after a few feet at an equally shiny door. Pam looked behind. The corridor continued until it stopped
at another identical door. The plane had disappeared, or – she gulped and panic swelled inside her – she had disappeared from the plane.

  She rubbed her eyes with her fists and looked again. The scene had not changed. It suddenly seemed important to stand but her legs refused to move. The metal floor was cold against her bottom and vibrating gently. She heard the faint hum of what might have been engines. Fear and shock were tying knots in her stomach and tangling her racing thoughts. Pam forced herself to stop her rapid panting and breathe deeply and slowly. Panicking would not help. Wherever she was, it was man-made and that meant there must be people here, and people would help her. At last she found the strength to get to her feet. The thin sheet metal of the corridor wall gave under her weight as she leaned against it. She looked from one door to the other. Which way?

  The choice was made for her. A clunking noise came from one of the doors and its polished metal swung open. A man stepped over the bulkhead and paused as he saw her. He came closer and she got an impression of highly polished shoes, knife-edged creases in dark-blue trousers and shining brass buttons on a dark-blue coat.

  He gave a short laugh. “Another one so soon. This is getting ridiculous.”

  Pam stared at the face beneath the narrow-peaked cap he wore. “Captain Todd. Oh, thank God! I thought I was all alone here. What’s happened to us?”

  To her astonishment he laughed again. “Nothing’s happened to me, girl, but I guarantee you’ve got yourself into a heap of trouble. Let’s see where you’ve been hiding.” A grip like a steel band closed around Pam’s upper arm and drew her to the other door.

  “Wait, what’s going on? Do you…? Have you…? Oh, what’s happened to us? What’s happened to the plane? That… that thing, what was it?”

  “It’s too late to be changing your mind now,” he said, opening the door. “You should have thought about the consequences before you snuck on board.” Pulling her after him he looked around the metal-walled room beyond the door. Old-fashioned trunks and suitcases were piled together under rope nets. A corner of one of the nets was loose from its fastening hook and turned back. Todd drew her towards it.

  “Didn’t you realise you could have been injured or killed if the baggage had shifted?” he asked, keeping his grip on her as he stooped to drag a blanket out from a narrow gap between piled suitcases. He gestured at it and the folded overcoat and canvas bag lying on top. “And that’s hopelessly inadequate. You might have died of cold if you’d stayed here much longer. But I guess that’s why you decided to come out when you did. What’s your name?”

  Pam’s bewilderment increased. “You know my name. Are you okay, Captain Todd? Has the shock affected you?” Or had it affected her much more than she thought? Was this all a hallucination, a dream?

  “I’m okay, girl. Everything is routine as far as I’m concerned, which is more than you’ll be able to say before it’s over. And my name isn’t Todd. It’s Lieutenant Drake, but of course you will call me ‘Sir’. Now tell me your name.”

  Pam blinked hard but the face she was staring at remained that of Todd. “But it’s me, Pam. Pamela Weston. Don’t you know me? We were on the plane together a few minutes ago. You must know me. You must!” Desperation joined the fear twisting her gut. Had he gone mad or was it her? Heart pounding she looked around the blank metallic walls of the room. “Oh, God, this can’t be happening!”

  Todd, who said he was Drake, shook her. “Stop your nonsense or I’ll smack you. Stand there while I have a look through your bag.”

  It’s not my bag, Pam wanted to say, but she had to concentrate all of her energy on slowing her breathing and suppressing her rising panic. She watched him rifle through the bag and withdraw a folded sheet of paper.

  “It’s a good thing you brought your passport or it would have gone even harder for you,” he said, after unfolding the document.

  Her passport was back on the plane. Looking at the paper upside down she could see it looked official, headed by the words ‘United States Of America’ printed in old-fashioned lettering in red and black ink.

  Todd, who denied that he was Todd, met her gaze, his expression stony. “So Pamela Weston is really Ann Estemay of Dayton, Ohio, born June sixteenth nineteen sixty-one and described as….” He broke off to look her up and down, then read from the document. “Five feet seven inches, blue eyes, light-brown hair, small mole beneath the jaw line, right side. I’d say that’s a pretty fair description, wouldn’t you, Ann?”

  Disbelieving, Pam realised that except for the name it was. “No. No! My name is Pamela Weston. I’m not….”

  He spun her with one hand and smacked her bottom with the other.

  “Ow! What the hell are you doing?” Pam demanded, indignation momentarily overcoming anxiety. “That’s sexual harassment and assault. I could have you on charges.”

  Todd’s steel grip closed on her arm again. “It’s no use behaving like a Freewoman now,” he said, dragging her after him along the corridor. “Those days are over for you. You made your choice when you stowed away. There’s no going back.”

  “A stowaway? God, you think…. No, that’s not how it is at all! I was on a plane and….”

  He pushed her against the cold wall hard enough to flatten her breasts and smacked her three times where the tight material of her skirt clung to her buttocks.

  “Ow, that hurts!” Pam yelped. “Will you quit hitting me! I’ll be making a formal complaint about you for this. You have no right to treat me this way.”

  “Oh, I’ve got the right,” he assured her, pulling her along again. “What are you complaining about? It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” He opened the door, revealing another bare corridor along which he led her until they reached two steep stairways, one leading up and the other down. Her brain a fog of confusion and bewilderment, Pam did not resist his tug on her arm and began descending the stairs. In three steps she discovered her high heels were not made for its narrow treads. She slipped and began to topple. Todd’s long, powerful arm clamped around her waist and pulling her tightly against him, he carried her easily to the bottom. Sudden warmth spread over her skin where their bodies touched. She pushed hard until he let her go and took her arm once more, a puzzled expression on his face.

  Pam took her shoes off before going down more stairs that brought them to another door. As the man unlatched it, the throbbing hum she had been hearing since her frightening and inexplicable arrival grew louder and the vibration she had felt was much more noticeable. Todd opened the door and a wave of heat washed over her, as if she had stepped off an airliner at some tropical destination.

  She stopped dead in the doorway. A short passage led to another staircase. At its foot was a scene from hell.

  The room looked huge. The noise filling it was tremendous, no longer a muted hum but a rolling, rumbling roar, punctuated by clanking and hissing and thumping sounds like nothing Pam had heard before. In its centre was a massive, dome-shaped structure from which pipes of all sizes seemed to sprout randomly and make their way via floor and ceiling to another slightly smaller dome next to it and another, smaller again, next to that. Ranged alongside them was a row of six immense pistons from which steam spurted with every rapid, regular stroke they gave and swirled in clouds beneath the light of dozens of dim electric bulbs. Men stripped to the waist moved amongst them, checking and adjusting and lubricating the machinery. Beside the biggest dome were several figures, half in shadow and half-illuminated by a bright orange glow that came and went with no pattern or purpose that Pam could make out.

  Todd opened a door on the right, pulled her in after him and closed it, shutting out much of the din assaulting Pam’s already befuddled senses. A man sitting behind a desk and poking a penknife into the bowl of a pipe rose to his feet.

  “Everything okay, Chief?” Todd asked him.

  “Fine, Lieutenant. I’ve checked things out.” He pointed a thumb at the big glass window that looked out into the hellish room. “There seemed to be a bit more vib
ration than usual a few minutes ago but everything’s normal now.”

  “Yes, she felt really sluggish for a while but it didn’t last. We’ve cleared the crosswinds and we’re back on course, but we’re miles south of where we should be. The Commodore sent me to make sure everything’s running smoothly.”

  “He already talked to me on the speaking tube. There wasn’t any need to send you too.”

  Todd, or Drake as he was obviously known to the man, shrugged. “You know the Old Man. He always likes to double check. And it’s never a bad idea to take extra care.”

  “Guess not.” The Chief looked at Pam. “Another one already? Hell, that’s one coming and now one going back. We’re making it too easy for them.”

  “I don’t suppose the Company agrees. That’s why they keep security so lax. It’s cheaper than buying them, I guess.” He pulled Pam closer to the desk and she stared daggers at the man behind it as his gaze appraised her from head to foot. It came to rest on the swells of her breasts outlined by her tight uniform jacket.

  “Pam-Ann?” he said, mistaking the purpose of the winged badge on her lapel as well as misreading it. “I knew a Sue-Ann once but I never heard that one before. You sure caught a beauty this time, Rafael.”

  “Yeah, but she seems to be having second thoughts. She’s done nothing but lie to me and complain since I found her.” Drake laughed. “When I smacked her ass she said she’s going to report me.”

  The Chief grinned at Pam. “Too bad. You sure pissed on your plate of beans, missy. Should have been dead sure before you decided you were one of That Kind. We’re eight hours out now. You’re in all the way and there’s no going back.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Pam said, his words only adding to her bewilderment. “I… I don’t know how I got here. I certainly didn’t stow away.”

  “Then you’ll have a ticket.”

  “She doesn’t.” Drake waved the paper he had found in the bag. “But she had the sense to bring her passport. She’s Ann Estemay, though for some reason she says she isn’t. I thought I’d let her sample your hospitality and see what her griping has got her.”