On Christmas Eve, a year after the Nakatomi Tower Incident, John McClane is waiting at Washington Dulles International Airport for his wife Holly to arrive from Los Angeles. Reporter Richard Thornburg, who exposed Holly's identity to Hans Gruber in the Nakatomi Tower, is assigned a seat across the aisle from her. In the airport bar McClane spots two men in army fatigues carrying a package, one of whom has a gun. He follows them into the baggage area. After a shootout, he kills one of the men while the other escapes. Learning the dead man is a mercenary thought killed in action while originally serving with the US military, McClane relates the situation to airport police Captain Carmine Lorenzo, but Lorenzo has McClane ejected from his office.